Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"

Read: July 15, 2011

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951. She had gone to the clinic at Johns Hopkins because it was one of the few places in her area that would treat black people, in part because the charter for the hospital specifies this charitable duty and in part because they would conduct research on their poor (mostly black) patients. During a treatment procedure, her doctors removed swabs of cells – one of Henrietta’s normal cervical cells and another of her tumor. Despite treatment, the tumors overtook Henrietta’s body and she died quickly and painfully. Her cells, however, were given to George Gey’s lab, which had been attempting to produce a cell line that would self-replicate outside of the body. With Henrietta’s cancer cells, named HeLa for the first two letters of her first and last names, Gey had found the golden ticket: not only did HeLa self-replicate outside the body, they replicated at an abnormally fast pace. The HeLa cells would be used in all manner of scientific experiments: they journeyed into space, they’ve helped find the cure for polio. There are now more HeLa cells than there were ever cells in the original Henrietta Lacks. But up until relatively recently, her family had no idea that her cells had ever been extracted, multiplied, and achieved fame.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a rather personally-written nonfiction book. Rebecca Skloot approaches the subject from her own experience with HeLa cells and her curiosity about the woman behind them (alternately named Henrietta Lacks and Helen Larson). As such, the nonfiction book is an engrossing tale. Skloot intersperses chapters about Henrietta’s life and family with chapters about the history of the science behind HeLa cells. The science chapters are very accessible, in part because Skloot’s audience seems to have changed while she wrote the book. Originally interested in a kind of human-interest science story, Skloot discovers that the Lacks family is recalcitrant at best when it comes to talking about Henrietta. She must convince them that she is trustworthy, which she does by spending years consistently talking to Deborah and the other Lacks siblings and answering their questions about Henrietta’s life (to the best of her research abilities) and the life of her cells. Her interactions with the Lacks children, especially Deborah, transformed this book into a story about Deborah’s discovery of her mother and her acceptance of the fact that her mother’s cells had been taken without her permission or knowledge and made into a billion dollar industry.

Throughout the book, Skloot hints at this injustice without taking a stance either way. The Lacks sons are adamant that they are owed a large monetary settlement from the companies manufacturing HeLa cells. To this day, HeLa cells are still the longest-living cell line – they grow at such a pace as to infect, outstrip, and overtake other cell cultures in a lab. The original researcher, George Gey, did not patent any of his discoveries, sending out HeLa cells for free to further the research into the human body, but later entrepreneurs would make quite a profit from Henrietta. One of the most often quoted injustices is the fact that while the medical industry continues to make profits from HeLa, Henrietta’s descendants can often not afford medical insurance or expensive procedures. The book is written so empathetically that my first response is outrage at this injustice. On further reflection, however, I think that this line of argument mistakes one injustice for a social failing. It’s a problem if any family cannot keep health insurance and afford medical care, regardless of who their mother is. At the same time, I think there has been a great injustice done because of the way Henrietta’s doctors took advantage of her ignorance and the ignorance of her family members. Part of Skloot’s contribution was to explain, carefully and repeatedly, to Deborah and her brothers what the HeLa cells have been used for and what they have not done. Deborah was under the impression that because they had cloned a HeLa cell in London, a replica of her mother was walking along the Thames. Furthermore, possibly because of their fears of a lawsuit or something similar, JHU had been reluctant to acknowledge their indebtedness to Henrietta in some kind of tribute – be it statue, plaque, building name, etc. This is a true crime.

I will say that the book, despite its unusual style for nonfiction, is very well written and informative. Skloot doesn’t spend too much time mired in scientific description, interspersing the narrative with quite a bit of “human interest.” I think if I were hoping for a more intellectually-engaged scientific description of the history behind cell lines, I would be disappointed, but then the book wouldn’t be as accessible or popular. Perhaps the science-heavy book is what Skloot intended to write, but the tribute to Henrietta’s contribution that resulted is well worth the detour. My one small complaint is something I’ve had troubles with in other popular nonfiction (The Devil in the White City comes to mind) – the inclusion of specific details with no explanation of where that information came from. The most egregious example I remember in this book was the idea that Mary Kubicek, the assistant in Gey’s lab, was “eating a tuna-salad sandwich at a long stone culture bench that doubled as a break table” when they brought in the swabs from Henrietta’s cells. How in the world did Skloot know what Mary had for lunch one nondescript day sixty years ago? It’s easy to let this kind of thing go, though, and follow the mesmerizing narrative.