the immortal life of henrietta lacks study guide

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I’m pretty sure that she-like most of us-would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever-bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world.

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She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells- her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

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Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her-a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. 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. 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, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa.

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