PROLOGUE

The Woman in the Photograph

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner

torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and

smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s

the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. 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. Beneath the photo, a caption says her

name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times

in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s

usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. 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.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

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. 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’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.

There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are

alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever

grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an

inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing.

Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown

end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning

more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit

over five feet tall.

I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988,

thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a

community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish

balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an

overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall

behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me

they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles

with words I didn’t understand, like “MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of

Protein Activations.”

I was a kid who’d failed freshman year at the regular public high school

because she never showed up. I’d transferred to an alternative school that

offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler’s class for

high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at

sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was

completely lost.

“Do we have to memorize everything on those diagrams?” one student

yelled.

Yes, Defler said, we had to memorize the diagrams, and yes, they’d be on

the test, but that didn’t matter right then. What he wanted us to understand

was that cells are amazing things: There are about one hundred trillion of

them in our bodies, each so small that several thousand could fit on the

period at the end of this sentence. They make up all our tissues—muscle,

bone, blood—which in turn make up our organs.

Under the microscope, a cell looks a lot like a fried egg: It has a white

(the cytoplasm) that’s full of water and proteins to keep it fed, and a yolk

(the nucleus) that holds all the genetic information that makes you you. The

cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street. It’s crammed full of

molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part

of the cell to another, pumping water, nutrients, and oxygen in and out of

the cell. All the while, little cytoplasmic factories work 24/7, cranking out

sugars, fats, proteins, and energy to keep the whole thing running and feed

the nucleus. The nucleus is the brains of the operation; inside every nucleus

within each cell in your body, there’s an identical copy of your entire

genome. That genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure

they do their jobs, whether that’s controlling your heartbeat or helping your

brain understand the words on this page.

Defler paced the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis—the

process of cell division—makes it possible for embryos to grow into babies,

and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or replenishing

blood we’ve lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a perfectly choreographed

dance.

All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for

cells to start growing out of control, he told us. Just one enzyme misfiring,

just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes

haywire, which is how it spreads.

“We learned that by studying cancer cells in culture,” Defler said. He

grinned and spun to face the board, where he wrote two words in enormous

print: HENRIETTA LACKS.

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us.

But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a

petri dish. 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.

“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than

they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture

lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find

millions—if not billions—of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice.

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.

“HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to

medicine in the last hundred years,” Defler said.

Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, “She was a

black woman.” He erased her name in one fast swipe and blew the chalk

from his hands. Class was over.

As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That’s it?

That’s all we get? There has to be more to the story.

I followed Defler to his office.

“Where was she from?” I asked. “Did she know how important her cells

were? Did she have any children?”

“I wish I could tell you,” he said, “but no one knows anything about her.”

After class, I ran home and threw myself onto my bed with my biology

textbook. I looked up “cell culture” in the index, and there she was, a small

parenthetical:

In culture, cancer cells can go on dividing indefinitely, if they have a continual supply of nutrients,

and thus are said to be “immortal.” A striking example is a cell line that has been reproducing in

culture since 1951. (Cells of this line are called HeLa cells because their original source was a

tumor removed from a woman named Henrietta Lacks.)

That was it. I looked up HeLa in my parents’ encyclopedia, then my

dictionary: No Henrietta.

As I graduated from high school and worked my way through college

toward a biology degree, HeLa cells were omnipresent. I heard about them

in histology, neurology, pathology; I used them in experiments on how

neighboring cells communicate. But after Mr. Defler, no one mentioned

Henrietta.

When I got my first computer in the mid-nineties and started using the

Internet, I searched for information about her, but found only confused

snippets: most sites said her name was Helen Lane; some said she died in

the thirties; others said the forties, fifties, or even sixties. Some said ovarian

cancer killed her, others said breast or cervical cancer.

Eventually I tracked down a few magazine articles about her from the

seventies. Ebony quoted Henrietta’s husband saying, “All I remember is

that she had this disease, and right after she died they called me in the office

wanting to get my permission to take a sample of some kind. I decided not

to let them.” Jet said the family was angry—angry that Henrietta’s cells

were being sold for twenty-five dollars a vial, and angry that articles had

been published about the cells without their knowledge. It said, “Pounding

in the back of their heads was a gnawing feeling that science and the press

had taken advantage of them.”

The articles all ran photos of Henrietta’s family: her oldest son sitting at

his dining room table in Baltimore, looking at a genetics textbook. Her

middle son in military uniform, smiling and holding a baby. But one picture

stood out more than any other: in it, Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks, is

surrounded by family, everyone smiling, arms around each other, eyes

bright and excited. Except Deborah. She stands in the foreground looking

alone, almost as if someone pasted her into the photo after the fact. She’s

twenty-six years old and beautiful, with short brown hair and catlike eyes.

But those eyes glare at the camera, hard and serious. The caption said the

family had found out just a few months earlier that Henrietta’s cells were

still alive, yet at that point she’d been dead for twenty-five years.

All of the stories mentioned that scientists had begun doing research on

Henrietta’s children, but the Lackses didn’t seem to know what that

research was for. They said they were being tested to see if they had the

cancer that killed Henrietta, but according to the reporters, scientists were

studying the Lacks family to learn more about Henrietta’s cells. The stories

quoted her son Lawrence, who wanted to know if the immortality of his

mother’s cells meant that he might live forever too. But one member of the

family remained voiceless: Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah.

As I worked my way through graduate school studying writing, I became

fixated on the idea of someday telling Henrietta’s story. At one point I even

called directory assistance in Baltimore looking for Henrietta’s husband,

David Lacks, but he wasn’t listed. I had the idea that I’d write a book that

was a biography of both the cells and the woman they came from—

someone’s daughter, wife, and mother.

I couldn’t have imagined it then, but that phone call would mark the

beginning of a decadelong adventure through scientific laboratories,

hospitals, and mental institutions, with a cast of characters that would

include Nobel laureates, grocery store clerks, convicted felons, and a

professional con artist. While trying to make sense of the history of cell

culture and the complicated ethical debate surrounding the use of human

tissues in research, I’d be accused of conspiracy and slammed into a wall

both physically and metaphorically, and I’d eventually find myself on the

receiving end of something that looked a lot like an exorcism. I did

eventually meet Deborah, who would turn out to be one of the strongest and

most resilient women I’d ever known. We’d form a deep personal bond, and

slowly, without realizing it, I’d become a character in her story, and she in

mine.

Deborah and I came from very different cultures: I grew up white and

agnostic in the Pacific Northwest, my roots half New York Jew and half

Midwestern Protestant; Deborah was a deeply religious black Christian

from the South. I tended to leave the room when religion came up in

conversation because it made me uncomfortable; Deborah’s family tended

toward preaching, faith healings, and sometimes voo doo. She grew up in a

black neighborhood that was one of the poorest and most dangerous in the

country; I grew up in a safe, quiet middle-class neighborhood in a

predominantly white city and went to high school with a total of two black

students. I was a science journalist who referred to all things supernatural as

“woo-woo stuff;” Deborah believed Henrietta’s spirit lived on in her cells,

controlling the life of anyone who crossed its path. Including me.

“How else do you explain why your science teacher knew her real name

when everyone else called her Helen Lane?” Deborah would say. “She was

trying to get your attention.” This thinking would apply to everything in my

life: when I married while writing this book, it was because Henrietta

wanted someone to take care of me while I worked. When I divorced, it was

because she’d decided he was getting in the way of the book. When an

editor who insisted I take the Lacks family out of the book was injured in a

mysterious accident, Deborah said that’s what happens when you piss

Henrietta off.

