The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers.

When Crazy Joe found out Henrietta was going to marry Day, he stabbed himself in the chest with an old dull pocketknife.

But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic measures” he took in that direction.

There is no record that George Gey ever visited Henrietta in the hospital, or said anything to her about her cells.

“Everybody in Lacks Town kin to Henrietta, but she been gone so long, even her memory pretty much dead now,” he said. “Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.”

Though no law or code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient, the law made it very clear that performing an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without permission was illegal.

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.

First, a group of researchers used HeLa to develop methods for freezing cells without harming or changing them.

The early cell culture and cloning technology developed using HeLa helped lead to many later advances that required the ability to grow single cells in culture, including isolating stem cells, cloning whole animals, and in vitro fertilization.

Researchers had long believed that human cells contained forty-eight chromosomes, the threads of DNA inside cells that contain all of our genetic information. But chromosomes clumped together, making it impossible to get an accurate count. Then, in 1953, a geneticist in Texas accidentally mixed the wrong liquid with HeLa and a few other cells, and it turned out to be a fortunate mistake. The chromosomes inside the cells swelled and spread out, and for the first time, scientists could see each of them clearly. That accidental discovery was the first of several developments that would allow two researchers from Spain and Sweden to discover that normal human cells have forty-six chromosomes.

As the Cold War escalated, some scientists exposed Henrietta’s cells to massive doses of radiation to study how nuclear bombs destroyed cells and find ways to reverse that damage. Others put them in special centrifuges that spun so fast the pressure inside was more than 100,000 times that of gravity, to see what happened to human cells under the extreme conditions of deep-sea diving or spaceflight.

The tribunal set forth a ten-point code of ethics now known as the Nuremberg Code, which was to govern all human experimentation worldwide. The first line in that code says, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The idea was revolutionary. The Hippocratic Oath, written in the fourth century BC, didn’t require patient consent. And though the American Medical Association had issued rules protecting laboratory animals in 1910, no such rules existed for humans until Nuremberg.

When the first humans went into orbit, Henrietta’s cells went with them so researchers could study the effects of space travel, as well as the nutritional needs of cells in space, and how cancerous and noncancerous cells responded differently to zero gravity. What they found was disturbing: in mission after mission, noncancerous cells grew normally in orbit, but HeLa became more powerful, dividing faster with each trip.

In the beginning, Joe spent his time in prison much as he’d spent it in the military: in the hole for insubordination and fighting. But eventually he stopped fighting and focused his energy inward. Joe found Islam and began spending all his time studying the Koran in his cell. Soon he changed his name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman.

“Scientists can even grow corneas now,” I told him, reaching into my bag for an article I’d clipped from a newspaper. I handed it to him and told him that, using culturing techniques HeLa helped develop, scientists could now take a sample of someone’s cornea, grow it in culture, then transplant it into someone else’s eye to help treat blindness.

“Hopkins say they gave them cells away,” Lawrence yelled, “but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

Despite Gey’s wishes, they sewed him up without taking any samples. When he awoke from anesthesia and found out there would be no GeGe line, he was furious. If this cancer was going to kill him, he wanted it to help advance science in the process.

They were talking about how to stop the HeLa contamination problem, when someone pointed out that the whole mess could be sorted out if they found genetic markers specific to Henrietta and used them to identify which cells were hers and which weren’t. But doing that would require DNA samples from her immediate family—preferably her husband as well as her children—to compare their DNA to HeLa’s and create a map of Henrietta’s genes.

With the help of Slavin’s serum, Blumberg eventually uncovered the link between hepatitis B and liver cancer, and created the first hepatitis B vaccine, saving millions of lives.

In the early 1900s, Carrel’s chicken-heart cells supposedly proved that all cells had the potential for immortality. But normal human cells—either in culture or in the human body—can’t grow indefinitely like cancer cells. They divide only a finite number of times, then stop growing and begin to die. The number of times they can divide is a specific number called the Hayflick Limit, after Leonard Hayflick, who’d published a paper in 1961 showing that normal cells reach their limit when they’ve doubled about fifty times.

I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled “Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics.” Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of fluid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. The side effects—crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting—lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s.

“It’ll be the only picture in the world with the three of us almost together.”

Sonny had a quintuple bypass in 2003, when he was fifty-six years old—the last thing he remembered before falling unconscious under the anesthesia was a doctor standing over him saying his mother’s cells were one of the most important things that had ever happened to medicine. Sonny woke up more than $125,000 in debt because he didn’t have health insurance to cover the surgery.

After finding Deborah in her bed, Sonny cut a lock of her hair and tucked it inside their mother’s Bible with the locks of hair from Henrietta and Elsie. “She’s with them now,” he told me. “You know there’s no place in the world she’d rather be.”

Dr. Sir Lord Keenan Kester Cofield’s whereabouts are unknown. Most recently, he served several years in prison for trying to buy jewelry at Macy’s with a stolen check, and filed several lawsuits while incarcerated. In 2008, after being released from prison, Cofield filed a seventy-five-page lawsuit—his last to date—that a judge called “incomprehensible.” He sued 226 parties for more than $10 billion, and argued that past decisions in all his cases should be reversed in his favor, and that anyone who’d printed his name without permission should be included in his suit, because he’d copyrighted his name. I was never able to get in touch with him to interview him for this book.

HeLa is still one of the most commonly used cell lines in laboratories around the world. When this book went to press in 2009, more than 60,000 scientific articles had been published about research done on HeLa, and that number was increasing steadily at a rate of more than 300 papers each month. HeLa cells are still contaminating other cultures and causing an estimated several million dollars in damage each year.