The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (review)

Some cases in medical ethics are so well known, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one example, that they are common knowledge. Others, with equally far-reaching implications, are unfamiliar to the public. The story of Henrietta Lacks is one of these largely unknown stories but, thanks to Rebecca Skloot's remarkable book, the Lacks case is likely to become a classic in the history of biomedical ethics.

Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer who died of cervical cancer in 1951 at the age of thirty-one, leaving a husband and five children. Before her death, she received treatment in a segregated "colored ward" at Johns Hopkins, the only hospital in Baltimore that would treat black patients. Unbeknownst to Lacks, during her hospital stay George Gey, head of tissue culture research at Hopkins, received a portion of her cervical biopsy. Gey had been working for three decades to grow malignant cells outside the body in a futile effort to produce the first immortal line of human cells. He finally triumphed using Lacks's cells. Her cells did not just survive in Gey's lab, they grew "with mythological intensity" (40). Gey named the cells HeLa, employing the nomenclature of the era that conjoined the first two letters of a donor's first and last names.

The need for this immortal cell line was immediate. In 1952, Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) was poised to test it in the largest field trial in history. Testing required mixing poliovirus and living cells with each blood sample taken from the two million vaccinated children. If the blood protected the living cells from the virus, then the vaccine worked. To find enough living cells for testing, the NFIP asked cell culture experts for help. Gey offered HeLa.

Each week the HeLa Distribution Center, housed ironically at the Tuskegee Institute, produced 20,000 tubes containing six trillion cells. Since the polio field trials, to name only a few of their contributions, HeLa cells have been used to develop cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization techniques and to study the effect of an endless array of toxins, drugs, and pathogens on human cells. Today, HeLa remains a necessity in laboratories around the world and continues to be bought and sold by the trillions.

Despite HeLa's importance to science, the Lacks family did not learn of the existence of HeLa cells until more than twenty years after Henrietta's death. And this segment of the story makes Skloot's approach to the Henrietta Lacks case particularly compelling. Skloot gives equal weight to HeLa (and its implications for science, biomedical ethics, race, and class in the United States) and the Lacks family (and their struggle to understand and make peace with the existence of HeLa cells). Henrietta's widower, who had a fourth grade education, was baffled by HeLa. The only "cell" he had ever heard of was a prison cell. Henrietta's only surviving daughter, Deborah, had an especially difficult time coping with knowledge of HeLa. When Deborah discovered that her mother's cells had been used in atomic bomb testing, she pictured her mother repeatedly being blown up. When she read an article in Newsweek headlined "People-Plants," describing HeLa cells crossed with tobacco cells, she assumed that scientists had created a monster that was half her mother and half tobacco. When she learned that HeLa cells had been used to study viruses such as AIDS and Ebola, Deborah imagined her mother suffering eternally from the symptoms of those diseases. Henrietta's sons became obsessed by another injustice. As Lawrence, Henrietta's oldest child, observed, "If our mother so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?" (168)

Skloot is a science journalist but this book also evidences her skill as a historian. Her sources include oral history interviews, medical records, legal documents, and newspaper and magazine articles. The book, which jumps back and forth in time...