The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science,

journalism, and race. Ultimately, this book is the result. It’s not only the

story of HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta’s family—

particularly Deborah—and their lifelong struggle to make peace with the

existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible.

DEBORAH’S VOICE

When people ask—and seems like people always be askin to where I can’t

never get away from it—I say, Yeah, that’s right, my mother name was

Henrietta Lacks, she died in 1951, John Hopkins took her cells and them

cells are still livin today, still multiplyin, still growin and spreadin if you

don’t keep em frozen. Science calls her HeLa and she’s all over the world in

medical facilities, in all the computers and the Internet everywhere.

When I go to the doctor for my checkups I always say my mother was HeLa.

They get all excited, tell me stuff like how her cells helped make my blood

pressure medicines and antidepression pills and how all this important stuff

in science happen cause of her. But they don’t never explain more than just

sayin, Yeah, your mother was on the moon, she been in nuclear bombs and

made that polio vaccine. I really don’t know how she did all that, but I

guess I’m glad she did, cause that mean she helpin lots of people. I think

she would like that.

But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much

for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t

make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about

them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad about

that to where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But I don’t got it in me

no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was.

1

The Exam

On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old Buick,

watching the rain fall. He was parked under a towering oak tree outside

Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his children—two still in diapers—

waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few minutes earlier she’d jumped out

of the car, pulled her jacket over her head, and scurried into the hospital,

past the “colored” bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use. In the

next building, under an elegant domed copper roof, a ten-and-a-half-foot

marble statue of Jesus stood, arms spread wide, holding court over what

was once the main entrance of Hopkins. No one in Henrietta’s family ever

saw a Hopkins doctor without visiting the Jesus statue, laying flowers at his

feet, saying a prayer, and rubbing his big toe for good luck. But that day

Henrietta didn’t stop.

She went straight to the waiting room of the gynecology clinic, a wide-

open space, empty but for rows of long straight-backed benches that looked

like church pews.

“I got a knot on my womb,” she told the receptionist. “The doctor need to

have a look.”

For more than a year Henrietta had been telling her closest girlfriends

something didn’t feel right. One night after dinner, she sat on her bed with

her cousins Margaret and Sadie and told them, “I got a knot inside me.”

“A what?” Sadie asked.

“A knot,” she said. “It hurt somethin awful—when that man want to get

with me, Sweet Jesus aren’t them but some pains.”

When sex first started hurting, she thought it had something to do with

baby Deborah, who she’d just given birth to a few weeks earlier, or the bad

blood David sometimes brought home after nights with other women—the

kind doctors treated with shots of penicillin and heavy metals.

Henrietta grabbed her cousins’ hands one at a time and guided them to

her belly, just as she’d done when Deborah started kicking.

“You feel anything?”

The cousins pressed their fingers into her stomach again and again.

“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “Maybe you’re pregnant outside your womb

—you know that can happen.”

“I’m no kind of pregnant,” Henrietta said. “It’s a knot.”

“Hennie, you gotta check that out. What if it’s somethin bad?”

But Henrietta didn’t go to the doctor, and the cousins didn’t tell anyone

what she’d said in the bedroom. In those days, people didn’t talk about

things like cancer, but Sadie always figured Henrietta kept it secret because

she was afraid a doctor would take her womb and make her stop having

children.

About a week after telling her cousins she thought something was wrong,

at the age of twenty-nine, Henrietta turned up pregnant with Joe, her fifth

child. Sadie and Margaret told Henrietta that the pain probably had

something to do with a baby after all. But Henrietta still said no.

“It was there before the baby,” she told them. “It’s somethin else.”

They all stopped talking about the knot, and no one told Henrietta’s

husband David anything about it. Then, four and a half months after baby

Joseph was born, Henrietta went to the bathroom and found blood spotting

her underwear when it wasn’t her time of the month.

She filled her bathtub, lowered herself into the warm water, and slowly

spread her legs. With the door closed to her children, husband, and cousins,

Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her cervix until

she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a hard lump, deep inside, as

though someone had lodged a marble just to the left of the opening to her

womb.

Henrietta climbed out of the bathtub, dried herself off, and dressed. Then

she told her husband, “You better take me to the doctor. I’m bleedin and it

ain’t my time.”

Her local doctor took one look inside her, saw the lump, and figured it

was a sore from syphilis. But the lump tested negative for syphilis, so he

told Henrietta she’d better go to the Johns Hopkins gynecology clinic.

Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in the country. It was built in 1889

as a charity hospital for the sick and poor, and it covered more than a dozen

acres where a cemetery and insane asylum once sat in East Baltimore. The

public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients, most of them black and

unable to pay their medical bills. David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles

to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major

hospital for miles that treated black patients. 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. Even

Hopkins, which did treat black patients, segregated them in colored wards,

and had colored-only fountains.

So when the nurse called Henrietta from the waiting room, she led her

through a single door to a colored-only exam room—one in a long row of

rooms divided by clear glass walls that let nurses see from one to the next.

Henrietta undressed, wrapped herself in a starched white hospital gown, and

lay down on a wooden exam table, waiting for Howard Jones, the

gynecologist on duty. Jones was thin and graying, his deep voice softened

by a faint Southern accent. When he walked into the room, Henrietta told

him about the lump. Before examining her, he flipped through her chart—a

quick sketch of her life, and a litany of untreated conditions:

Sixth or seventh grade education; housewife and mother of five. Breathing difficult since childhood

due to recurrent throat infections and deviated septum in patient’s nose. Physician recommended

surgical repair. Patient declined. Patient had one toothache for nearly five years; tooth eventually

extracted with several others. Only anxiety is oldest daughter who is epileptic and can’t talk. Happy

household. Very occasional drinker. Has not traveled. Well nourished, cooperative. Patient was one

of ten siblings. One died of car accident, one from rheumatic heart, one was poisoned. Unexplained

vaginal bleeding and blood in urine during last two pregnancies; physician recommended sickle

cell test. Patient declined. Been with husband since age 15 and has no liking for sexual intercourse.

Patient has asymptomatic neuro syphilis but cancelled syphilis treatments, said she felt fine. Two

months prior to current visit, after delivery of fifth child, patient had significant blood in urine.

Tests showed areas of increased cellular activity in the cervix. Physician recommended diagnostics

and referred to specialist for ruling out infection or cancer. Patient canceled appointment. One

month prior to current visit, patient tested positive for gonorrhea. Patient recalled to clinic for

treatment. No response.

It was no surprise that she hadn’t come back all those times for follow-

up. For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country

where she didn’t speak the language. She knew about harvesting tobacco

and butchering a pig, but she’d never heard the words cervix or biopsy. She

didn’t read or write much, and she hadn’t studied science in school. She,

like most black patients, only went to Hopkins when she thought she had no

choice.

Jones listened as Henrietta told him about the pain, the blood. “She says

that she knew there was something wrong with the neck of her womb,” he

wrote later. “When asked why she knew it, she said that she felt as if there

were a lump there. I do not quite know what she means by this, unless she

actually palpated this area.”

Henrietta lay back on the table, feet pressed hard in stirrups as she stared

at the ceiling. And sure enough, Jones found a lump exactly where she’d

said he would. He described it as an eroded, hard mass about the size of a

nickel. If her cervix was a clock’s face, the lump was at four o’clock. He’d

seen easily a thousand cervical cancer lesions, but never anything like this:

shiny and purple (like “grape Jello,” he wrote later), and so delicate it bled

at the slightest touch. Jones cut a small sample and sent it to the pathology

lab down the hall for a diagnosis. Then he told Henrietta to go home.

