The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

Today it’s possible for scientists to immortalize cells by exposing them to certain viruses or chemicals, but very few cells have become immortal on their own as Henrietta’s did.

But even today some scientists argue that it’s factually incorrect to say that HeLa cells are related to Henrietta, since their DNA is no longer genetically identical to hers.

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

“Them doctors say her cells is so important and did all this and that to help people. But it didn’t do no good for her, and it don’t do no good for us. If me and my sister need something, we can’t even go see a doctor cause we can’t afford it. Only people that can get any good from my mother cells is the people that got money, and whoever sellin them cells—they get rich off our mother and we got nothing.” He shook his head. “All those damn people didn’t deserve her help as far as I’m concerned.”

“I think them cells is why I’m so mean,” he said. “I had to start fightin before I was even a person. That’s the only way I figure I kept them cancer cells from growin all over me while I was inside my mother. I started fightin when I was just a baby in her womb, and I never known nothin different.”

“Dale,” Gary said, “do something for yourself.” “Yeah, I’m tryin,” she said. “You know they shot her cells into murderers in prison?” “I mean to relax,” Gary said. “Do something to relax yourself.” “I can’t help it,” Deborah said, waving him off with her hand. “I worry all the time.” “Like the Bible said,” Gary whispered, “man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometime we care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.” In a moment of clarity, Deborah nodded, saying, “And we bring our own body down by doing it.”

Angels are like that. The Bible tells us so. For Deborah and her family—and surely many others in the world—that answer was so much more concrete than the explanation offered by science: that the immortality of Henrietta’s cells had something to do with her telomeres and how HPV interacted with her DNA. The idea that God chose Henrietta as an angel who would be reborn as immortal cells made a lot more sense to them than the explanation Deborah had read years earlier in Victor McKusick’s genetics book, with its clinical talk of HeLa’s “atypical histology” and “unusually malignant behavior.” It used phrases like “the tumor’s singularity” and called the cells “a reservoir of morphologic, biochemical, and other information.” Jesus told his followers, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never die.” Plain, simple, to the point.

Today most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere. When you go to the doctor for a routine blood test or to have a mole removed, when you have an appendectomy, tonsillectomy, or any other kind of ectomy, the stuff you leave behind doesn’t always get thrown out. Doctors, hospitals, and laboratories keep it. Often indefinitely.

They also house blood samples taken from most infants born in the United States since the late sixties, when states started mandating the screening of all newborns for genetic diseases. And the scale of tissue research is only getting bigger. “It used to be, some researcher in Florida had sixty samples in his freezer, then another guy in Utah had some in his,” says Kathy Hudson, a molecular biologist who founded the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University and is now chief of staff at NIH. “Now we’re talking about a massive, massive scale.” In 2009 the NIH invested $13.5 million to develop a bank for the samples taken from new borns nationwide.

Scientists use these samples to develop everything from flu vaccines to penis-enlargement products. They put cells in culture dishes and expose them to radiation, drugs, cosmetics, viruses, household chemicals, and biological weapons, and then study their responses. Without those tissues, we would have no tests for diseases like hepatitis and HIV; no vaccines for rabies, smallpox, measles; none of the promising new drugs for leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer. And developers of the products that rely on human biological materials would be out billions of dollars.

Today, tissue-supply companies range from small private businesses to huge corporations, like Ardais, which pays the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Duke University Medical Center, and many others an undisclosed amount of money for exclusive access to tissues collected from their patients.