Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rarely does a book shock me.  This one did multiple times over.

Here’s a quick summary:

Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman who was raised on a tobacco sharecropping farm.  She was poor, uneducated, abused, and she eventually developed cervical cancer.  She lived in Baltimore about 20 minutes from Johns Hopkins University.  It was the only place that would see blacks with no insurance, so that’s where she went.  Hopkins had a bad reputation for experimenting on their “colored patients” but it was the only place she could go, and they did have brilliant doctors and great facilities.

Also in Baltimore was a man named Dr. George Gey.  He was trying with all his might to keep human tissue samples alive in Petri dishes.  No one had been able to keep human tissues or cells alive for very long.  You could freeze it and preserve it – but all tissue eventually died, the cells would reproduce maybe a few times – then die.  He asked the doctors at the hospitals to collect extra samples of all tissues for him so he could try to keep them alive or even make the cells replicate in a test tube.

Henrietta had a malignant cervical tumor.  Her doctor took a biopsy, and sent part of it to pathology for diagnosis and part of it to Dr. Gey.  He labeled the test tubes with the first two initials of her first and last name: He La

Dr. Gey’s assistant put it the “nutrient bath” like the last few thousand samples and waited and watched.

For the first time ever – a set of human cells didn’t die, they multiplied.  They multiplied so fast it was unbelievable.  Sure they were cancer cells which always grow out of control – in the body.  But Gey had tested tons of cancer cells before, they all died.  These grew and spread like wild fire.  He told a few fellow researchers that he may have found the first “immortal” human cell line ever.  They asked if they could have some, and he freely gave them.  He started giving them to everybody.

Meanwhile Henrietta underwent radiation therapy.  While she was burned from the outside she had the most malignant and vicious cancer destroying her from the inside.  She soon died Oct 4 1951.

1952 was the worst US outbreak ever of Polio and Dr. Jonas Salk was desperately looking for a way to test his vaccine.  He needed human tissue that was susceptible to Polio that he could use his vaccine on and then inject with polio to see if it worked.  He needed to test it thousands and thousands of times and with multiple versions of his vaccine.

Dr. Gey knew he had what Dr. Salk needed.  They tested the HeLa cells, and they were susceptible to Polio.  They set up a massive cell reproduction system and started producing billions of HeLa cells for Polio experimentation.

In 1955 the vaccine was released.  Together with the vaccine developed by Sabin, polio was eradicated.

HeLa cells were then used by everyone for everything.  Bio-Tech companies reproduced HeLa cells on a massive scale and sold them to laboratories around the world.

HeLa cells were the only cells that could be tested forever.  You could test anything on them: diseases, drugs, radiation, zero gravity – if the cells died you just went to the test tube and got more of them.  They never stopped multiplying.  HeLa cells were sent to the moon and were exploded in atomic bombs.  They were fused with animal cells to make hybrid cells with mouse and human genes. 

HeLa cells became the basis of a HUGE portion of biological research.  The cells were a medical revolution and sparked a multi-million dollar industry.

Only one problem - No one told Henrietta or anyone in her family.  They found out 22 years later through a chance encounter.  In 1973 Henrietta’s daughter-in-law, Bobbette, was chatting with her friend and her husband.  She mentioned she was from Baltimore and her married name was Lacks.
The friends husband told her that was amazing because he’d been working for years with these cells in his lab and had just read an article that said they came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks.

Bobbette told him that was her mother in law’s name, but there couldn’t be a relation because her mother in law had died in 1951.

“Did she die of cervical cancer?”  He asked.

-“How’d you know that?”

“Those cells in my lab have to be hers.  They’re from a black woman named Henrietta Lack who died of cervical cancer at Hopkins in the fifties.”

- “WHAT?!” Bobbette yelled, jumping up from her chair.  “What do you mean you’ve got her cells in your lab?”

He held his hand up in the air, like whoa, wait a minute. “I ordered them from a supplier just like everybody else.”

- “What do you mean ‘everybody else’?!”  She snapped “What Supplier?  WHO’S GOT CELLS FROM MY MOTHER IN LAW?!”

And that’s how the nightmare started.  There was a woman whose biopsied cells had been sold for millions or billions of dollars and saved thousands of lives.  Her family was still dirt poor, couldn’t afford health insurance, and they were about to embark on a terrible and heart wrenching journey to find out what had been done to their mother.  Had anyone ever asked for permission to use those cells?  Would they ever see any money from their use?  Over the next 20 years her family would be ignored, followed, tested, lied to, deceived, interviewed and filmed dozens of times over.  

The book tells the story of Henrietta and her family, the story of the HeLa cells and all the good and bad they were used for, and the story of the author, Rebecca Skloot.  It took her 10 years to write the book.  It is fascinating, funny, horrific, shocking and heart-warming all at the same time.

I will be hanging a picture of Henrietta Lacks in my office.  I never want to forget her story.