Soon after, Howard Jones sat down and dictated notes about Henrietta

and her diagnosis: “Her history is interesting in that she had a term delivery

here at this hospital, September 19, 1950,” he said. “No note is made in the

history at that time, or at the six weeks’ return visit that there is any

abnormality of the cervix.”

Yet here she was, three months later, with a full-fledged tumor. Either her

doctors had missed it during her last exams—which seemed impossible—or

it had grown at a terrifying rate.

2

Clover

Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on

August 1, 1920. No one knows how she became Henrietta. A midwife

named Fannie delivered her into a small shack on a dead-end road

overlooking a train depot, where hundreds of freight cars came and went

each day. Henrietta shared that house with her parents and eight older

siblings until 1924, when her mother, Eliza Lacks Pleasant, died giving

birth to her tenth child.

Henrietta’s father, Johnny Pleasant, was a squat man who hobbled around

on a cane he often hit people with. Family lore has it that he killed his own

brother for trying to get fresh with Eliza. Johnny didn’t have the patience

for raising children, so when Eliza died, he took them all back to Clover,

Virginia, where his family still farmed the tobacco fields their ancestors had

worked as slaves. No one in Clover could take all ten children, so relatives

divided them up—one with this cousin, one with that aunt. Henrietta ended

up with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks.

Tommy lived in what everyone called the home-house—a four-room log

cabin that once served as slave quarters, with plank floors, gas lanterns, and

water Henrietta hauled up a long hill from the creek. The home-house stood

on a hillside where wind whipped through cracks in the walls. The air

inside stayed so cool that when relatives died, the family kept their corpses

in the front hallway for days so people could visit and pay respects. Then

they buried them in the cemetery out back.

Henrietta’s grandfather was already raising another grandchild that one of

his daughters had left behind after delivering him on the home-house floor.

That child’s name was David Lacks, but everyone called him Day, because

in the Lacks country drawl, house sounds like hyse, and David sounds like

Day.

Young Day was what the Lacks family called a sneak baby: a man named

Johnny Coleman had passed through town; nine months later Day arrived.

A twelve-year-old cousin and midwife named Munchie delivered him, blue

as a stormy sky and not breathing. A white doctor came to the home-house

with his derby and walking stick, wrote “stillborn” on Day’s birth

certificate, then drove his horse-drawn buggy back to town, leaving a cloud

of red dust behind.

Munchie prayed as he rode away, Lord, I know you didn’t mean to take

this baby. She washed Day in a tub of warm water, then put him on a white

sheet where she rubbed and patted his chest until he gasped for breath and

his blue skin warmed to soft brown.

By the time Johnny Pleasant shipped Henrietta off to live with Grandpa

Tommy, she was four and Day was almost nine. No one could have guessed

she’d spend the rest of her life with Day—first as a cousin growing up in

their grandfather’s home, then as his wife.

As children, Henrietta and Day awoke each morning at four o’clock to

milk the cows and feed the chickens, hogs, and horses. They tended a

garden filled with corn, peanuts, and greens, then headed to the tobacco

fields with their cousins Cliff, Fred, Sadie, Margaret, and a horde of others.

They spent much of their young lives stooped in those fields, planting

tobacco behind mule-drawn plows. Each spring they pulled the wide green

leaves from their stalks and tied them into small bundles—their fingers raw

and sticky with nicotine resin—then climbed the rafters of their

grandfather’s tobacco barn to hang bundle after bundle for curing. Each

summer day they prayed for a storm to cool their skin from the burning sun.

When they got one, they’d scream and run through fields, snatching armfuls

of ripe fruit and walnuts that the winds blew from the trees.

Like most young Lackses, Day didn’t finish school: he stopped in the

fourth grade because the family needed him to work the fields. But

Henrietta stayed until the sixth grade. During the school year, after taking

care of the garden and livestock each morning, she’d walk two miles—past

the white school where children threw rocks and taunted her—to the

colored school, a three-room wooden farmhouse hidden under tall shade

trees, with a yard out front where Mrs. Coleman made the boys and girls

play on separate sides. When school let out each day, and any time it wasn’t

in session, Henrietta was in the fields with Day and the cousins.

If the weather was nice, when they finished working, the cousins ran

straight to the swimming hole they made each year by damming the creek

behind the house with rocks, sticks, bags of sand, and anything else they

could sink. They threw rocks to scare away the poisonous cottonmouth

snakes, then dropped into the water from tree branches or dove from muddy

banks.

At nightfall they built fires with pieces of old shoes to keep the

mosquitoes away, and watched the stars from beneath the big oak tree

where they’d hung a rope to swing from. They played tag, ring-around-the-

rosy, and hopscotch, and danced around the field singing until Grandpa

Tommy yelled for everyone to go to bed.

Each night, piles of cousins packed into the crawl space above a little

wooden kitchen house just a few feet from the home-house. They lay one

next to the other—telling stories about the headless tobacco farmer who

roamed the streets at night, or the man with no eyes who lived by the creek

—then slept until their grandmother Chloe fired up the woodstove below

and woke them to the smell of fresh biscuits.

One evening each month during harvest season, Grandpa Tommy hitched

the horses after supper and readied them to ride into the town of South

Boston—home of the nation’s second-largest tobacco market, with tobacco

parades, a Miss Tobacco pageant, and a port where boats collected the dried

leaves for people around the world to smoke.

Before leaving home, Tommy would call for the young cousins, who’d

nestle into the flat wagon on a bed of tobacco leaves, then fight sleep as

long as they could before giving in to the rhythm of the horses. Like

farmers from all over Virginia, Tommy Lacks and the grandchildren rode

through the night to bring their crops to South Boston, where they’d line up

at dawn—one wagon behind the next—waiting for the enormous green

wooden gates of the auction warehouse to open.

When they arrived, Henrietta and the cousins would help unhitch the

horses and fill their troughs with grain, then unload the family’s tobacco

onto the wood-plank floor of the warehouse. The auctioneer rattled off

numbers that echoed through the huge open room, its ceiling nearly thirty

feet high and covered with skylights blackened by years of dirt. As Tommy

Lacks stood by his crop praying for a good price, Henrietta and the cousins

ran around the tobacco piles, talking in a fast gibberish to sound like the

auctioneer. At night they’d help Tommy haul any unsold tobacco down to

the basement, where he’d turn the leaves into a bed for the children. White

farmers slept upstairs in lofts and private rooms; black farmers slept in the

dark underbelly of the warehouse with the horses, mules, and dogs, on a

dusty dirt floor lined with rows of wooden stalls for livestock, and

mountains of empty liquor bottles piled almost to the ceiling.

Night at the warehouse was a time of booze, gambling, prostitution, and

occasional murders as farmers burned through their season’s earnings. From

their bed of leaves, the Lacks children would stare at ceiling beams the size

of trees as they drifted off to the sound of laughter and clanking bottles, and

the smell of dried tobacco.

In the morning they’d pile into the wagon with their unsold harvest and

set out on the long journey home. Any cousins who’d stayed behind in

Clover knew a wagon ride into South Boston meant treats for everyone—a

hunk of cheese, maybe, or a slab of bologna—so they waited for hours on

Main Street to follow the wagon to the home-house.

