In 1999 the RAND Corporation estimated that American labs alone held more than 307 million tissue samples from some 178 million people. The cell line created by the doctor had been “transformed” via his “inventive effort,” and to say otherwise would “destroy the economic incentive to conduct important medical research.” The court said that doctors should disclose their financial interests and called on legislators to increase patient protections and regulation, but this has hardly hindered the growth of the field. Moore sued, and on appeal the court ruled that patients had the right to control their tissues, but soon that was struck down by the California Supreme Court, which said that tissue removed from the body had been abandoned as medical waste. In the 1980s a doctor who had removed the cancer-ridden spleen of a man named John Moore patented some of the cells to create a cell line then valued at more than $3 billion, without Moore’s knowledge. Since 1951, science has progressed much faster than our ability to figure out what is right and wrong about tissue culture. The ethical issues implicated in the HeLa story are many and tangled. “Scientists don’t like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it’s much easier to do science when you dissociate your materials from the people they come from,” a researcher named Robert Stevenson tells Skloot in one of the many ethical discussions seeded throughout the book.
It is also a critique of science that insists on ignoring the messy human provenance of its materials. But I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.”īut “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is much more than a portrait of the Lacks family. “Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. She tacks between the perspective of the scientists and the family evenly and fairly, arriving at a paradox described by Henrietta’s daughter Deborah.
Skloot traces the family’s emotional ordeal, the changing ethics and law around tissue collections, and the inadvertently careless journalists and researchers who violated the family’s privacy by publishing everything from Henrietta’s medical records to the family’s genetic information. Some of the family feel they’ve been ripped off, cheated by either Johns Hopkins (though the hospital never sold the cells) or the entire medical establishment, which has made enormous profits from the cells. The first time she called Lacks’s widower, then living in Baltimore, the person who answered the phone simply heard her voice and yelled, “Get Pop, lady’s on the phone about his wife cells.” Over the years it took Skloot to gain the family’s trust, she came to understand that the only time white people ever called the house was when they wanted something to do with the HeLa cells. Skloot didn’t know what she was getting into when she began researching the book as a graduate student in 1999. From “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” By 1973, when Lacks’s children were shocked to learn that their mother’s cells were still alive, HeLa had already been to outer space. And so, like any good celebrity, HeLa had a scandal: In 1966 it became clear that HeLa had contaminated hundreds of cell lines, destroying research as far away as Russia. HeLa is so outrageously robust that if one cell lands in a petri dish, it proceeds to take over.
HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly 10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating and the cellular effects of working in sewers. Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her cells, and you can get some for yourself simply by calling an 800 number. Meanwhile Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s “colored” ward.Īfter Henrietta Lacks’s death, HeLa went viral, so to speak, becoming the godmother of virology and then biotech, benefiting practically anyone who’s ever taken a pill stronger than aspirin. HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins - the first human cells ever to do so. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks’s cervix.
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