The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment.

Cootie spent a year inside an iron lung that breathed for him, and he’d been in and out of hospitals ever since.

He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else’s malignant cells.

But at the time, prisoners nationwide were being used for research of all kinds—from testing chemical warfare agents to determining how X-raying testicles affected sperm count.