Clover’s wide, dusty Main Street was full of Model As, and wagons

pulled by mules and horses. Old Man Snow had the first tractor in town,

and he drove it to the store like it was a car—newspaper tucked under his

arm, his hounds Cadillac and Dan baying beside him. Main Street had a

movie theater, bank, jewelry store, doctor’s office, hardware store, and

several churches. When the weather was good, white men with suspenders,

top hats, and long cigars—everyone from mayor to doctor to undertaker—

stood along Main Street sipping whiskey from juice bottles, talking, or

playing checkers on the wooden barrel in front of the pharmacy. Their

wives gossiped at the general store as their babies slept in a row on the

counter, heads resting on long bolts of fabric.

Henrietta and her cousins would hire themselves out to those white folks,

picking their tobacco for ten cents so they’d have money to see their

favorite Buck Jones cowboy movies. The theater owner showed silent

black-and-white films, and his wife played along on the piano. She knew

only one song, so she played happy carnival-style music for every scene,

even when characters were getting shot and dying. The Lacks children sat

up in the colored section next to the projector, which clicked like a

metronome through the whole movie.

     As Henrietta and Day grew older, they traded ring-around-the-rosy for

horse races along the dirt road that ran the length of what used to be the

Lacks tobacco plantation, but was now simply called Lacks Town. The boys

always fought over who got to ride Charlie Horse, Grandpa Tommy’s tall

bay, which could outrun any other horse in Clover. Henrietta and the other

girls watched from the hillside or the backs of straw-filled wagons, hopping

up and down, clapping and screaming as the boys streaked by on horseback.

Henrietta often yelled for Day, but sometimes she cheered for another

cousin, Crazy Joe Grinnan. Crazy Joe was what their cousin Cliff called “an

over average man”—tall, husky, and strong, with dark skin, a sharp nose,

and so much thick black hair covering his head, arms, back, and neck that

he had to shave his whole body in the summer to keep from burning up.

They called him Crazy Joe because he was so in love with Henrietta, he’d

do anything to get her attention. She was the prettiest girl in Lacks Town,

with her beautiful smile and walnut eyes.

The first time Crazy Joe tried to kill himself over Henrietta, he ran circles

around her in the middle of winter while she was on her way home from

school. He begged her for a date, saying, “Hennie, come on … just give me

a chance.” When she laughed and said no, Crazy Joe ran and jumped

straight through the ice of a frozen pond and refused to come out until she

agreed to go out with him.

All the cousins teased Joe, saying, “Maybe he thought that ice water

might’a cool him off, but he so hot for her, that water nearly started

boiling!” Henrietta’s cousin Sadie, who was Crazy Joe’s sister, yelled at

him, “Man you so much in love with a girl, you gonna die for her? That

ain’t right.”

No one knew what happened between Henrietta and Crazy Joe, except

that there were some dates and some kisses. But Henrietta and Day had

been sharing a bedroom since she was four, so what happened next didn’t

surprise anyone: they started having children together. Their son Lawrence

was born just months after Henrietta’s fourteenth birthday; his sister Lucile

Elsie Pleasant came along four years later. They were both born on the floor

of the home-house like their father, grandmother, and grandfather before

them.

People wouldn’t use words like epilepsy, mental retardation, or

neurosyphilis to describe Elsie’s condition until years later. To the folks in

Lacks Town, she was just simple. Touched. She came into the world so fast,

Day hadn’t even gotten back with the midwife when Elsie shot right out and

hit her head on the floor. Everyone would say maybe that was what left her

mind like an infant’s.

The old dusty record books from Henrietta’s church are filled with the

names of women cast from the congregation for bearing children out of

wedlock, but for some reason Henrietta never was, even as rumors floated

around Lacks Town that maybe Crazy Joe had fathered one of her children.

When Crazy Joe found out Henrietta was going to marry Day, he stabbed

himself in the chest with an old dull pocketknife. His father found him lying

drunk in their yard, shirt soaked with blood. He tried to stop the bleeding,

but Joe fought him—thrashing and punching—which just made him bleed

more. Eventually Joe’s father wrestled him into the car, tied him tight to the

door, and drove to the doctor. When Joe got home all bandaged up, Sadie

just kept saying, “All that to stop Hennie from marrying Day?” But Crazy

Joe wasn’t the only one trying to stop the marriage.

Henrietta’s sister Gladys was always saying Henrietta could do better.

When most Lackses talked about Henrietta and Day and their early life in

Clover, it sounded as idyllic as a fairy tale. But not Gladys. No one knew

why she was so against the marriage. Some folks said Gladys was just

jealous because Henrietta was prettier. But Gladys always insisted Day

would be a no-good husband.

Henrietta and Day married alone at their preacher’s house on April 10,

1941. She was twenty; he was twenty-five. They didn’t go on a honeymoon

because there was too much work to do, and no money for travel. By

winter, the United States was at war and tobacco companies were supplying

free cigarettes to soldiers, so the market was booming. But as large farms

flourished, the small ones struggled. Henrietta and Day were lucky if they

sold enough tobacco each season to feed the family and plant the next crop.

So after their wedding, Day went back to gripping the splintered ends of

his old wooden plow as Henrietta followed close behind, pushing a

homemade wheelbarrow and dropping tobacco seedlings into holes in the

freshly turned red dirt.

Then one afternoon at the end of 1941, their cousin Fred Garret came

barreling down the dirt road beside their field. He was just back from

Baltimore for a visit in his slick ‘36 Chevy and fancy clothes. Only a year

earlier, Fred and his brother Cliff had been tobacco farmers in Clover too.

For extra money, they’d opened a “colored” convenience store where most

customers paid in IOUs; they also ran an old cinderblock juke joint where

Henrietta often danced on the red-dirt floor. Everybody put coins in the

jukebox and drank RC Cola, but the profits never amounted to much. So

eventually Fred took his last three dollars and twenty-five cents and bought

a bus ticket north for a new life. He, like several other cousins, went to

work at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point steel mill and live in Turner

Station, a small community of black workers on a peninsula in the Patapsco

River, about twenty miles from downtown Baltimore.

In the late 1800s, when Sparrows Point first opened, Turner Station was

mostly swamps, farmland, and a few shanties connected with wooden

boards for walkways. When demand for steel increased during World War I,

streams of white workers moved into the nearby town of Dundalk, and

Bethlehem Steel’s housing barracks for black workers quickly overflowed,

pushing them into Turner Station. By the early years of World War II,

Turner Station had a few paved roads, a doctor, a general store, and an ice

man. But its residents were still fighting for water, sewage lines, and

schools.

Then, in December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and it was like

Turner Station had won the lottery: the demand for steel skyrocketed, as did

the need for workers. The government poured money into Turner Station,

which began filling with one-and two-story housing projects, many of them

pressed side by side and back-to-back, some with four to five hundred units.

Most were brick, others covered with asbestos shingles. Some had yards,

some didn’t. From most of them you could see the flames dancing above

Sparrows Point’s furnaces and the eerie red smoke pouring from its

smokestacks.

Sparrows Point was rapidly becoming the largest steel plant in the world.

It produced concrete-reinforcing bars, barbed wire, nails, and steel for cars,

refrigerators, and military ships. It would burn more than six million tons of

coal each year to make up to eight million tons of steel and employ more

than 30,000 workers. Bethlehem Steel was a gold mine in a time flush with

poverty, especially for black families from the South. Word spread from

Maryland to the farms of Virginia and the Carolinas, and as part of what

would become known as the Great Migration, black families flocked from

the South to Turner Station—the Promised Land.

The work was tough, especially for black men, who got the jobs white

men wouldn’t touch. Like Fred, black workers usually started in the bowels

of partially built tankers in the shipyard, collecting bolts, rivets, and nuts as

they fell from the hands of men drilling and welding thirty or forty feet up.

