The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race.” 

Skloot, by her own admission, develops as a character through her encounters with the Lackses. In this passage, she’s likely referring to the emotional ties the Lackses placed on what she had previously considered concrete truths. While to science a tissue sample is just a tissue sample, the Lackses believed it was an extension of their mother. While the medical community claimed to give equal treatment to all races, African Americans were clearly less valued and often exploited. While cancer tissue cells may not seem to be of religious significance, to the Lackses they’re a form of Henrietta’s angelic healing.

“Like many doctors of his era, (Richard Wesley) 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.” 

This passage develops the theme of Racism in the Medical Community. The poor, largely black, community that used the public wards were dehumanized for the purpose of research. It’s ironic that, in order to get medical attention, they were expected to risk their physical health for the sake of research. 

“But Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intensity […] Soon, George told a few of his closest colleagues that he thought his lab might have grown the first immortal human cells. To which they replied, Can I have some? And George said yes.”

In this quote, we learn the beginning of the HeLa cells saga. Skloot’s verbiage here, “mythological intensity,” as contrasted with the scientific environment she’s describing, indicates how miraculous the discovery of HeLa cells really was. She follows the description of the cells’ speedy growth with George quickly agreeing to share the cells, giving the reader a rushed feeling; this is how the distribution of the cells got out of hand. 

“This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!” 

These words, spoken by Courtney Speed, reveals the authentic dialect of the Lackses and their community. She also represents the feelings of the community when she attributes Skloot’s arrival to be of religious significance and expresses her excitement that Henrietta’s story will at last be portrayed in earnest. She follows up these sentiments by telling Skloot she refuses to tell her anything until she has the family’s consent. 

“Nobody round here never understood how she dead and that thing still livin’. That’s where the mystery’s at.” 

This quote from Cootie portrays how Henrietta’s community reacted to the news of her immortal cells. Cootie goes on to guess that her cells are either “man-made” or “spirit-made,” telling Skloot about sickness spirits that have visited his house. Cootie’s superstitious beliefs pervade the Lacks family.

“When I saw [Henrietta’s] toenails […] I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in the 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.” 

Henrietta’s toenails here symbolize Henrietta’s humanity. For the first time, Mary Kubicek recognizes that the cells belong to a human being, contrasting Gey’s work, which has never considered the personhood or informed consent of Henrietta. Mary’s realization draws attention to the callous nature of their research. 

“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.” 

This passage reveals the exploitation of blacks for the benefit of white patients. The Tuskegee syphilis studies supports the revelation, as the study included black men with syphilis that might’ve been healed, but were forced to suffer through their illness and die for the sake of research.

“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 […] But the Nuremberg Code—like other codes that would come after it—wasn’t law. It was, essentially, a list of recommendations.”

The lack of ethical law in medical research contributes greatly to the book. The author suggests here that people had already ferreted out the ethics of certain practices, but the law was still falling short of monitoring the scientific community. As we see in the case of Southam, there were few repercussions for unethical research practices.