The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. —ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code

Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. 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. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. 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. And as Howard Jones once wrote, “Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.”

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.

one predicted that 70 percent of babies would soon be grown in culture; another imagined tissue culture producing giant “Negroes” and two-headed toads.

Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil. It wasn’t something to be celebrated. In fact, no one paid much attention to it at all.

‘Your cells will make you immortal.’ He told Henrietta her cells would help save the lives of countless people, and she smiled. She told him she was glad her pain would come to some good for someone.”

“You know, they said if we could get all the pieces of her together, she’d weigh over eight hundred pounds now,” he told me. “And Henrietta never was a big girl. She just still growin.”

“You know, a lot of things, they man-made,” he told me, dropping his voice to a whisper. “You know what I mean by man-made, don’t you?” I shook my head no. “Voodoo,” he whispered. “Some peoples is sayin Henrietta’s sickness and them cells was man-or woman-made, others say it was doctor-made.”

“Now I don’t know for sure if a spirit got Henrietta or if a doctor did it,” Cootie said, “but I do know that her cancer wasn’t no regular cancer, cause regular cancer don’t keep on growing after a person die.”

“That there’s a memory I’ll take to my grave,” he told me years later. “When them pains hit, looked like her mind just said, Henrietta, you best leave. She was sick like I never seen. Sweetest girl you ever wanna meet, and prettier than anything. But them cells, boy, them cells of hers is somethin else. No wonder they never could kill them … That cancer was a terrible thing.”

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.

To understand why cellular cloning was important, you need to know two things: First, HeLa didn’t grow from one of Henrietta’s cells. It grew from a sliver of her tumor, which was a cluster of cells. Second, cells often behave differently, even if they’re all from the same sample, which means some grow faster than others, some produce more poliovirus, and some are resistant to certain antibiotics. Scientists wanted to grow cellular clones—lines of cells descended from individual cells—so they could harness those unique traits. With HeLa, a group of scientists in Colorado succeeded, and soon the world of science had not only HeLa but also its hundreds, then thousands, of clones.

Slowly, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials was born.

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.

They used HeLa to test the effects of steroids, chemotherapy drugs, hormones, vitamins, and environmental stress; they infected them with tuberculosis, salmonella, and the bacterium that causes vaginitis.

Berg didn’t explain how releasing Henrietta’s name to the public would have protected the privacy or rights of her family. In fact, doing so would have forever connected Henrietta and her family with the cells and any medical information eventually derived from their DNA. That wouldn’t have protected the Lackses’ privacy, but it certainly would have changed the course of their lives. They would have learned that Henrietta’s cells were still alive, that they’d been taken, bought, sold, and used in research without her knowledge or theirs.

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.

“A physician violates his duty to his patient and subjects himself to liability if he withholds any facts which are necessary to form the basis of an intelligent consent by the patient to the proposed treatment.” He wrote that there needed to be “full disclosure of facts necessary to an informed consent.”

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.

Almost as an aside, he pointed out one possibility that other researchers hadn’t considered: all transformed cells seemed to behave identically to HeLa, he wrote, which could mean that HeLa was the contaminant.

The British press called the HeLa hybrids an “assault on life,” and portrayed Harris as a mad scientist. And Harris didn’t help the situation: he caused near-pandemonium when he appeared in a BBC documentary saying that the eggs of man and ape could now be joined to create a “mape.”

“Back then they did things,” Sonny said. “Especially to black folks. John Hopkins was known for experimentin on black folks. They’d snatch em off the street…” “That’s right!” Bobbette said, appearing in the kitchen door with her coffee. “Everybody knows that.” “They just snatch em off the street,” Sonny said. “Snatchin people!” Bobbette yelled, her voice growing louder. “Experimentin on them!” Sonny yelled. “You’d be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I was a girl,” Bobbette said, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, I lived here in the fifties when they got Henrietta, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near Hopkins. When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or Hopkins might get us.”

Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

But night doctors weren’t just fictions conjured as scare tactics. Many doctors tested drugs on slaves and operated on them to develop new surgical techniques, often without using anesthesia. Fear of night doctors only increased in the early 1900s, as black people migrated north to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and news spread that medical schools there were offering money in exchange for bodies. Black corpses were routinely exhumed from graves for research, and an under ground shipping industry kept schools in the North supplied with black bodies from the South for anatomy courses. The bodies sometimes arrived, a dozen or so at a time, in barrels labeled turpentine.

Because of this history, black residents near Hopkins have long believed the hospital was built in a poor black neighborhood for the benefit of scientists—to give them easy access to potential research subjects. In fact, it was built for the benefit of Baltimore’s poor. Johns Hopkins was born on a tobacco plantation in Mar...

His board of trustees—many of them friends and family—created one of the top medical schools in the country, and a hospital whose public wards provided millions of dollars in free care to the poor, many of them black.

But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins’s relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks—a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.

I talked to many scientists about HeLa, and none could explain why Henrietta’s cells grew so powerfully when many others didn’t even survive. 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.

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.”