Eventually black workers moved up to the boiler room, where they

shoveled coal into a blazing furnace. They spent their days breathing in

toxic coal dust and asbestos, which they brought home to their wives and

daughters, who inhaled it while shaking the men’s clothes out for the wash.

The black workers at Sparrows Point made about eighty cents an hour at

most, usually less. White workers got higher wages, but Fred didn’t

complain: eighty cents an hour was more than most Lackses had ever seen.

Fred had made it. Now he’d come back to Clover to convince Henrietta

and Day that they should do the same. The morning after he came barreling

into town, Fred bought Day a bus ticket to Baltimore. They agreed

Henrietta would stay behind to care for the children and the tobacco until

Day made enough for a house of their own in Baltimore, and three tickets

north. A few months later, Fred got a draft notice shipping him overseas.

Before he left, Fred gave Day all the money he’d saved, saying it was time

to get Henrietta and the children to Turner Station.

Soon, with a child on each side, Henrietta boarded a coal-fueled train

from the small wooden depot at the end of Clover’s Main Street. She left

the tobacco fields of her youth and the hundred-year-old oak tree that

shaded her from the sun on so many hot afternoons. At the age of twenty-

one, Henrietta stared through the train window at rolling hills and wide-

open bodies of water for the first time, heading toward a new life.

3

Diagnosis and Treatment

After her visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went about life as usual, cleaning

and cooking for Day, their children, and the many cousins who stopped by.

Then, a few days later, Jones got her biopsy results from the pathology lab:

“Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I.”

All cancers originate from a single cell gone wrong and are categorized

based on the type of cell they start from. Most cervical cancers are

carcinomas, which grow from the epithelial cells that cover the cervix and

protect its surface. By chance, when Henrietta showed up at Hopkins

complaining of abnormal bleeding, Jones and his boss, Richard Wesley

TeLinde, were involved in a heated nationwide debate over what qualified

as cervical cancer, and how best to treat it.

TeLinde, one of the top cervical cancer experts in the country, was a

dapper and serious fifty-six-year-old surgeon who walked with an extreme

limp from an ice-skating accident more than a decade earlier. Everyone at

Hopkins called him Uncle Dick. He’d pioneered the use of estrogen for

treating symptoms of menopause and made important early discoveries

about endometriosis. He’d also written one of the most famous clinical

gynecology textbooks, which is still widely used sixty years and ten

editions after he first wrote it. His reputation was international: when the

king of Morocco’s wife fell ill, he insisted only TeLinde could operate on

her. By 1951, when Henrietta arrived at Hopkins, TeLinde had developed a

theory about cervical cancer that, if correct, could save the lives of millions

of women. But few in the field believed him.

         Cervical carcinomas are divided into two types: invasive carcinomas,

which have penetrated the surface of the cervix, and noninvasive

carcinomas, which haven’t. The noninvasive type is sometimes called

“sugar-icing carcinoma,” because it grows in a smooth layered sheet across

the surface of the cervix, but its official name is carcinoma in situ, which

derives from the Latin for “cancer in its original place.”

In 1951, most doctors in the field believed that invasive carcinoma was

deadly, and carcinoma in situ wasn’t. So they treated the invasive type

aggressively but generally didn’t worry about carcinoma in situ because

they thought it couldn’t spread. TeLinde disagreed—he believed carcinoma

in situ was simply an early stage of invasive carcinoma that, if left

untreated, eventually became deadly. So he treated it aggressively, often

removing the cervix, uterus, and most of the vagina. He argued that this

would drastically reduce cervical cancer deaths, but his critics called it

extreme and unnecessary.

Diagnosing carcinoma in situ had only been possible since 1941, when

George Papanicolaou, a Greek researcher, published a paper describing a

test he’d developed, now called the Pap smear. It involved scraping cells

from the cervix with a curved glass pipette and examining them under a

microscope for precancerous changes that TeLinde and a few others had

identified years earlier. This was a tremendous advance, because those

precancerous cells weren’t detectable otherwise: they caused no physical

symptoms and weren’t palpable or visible to the naked eye. By the time a

woman began showing symptoms, there was little hope of a cure. But with

the Pap smear, doctors could detect precancerous cells and perform a

hysterectomy, and cervical cancer would be almost entirely preventable.

At that point, more than 15,000 women were dying each year from

cervical cancer. The Pap smear had the potential to decrease that death rate

by 70 percent or more, but there were two things standing in its way: first,

many women—like Henrietta—simply didn’t get the test; and, second, even

when they did, few doctors knew how to interpret the results accurately,

because they didn’t know what the various stages of cervical cancer looked

like under a microscope. Some mistook cervical infections for cancer and

removed a woman’s entire reproductive tract when all she needed was

antibiotics. Others mistook malignant changes for infection, sending

women home with antibiotics only to have them return later, dying from

metastasized cancer. And even when doctors correctly diagnosed

precancerous changes, they often didn’t know how those changes should be

treated.

TeLinde set out to minimize what he called “unjustifiable

hysterectomies” by documenting what wasn’t cervical cancer and by urging

surgeons to verify smear results with biopsies before operating. He also

hoped to prove that women with carcinoma in situ needed aggressive

treatment, so their cancer didn’t become invasive.

Not long before Henrietta’s first exam, TeLinde presented his argument

about carcinoma in situ to a major meeting of pathologists in Washington,

D.C., and the audience heckled him off the stage. So he went back to

Hopkins and planned a study that would prove them wrong: he and his staff

would review all medical records and biopsies from patients who’d been

diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer at Hopkins in the past decade, to

see how many initially had carcinoma in situ.

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.”

In this particular study—the largest ever done on the relationship

between the two cervical cancers—Jones and TeLinde found that 62 percent

of women with invasive cancer who’d had earlier biopsies first had

carcinoma in situ. In addition to that study, TeLinde thought, if he could

find a way to grow living samples from normal cervical tissue and both

types of cancerous tissue—something never done before—he could

compare all three. If he could prove that carcinoma in situ and invasive

carcinoma looked and behaved similarly in the laboratory, he could end the

debate, showing that he’d been right all along, and doctors who ignored him

were killing their patients. So he called George Gey (pronounced Guy),

head of tissue culture research at Hopkins.

Gey and his wife, Margaret, had spent the last three decades working to

grow malignant cells outside the body, hoping to use them to find cancer’s

cause and cure. But most cells died quickly, and the few that survived

hardly grew at all. The Geys were determined to grow the first immortal

human cells: a continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one

original sample, cells that would constantly replenish themselves and never

die. Eight years earlier—in 1943—a group of researchers at the National

Institutes of Health had proven such a thing was possible using mouse cells.

The Geys wanted to grow the human equivalent—they didn’t care what

kind of tissue they used, as long as it came from a person.

Gey took any cells he could get his hands on—he called himself “the

world’s most famous vulture, feeding on human specimens almost

constantly.” So when TeLinde offered him a supply of cervical cancer tissue

in exchange for trying to grow some cells, Gey didn’t hesitate. And TeLinde

began collecting samples from any woman who happened to walk into

Hopkins with cervical cancer. Including Henrietta.

     On February 5, 1951, after Jones got Henrietta’s biopsy report back from

the lab, he called and told her it was malignant. Henrietta didn’t tell anyone

what Jones said, and no one asked. She simply went on with her day as if

nothing had happened, which was just like her—no sense upsetting anyone

over something she could deal with herself.

