The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - HeLa lives!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Author: Rebecca Skloot

HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years. –Donald Defler

This was the era of Jim Crow – when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot.
–Rebecca Skloot

I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way. –Mary Kubicek

Henrietta was chosen… And when the Lord chooses an angel to do his work, you never know what they going to come back looking like. –Gary Lacks

Amazon.com:

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Henrietta Lacks. I’d honestly never heard of her before I read this book, at least not that I could recall. It sometimes boggles my mind to think that someone or something that is so important in the big picture of life can be so far from my exposure. If she were so important, why hadn't I heard of her? That, of course, just makes me realize how small I am and how large this world really is. Big names in my corner of the world mean nothing to other people, just as big names in, say, physics or gymnastics or militia or forensic psychology mean nothing to me. I’m not sure I can even adequately describe the feeling… incredible, really.

I could have gone my whole life not knowing the name Henrietta Lacks (or HeLa!), even as the advances in science attributed to those cells touched my life. And yet because of this project, I was introduced to her -- incredible both in life and after it -- and my mind has been opened up and exposed to the innumerable things scientists and geneticists can do with a few simple cells. Well, “simple” is probably the wrong word. From what remarkably (and embarrassingly) little I remember from high school science classes, cells aren’t exactly simple.

My point, though, is that I learned something with this book. Sure, I like to think that I learn something from every book I read, but let’s be honest; there’s only so much you can “learn” from a Mary Higgins Clark or Janet Evanovich book. Don’t get me wrong: these two ladies are fantastic storytellers and I’d likely be reading their collected works if not for this project. But those books are purely entertaining and not so much what I’d call “educational.” This book, however, was equally well-written and it made me think.

I still know very little about science or cell mutations or how scientists use her reproducing cancerous cells to perform so many tests and come to so many conclusions. What I do know is that they do use them still today. The cytologists and geneticists and oncologists and epidemiologists continue to use those cells to discover valuable information that touches humanity. And if a cure to cancer is ever found, you can be certain that HeLa cells played a part. I don’t need to know how or why or when they helped; I just have to know that they did.

But this book isn’t just a dry dive into the world of cytologists. Rebecca Skloot set out with this book to introduce the world not only to the cells but to the woman who unknowingly contributed those cells to the world. And though Henrietta has been dead for many, many years, Rebecca used every resource at her disposal – and many of those resources came only with patience and persistence – to piece together what little is known of this woman. She also depicted for the reader Henrietta’s living relatives, warts and all. I think her biggest goal – and ultimately, her most successfully completed one – was to show the humanity in the cells and in the story.

The quote above from Mary Kubicek, one of the workers in the first lab to handle and reproduce the HeLa cells, proves just that. It is one of my favorite quotes of the book. Scientists, used to living in a microcosm where specimens are de-humanized may not always associate a living, breathing person with the cells in their petri dishes.

My takeaway: So many wonderful advances in science and medicine were made due, at least in part, to Henrietta Lacks, a woman who did not know she was donating cells to the cause, and whose family finally came to understand Henrietta’s legacy due, at least in part, to the intervention of Rebecca Skloot. And sometimes all it takes is one woman to change the lives of many – thank you, Henrietta; and thank you, Rebecca.