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Quote:Ari N. Schulman

In 1951, a thirty-year-old woman living in Baltimore was experiencing abnormal bleeding and felt a lump on her cervix. She checked herself into the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where four months earlier she had given birth to her fifth child. The doctor found a tumor the size of a nickel — which was surprising, as it had not been seen in the checkup following her recent delivery. A biopsy confirmed the presence of what turned out to be an unusually aggressive cancer.

The woman returned to begin treatment; with the patient under anesthetic, the doctors cut two tissue samples — one from the tumor, another from her healthy cervical tissue — before inserting pieces of radium in an attempt to shrink the tumor. The samples were passed along to a researcher who was continuing a decades-long, so-far unsuccessful scientific effort to keep human tissues alive in culture indefinitely. While the healthy cervical tissue failed to culture, the tumoral cells began dividing at a remarkable rate — doubling every 24 hours. It soon became clear that the culture was the first line of human cells that could potentially be kept alive forever. By the end of the year, the power of those cells had taken the life of the patient they were taken from.

The woman’s name was Henrietta Lacks. She was descended from slaves and raised working the same Virginia tobacco fields they had. But even as she was being buried in an unmarked grave, her cells were already beginning to transform medical research. Known as HeLa, this cell line was immensely valuable as a readily available, self-sustaining, standardized subject for human cell experimentation. HeLa cells were integral in the development of the polio vaccine, research on cancer and viruses, the sequencing of the human genome, and the development of in vitro fertilization, and were used in early testing of the effects of atomic bombs. These cells from a woman preceded men into outer space. They are still alive and remain in regular laboratory use worldwide.

But despite the incalculable benefit to science of HeLa cells — and the perhaps more calculable profits reaped by the medical industry from them — not only were the cells taken without the knowledge or consent of Henrietta Lacks or her husband, but her family knew nothing about them until researchers published Lacks’s name in a 1973 article, and a family friend who had worked with the cells later put two and two together. Today, the Lacks family still has received no financial compensation, and remains living in poverty in Baltimore and southern Virginia.

A recent book seeks to finally set straight and tell the story of this central, yet unwitting and for years anonymous, figure in medical research. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks resulted from a gnawing curiosity by author Rebecca Skloot, beginning when she learned about and experimented upon HeLa cells in the course of pursuing a degree in biology but could find no information about the woman whose cells her professor said “were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years.” Early in her career as a journalist, Skloot spent much of a decade and a great deal of her own money researching the Lacks case, all in pursuit of information from a family that had become hostile toward anyone inquiring after their mother’s cells. The book, a semi-novelistic account of the struggles of Henrietta Lacks, of her children, and in a different sense of Skloot herself in investigating the story and gaining the trust of the Lacks family, is an engaging and sensitive work of reporting that more than vindicates its author’s efforts. It has justly become a bestseller, is slated for a film adaptation, and, one hopes, will become required reading for courses in which students begin to think seriously about medicine, bioethics, or the human meaning and social implications of science and technology more generally.