That night Henrietta told her husband, “Day, I need to go back to the

doctor tomorrow. He wants to do some tests, give me some medicine.” The

next morning she climbed from the Buick outside Hopkins again, telling

Day and the children not to worry.

“Ain’t nothin serious wrong,” she said. “Doctor’s gonna fix me right up.”

Henrietta went straight to the admissions desk and told the receptionist

she was there for her treatment. Then she signed a form with the words

OPERATION PERMIT at the top of the page. It said:

I hereby give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative

procedures and under any anaesthetic either local or general that they may deem necessary in the

proper surgical care and treatment of: ______________________________

Henrietta printed her name in the blank space. A witness with illegible

handwriting signed a line at the bottom of the form, and Henrietta signed

another.

Then she followed a nurse down a long hallway into the ward for colored

women, where Howard Jones and several other white physicians ran more

tests than she’d had in her entire life. They checked her urine, her blood, her

lungs. They stuck tubes in her bladder and nose.

On her second night at the hospital, the nurse on duty fed Henrietta an

early dinner so her stomach would be empty the next morning, when a

doctor put her under anesthetic for her first cancer treatment. Henrietta’s

tumor was the invasive type, and like hospitals nationwide, Hopkins treated

all invasive cervical carcinomas with radium, a white radioactive metal that

glows an eerie blue.

When radium was first discovered in the late 1800s, headlines nationwide

hailed it as “a substitute for gas, electricity, and a positive cure for every

disease.” Watchmakers added it to paint to make watch dials glow, and

doctors administered it in powdered form to treat everything from

seasickness to ear infections. But radium destroys any cells it encounters,

and patients who’d taken it for trivial problems began dying. Radium

causes mutations that can turn into cancer, and at high doses it can burn the

skin off a person’s body. But it also kills cancer cells.

Hopkins had been using radium to treat cervical cancer since the early

1900s, when a surgeon named Howard Kelly visited Marie and Pierre

Curie, the couple in France who’d discovered radium and its ability to

destroy cancer cells. Without realizing the danger of contact with radium,

Kelly brought some back to the United States in his pockets and regularly

traveled the world collecting more. By the 1940s, several studies—one of

them conducted by Howard Jones, Henrietta’s physician—showed that

radium was safer and more effective than surgery for treating invasive

cervical cancer.

The morning of Henrietta’s first treatment, a taxi driver picked up a

doctor’s bag filled with thin glass tubes of radium from a clinic across town.

The tubes were tucked into individual slots inside small canvas pouches

hand-sewn by a local Baltimore woman. The pouches were called Brack

plaques, after the Hopkins doctor who invented them and oversaw

Henrietta’s radium treatment. He would later die of cancer, most likely

caused by his regular exposure to radium, as would a resident who traveled

with Kelly and also transported radium in his pockets.

One nurse placed the Brack plaques on a stainless-steel tray. Another

wheeled Henrietta into the small colored-only operating room on the second

floor, with stainless-steel tables, huge glaring lights, and an all-white

medical staff dressed in white gowns, hats, masks, and gloves.

With Henrietta unconscious on the operating table in the center of the

room, her feet in stirrups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr.,

sat on a stool between her legs. He peered inside Henrietta, dilated her

cervix, and prepared to treat her tumor. But first—though no one had told

Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be

a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized

pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s cervix: one from her tumor, and one from

the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass

dish.

Wharton slipped a tube filled with radium inside Henrietta’s cervix, and

sewed it in place. He sewed a plaque filled with radium to the outer surface

of her cervix and packed another plaque against it. He slid several rolls of

gauze inside her vagina to help keep the radium in place, then threaded a

catheter into her bladder so she could urinate without disturbing the

treatment.

When Wharton finished, a nurse wheeled Henrietta back into the ward,

and Wharton wrote in her chart, “The patient tolerated the procedure well

and left the operating room in good condition.” On a separate page he

wrote, “Henrietta Lacks … Biopsy of cervical tissue … Tissue given to Dr.

George Gey.”

A resident took the dish with the samples to Gey’s lab, as he’d done

many times before. Gey still got excited at moments like this, but everyone

else in his lab saw Henrietta’s sample as something tedious—the latest of

what felt like countless samples that scientists and lab technicians had been

trying and failing to grow for years. They were sure Henrietta’s cells would

die just like all the others.

4

The Birth of HeLa

Gey’s twenty-one-year-old assistant, Mary Kubicek, sat eating a tuna-

salad sandwich at a long stone culture bench that doubled as a break table.

She and Margaret and the other women in the Gey lab spent countless hours

there, all in nearly identical cat-eye-glasses with fat dark frames and thick

lenses, their hair pulled back in tight buns.

At first glance, the room could have been an industrial kitchen. There

were gallon-sized tin coffee cans full of utensils and glassware; powdered

creamer, sugar, spoons, and soda bottles on the table; huge metal freezers

lining one wall; and deep sinks Gey made by hand using stones he collected

from a nearby quarry. But the teapot sat next to a Bunsen burner, and the

freezers were filled with blood, placentas, tumor samples, and dead mice

(plus at least one duck Gey kept frozen in the lab for more than twenty

years after a hunting trip, since it wouldn’t fit in his freezer at home). Gey

had lined one wall with cages full of squealing rabbits, rats, and guinea

pigs; on one side of the table where Mary sat eating her lunch, he’d built

shelves holding cages full of mice, their bodies filled with tumors. Mary

always stared at them while she ate, just as she was doing when Gey walked

into the lab carrying the pieces of Henrietta’s cervix.

“I’m putting a new sample in your cubicle,” he told her.

Mary pretended not to notice. Not again, she thought, and kept eating her

sandwich. It can wait till I’m done.

Mary knew she shouldn’t wait—every moment those cells sat in the dish

made it more likely they’d die. But she was tired of cell culture, tired of

meticulously cutting away dead tissue like gristle from a steak, tired of

having cells die after hours of work.

Why bother? she thought.

          Gey hired Mary for her hands. She was fresh out of college with a

physiology degree when her adviser sent her for an interview. Gey asked

Mary to pick up a pen from the table and write a few sentences. Now pick

up that knife, he said. Cut this piece of paper. Twirl this pipette.

Mary didn’t realize until months later that he’d been studying her hands,

checking their dexterity and strength to see how they’d stand up to hours of

delicate cutting, scraping, tweezing, and pipetting.

By the time Henrietta walked into Hopkins, Mary was handling most of

the tissue samples that came through the door, and so far all samples from

TeLinde’s patients had died.

At that point, there were many obstacles to growing cells successfully.

For starters, no one knew exactly what nutrients they needed to survive, or

how best to supply them. Many researchers, including the Geys, had been

trying for years to develop the perfect culture medium—the liquid used for

feeding cells. The recipes for Gey Culture Medium evolved constantly as

George and Margaret added and removed ingredients, searching for the

perfect balance. But they all sounded like witches’ brews: the plasma of

chickens, purée of calf fetuses, special salts, and blood from human

umbilical cords. George had rigged a bell and cable from the window of his

lab across a courtyard to the Hopkins maternity ward, so nurses could ring

anytime a baby was born, and Margaret or Mary would run over and collect

umbilical cord blood.

The other ingredients weren’t so easy to come by: George visited local

slaughterhouses at least once a week to collect cow fetuses and chicken

blood. He’d drive there in his rusted-out old Chevy, its left fender flapping

against the pavement, shooting sparks. Well before dawn, in a rundown

wooden building with a sawdust floor and wide gaps in the walls, Gey

would grab a screaming chicken by the legs, yank it upside down from its

cage, and wrestle it to its back on a butcher block. He’d hold its feet in one

hand and pin its neck motionless to the wood with his elbow. With his free

hand, he’d squirt the bird’s chest with alcohol, and plunge a syringe needle

into the chicken’s heart to draw blood. Then he’d stand the bird upright,

saying, “Sorry, old fella,” and put it back in its cage. Every once in a while,

when a chicken dropped dead from the stress, George took it home so

Margaret could fry it for dinner.

Like many procedures in their lab, the Gey Chicken Bleeding Technique

was Margaret’s creation. She worked out the method step-by-step, taught it

to George, and wrote detailed instructions for the many other researchers

who wanted to learn it.

Finding the perfect medium was an ongoing experiment, but the biggest

problem facing cell culture was contamination. Bacteria and a host of other

microorganisms could find their way into cultures from people’s unwashed

hands, their breath, and dust particles floating through the air, and destroy

them. But Margaret had been trained as a surgical nurse, which meant

sterility was her specialty—it was key to preventing deadly infections in

patients in the operating room. Many would later say that Margaret’s

surgical training was the only reason the Gey lab was able to grow cells at

all. Most culturists, like George, were biologists; they knew nothing about

preventing contamination.

Margaret taught George everything he knew about keeping cultures

sterile, and she did the same with every technician, grad student, and

scientist who came to work or study in the lab. She hired a local woman

named Minnie whose sole job was washing the laboratory glassware using

the only product Margaret would allow: Gold Dust Twins soap. Margaret

was so serious about that soap, when she heard a rumor that the company

might go out of business, she bought an entire boxcar full of it.

Margaret patrolled the lab, arms crossed, and leaned over Minnie’s

shoulder as she worked, towering nearly a foot above her. If Margaret ever

smiled, no one could have seen it through her ever-present surgical mask.

She inspected all the glassware for spots or smudges, and when she found

them—which was often—she’d scream, “MINNIE!” so loud that Mary

cringed.

Mary followed Margaret’s sterilizing rules meticulously to avoid her

wrath. After finishing her lunch, and before touching Henrietta’s sample,

Mary covered herself with a clean white gown, surgical cap, and mask, and

then walked to her cubicle, one of four airtight rooms George had built by

hand in the center of the lab. The cubicles were small, only five feet in any

direction, with doors that sealed like a freezer’s to prevent contaminated air

from getting inside. Mary turned on the sterilizing system and watched

from outside as her cubicle filled with hot steam to kill anything that might

damage the cells. When the steam cleared, she stepped inside and sealed the

door behind her, then hosed the cubicle’s cement floor with water and

scoured her workbench with alcohol. The air inside was filtered and piped

in through a vent on the ceiling. Once she’d sterilized the cubicle, she lit a

Bunsen burner and used its flame to sterilize test tubes and a used scalpel

blade, since the Gey lab couldn’t afford new ones for each sample.

Only then did she pick up the pieces of Henrietta’s cervix—forceps in

one hand, scalpel in the other—and carefully slice them into one-millimeter

squares. She sucked each square into a pipette, and dropped them one at a

time onto chicken-blood clots she’d placed at the bottom of dozens of test

tubes. She covered each clot with several drops of culture medium, plugged

the tubes with rubber stoppers, and labeled each one as she’d labeled most

cultures they grew: using the first two letters of the patient’s first and last

names.

After writing “HeLa,” for Henrietta and Lacks, in big black letters on the

side of each tube, Mary carried them to the incubator room that Gey had

built just like he’d built everything else in the lab: by hand and mostly from

junkyard scraps, a skill he’d learned from a lifetime of making do with

nothing.

          George Gey was born in 1899 and raised on a Pittsburgh hillside

overlooking a steel mill. Soot from the smokestacks made his parents’ small

white house look like it had been permanently charred by fire and left the

afternoon sky dark. His mother worked the garden and fed her family from

nothing but the food she raised. As a child, George dug a small coal mine in

the hill behind his parents’ house. He’d crawl through the damp tunnel each

morning with a pick, filling buckets for his family and neighbors so they

could keep their houses warm and stoves burning.

Gey paid his way through a biology degree at the University of

Pittsburgh by working as a carpenter and mason, and he could make nearly

anything for cheap or free. During his second year in medical school, he

rigged a microscope with a time-lapse motion picture camera to capture live

cells on film. It was a Frankensteinish mishmash of microscope parts, glass,

and 16-millimeter camera equipment from who knows where, plus metal

scraps, and old motors from Shapiro’s junkyard. He built it in a hole he’d

blasted in the foundation of Hopkins, right below the morgue, its base

entirely underground and surrounded by a thick wall of cork to keep it from

jiggling when street cars passed. At night, a Lithuanian lab assistant slept

next to the camera on a cot, listening to its constant tick, making sure it

stayed stable through the night, waking every hour to refocus it. With that

camera, Gey and his mentor, Warren Lewis, filmed the growth of cells, a

process so slow—like the growth of a flower—the naked eye couldn’t see

it. They played the film at high speed so they could watch cell division on

the screen in one smooth motion, like a story unfolding in a flip book.

It took Gey eight years to get through medical school because he kept

dropping out to work construction and save for another year’s tuition. After

he graduated, he and Margaret built their first lab in a janitor’s quarters at

Hopkins—they spent weeks wiring, painting, plumbing, building counters

and cabinets, paying for much of it with their own money.

Margaret was cautious and stable, the backbone of the lab. George was

an enormous, mischievous, grown-up kid. At work he was dapper, but at

home he lived in flannels, khakis, and suspenders. He moved boulders

around his yard on weekends, ate twelve ears of corn in one sitting, and

kept barrels full of oysters in his garage so he could shuck and eat them

anytime he wanted. He had the body of a retired linebacker, six feet four

inches tall and 215 pounds, his back unnaturally stiff and upright from

having his spine fused so he’d stop throwing it out. When his basement

wine-making factory exploded on a Sunday, sending a flood of sparkling

burgundy through his garage and into the street, Gey just washed the wine

into a storm drain, waving at his neighbors as they walked to church.

Gey was a reckless visionary—spontaneous, quick to start dozens of

projects at once, filling the lab and his basement at home with half-built

machines, partial discoveries, and piles of junkyard scraps only he could

imagine using in a lab. Whenever an idea hit him, he sat wherever he was—

at his desk, kitchen table, a bar, or behind the wheel of his car—gnawing on

his ever-present cigar and scribbling diagrams on napkins or the backs of

torn-off bottle labels. That’s how he came up with the roller-tube culturing

technique, his most important invention.

It involved a large wooden roller drum, a cylinder with holes for special

test tubes called roller tubes. The drum, which Gey called the “whirligig,”

turned like a cement mixer twenty-four hours a day, rotating so slowly it

made only two full turns an hour, sometimes less. For Gey, the rotation was

crucial: he believed that culture medium needed to be in constant motion,

like blood and fluids in the body, which flow around cells, transporting

waste and nutrients.

When Mary finally finished cutting the samples of Henrietta’s cervix and

dropping them in dozens of roller tubes, she walked into the incubator

room, slid the tubes one at a time into the drum, and turned it on. Then she

watched as Gey’s machine began churning slowly.

         Henrietta spent the next two days in the hospital, recovering from her

first radium treatment. Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing on her

stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder, fingers into her vagina

and anus, needles into her veins. They wrote notes in her chart saying, “30

year-old colored female lying quietly in no evident distress,” and “Patient

feels quite well tonight. Morale is good and she is ready to go home.”

Before Henrietta left the hospital, a doctor put her feet in the stirrups

again and removed the radium. He sent her home with instructions to call

the clinic if she had problems, and to come back for a second dose of

radium in two and a half weeks.

Meanwhile, each morning after putting Henrietta’s cells in culture, Mary

started her days with the usual sterilization drill. She peered into the tubes,

laughing to herself and thinking, Nothing’s happening. Big surprise. Then,

two days after Henrietta went home from the hospital, Mary saw what

looked like little rings of fried egg white around the clots at the bottoms of

each tube. The cells were growing, but Mary didn’t think much of it—other

cells had survived for a while in the lab.

But Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing with

mythological intensity. By the next morning they’d doubled. Mary divided

the contents of each tube into two, giving them room to grow, and within

twenty-four hours, they’d doubled again. Soon she was dividing them into

four tubes, then six. Henrietta’s cells grew to fill as much space as Mary

gave them.

Still, Gey wasn’t ready to celebrate. “The cells could die any minute,” he

told Mary.

But they didn’t. They kept growing like nothing anyone had seen,

doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds on top

of hundreds, accumulating by the millions. “Spreading like crabgrass!”

Margaret said. They grew twenty times faster than Henrietta’s normal cells,

which died only a few days after Mary put them in culture. As long as they

had food and warmth, Henrietta’s cancer cells seemed unstoppable.

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.

5

“Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside”

Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory. After

leaving the hospital, she went back to life as usual. She’d never loved the

city, so almost every weekend she took the children back to Clover, where

she worked the tobacco fields and spent hours churning butter on the steps

of the home-house. Though radium often causes relentless nausea,

vomiting, weakness, and anemia, there’s no record of Henrietta having any

side effects, and no one remembers her complaining of feeling sick.

When she wasn’t in Clover, Henrietta spent her time cooking for Day, the

children, and whichever cousins happened to be at her house. She made her

famous rice pudding and slow-cooked greens, chitlins, and the vats of

spaghetti with meatballs she kept going on the stove for whenever cousins

dropped by hungry. When Day wasn’t working the night shift, he and

Henrietta spent evenings at home, playing cards and listening to Bennie

Smith play blues guitar on the radio after the kids went to sleep. On the

nights Day worked, Henrietta and Sadie would wait until the door slammed,

count to one hundred, then jump out of bed, put on their dancing clothes,

and sneak out of the house, careful not to wake the children. Once they got

outside, they’d wiggle their hips and squeal, scampering down the street to

the dance floors at Adams Bar and Twin Pines.

“We used to really swing out heavy,” Sadie told me years later. “We

couldn’t help it. They played music that when you heard it just put your

soul into it. We’d two-step across that floor, jiggle to some blues, then

somebody maybe put a quarter in there and play a slow music song, and

Lord we’d just get out there and shake and turn around and all like that!”

She giggled like a young girl. “It was some beautiful times.” And they were

beautiful women.

Henrietta had walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips. She was a

sturdy woman with a square jaw, thick hips, short, muscular legs, and hands

rough from tobacco fields and kitchens. She kept her nails short so bread

dough wouldn’t stick under them when she kneaded it, but she always

painted them a deep red to match her toenails.

Henrietta spent hours taking care of those nails, touching up chips and

brushing on new coats of polish. She’d sit on her bed, polish in hand, hair

high on her head in curlers, wearing the silky slip she loved so much she

hand-washed it each night. She never wore pants, and rarely left the house

without pulling on a carefully pressed skirt and shirt, sliding her feet into

her tiny, open-toed pumps, and pinning her hair up with a little flip at the

bottom, “just like it was dancin toward her face,” Sadie always said.

“Hennie made life come alive—bein with her was like bein with fun,”

Sadie told me, staring toward the ceiling as she talked. “Hennie just love

peoples. She was a person that could really make the good things come out

of you.”

But there was one person Henrietta couldn’t bring out any good in. Ethel,

the wife of their cousin Galen, had recently come to Turner Station from

Clover, and she hated Henrietta—her cousins always said it was jealousy.

“I guess I can’t say’s I blame her,” Sadie said. “Galen, that husband of

Ethel’s, he was likin Hennie more than he like Ethel. Lord, he followed

Hennie! Everywhere she go, there go Galen—he tried to stay up at Hennie

house all the time when Day gone to work. Lord, Ethel was jealous—made

her hateful to Hennie somethin fierce. Always seemed like she wanted to

hurt Hennie.” So Henrietta and Sadie would giggle and slip out the back to

another club anytime Ethel showed up.

When they weren’t sneaking out, Henrietta, Sadie, and Sadie’s sister

Margaret spent evenings in Henrietta’s living room, playing bingo, yelling,

and laughing over a pot of pennies while Henrietta’s babies—David Jr.,

Deborah, and Joe—played with the bingo chips on the carpet beneath the

table. Lawrence was nearly sixteen, already out having a life of his own.

But one child was missing: Henrietta’s oldest daughter, Elsie.

Before Henrietta got sick, she took Elsie down to Clover every time she

went. Elsie would sit on the stoop of the home-house, staring into the hills

and watching the sunrise as Henrietta worked in the garden. She was

beautiful, delicate and feminine like Henrietta, who dressed her in

homemade outfits with bows and spent hours braiding her long brown curls.

Elsie never talked, she just cawed and chirped like a bird as she waved her

hands inches from her face. She had wide chestnut eyes that everyone

stared into, trying to understand what went on in that pretty head. But she

just stared back, unflinching, her eyes haunted with fear and sadness that

only softened when Henrietta rocked her back and forth.

Sometimes Elsie raced through the fields, chasing wild turkeys or

grabbing the family mule by the tail and thrashing against him until

Lawrence pulled her off. Henrietta’s cousin Peter always said God had that

child from the moment she was born, because that mule never hurt her. It

was so mean it snapped at air like a rabid dog and kicked at the wind, but it

seemed to know Elsie was special. Still, as she grew, she fell, she ran into

walls and doors, burned herself against the woodstove. Henrietta made Day

drive her and Elsie to revival meetings so preachers in tents could lay hands

on Elsie to heal her, but it never worked. In Turner Station, sometimes Elsie

bolted from the house and ran through the street screaming.

By the time Henrietta got pregnant with baby Joe, Elsie was too big for

Henrietta to handle alone, especially with two babies. The doctors said that

sending Elsie away was the best thing. So now she was living about an hour

and a half south of Baltimore, at Crownsville State Hospital—formerly

known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane.

Henrietta’s cousins always said a bit of Henrietta died the day they sent

Elsie away, that losing her was worse than anything else that happened to

her. Now, nearly a year later, Henrietta still had Day or a cousin take her

from Turner Station to Crownsville once a week to sit with Elsie, who’d cry

and cling to her as they played with each other’s hair.

Henrietta had a way with children—they were always good and quiet

when she was around. But whenever she left the house, Lawrence stopped

being good. If the weather was nice, he’d run to the old pier in Turner

Station, where Henrietta had forbidden him to go. The pier had burned

down years earlier, leaving tall wooden pilings that Lawrence and his

friends liked to dive from. One of Sadie’s sons nearly drowned out there

from hitting his head on a rock, and Lawrence was always coming home

with eye infections that everyone blamed on the water being contaminated

by Sparrows Point. Anytime Henrietta got word that Lawrence was at the

pier, she’d storm down there, drag him out of the water, and whip him.

“Ooooh Lord,” Sadie said once, “Hennie went down there with a switch.

Yes Lord. She pitched a boogie like I never seen.” But those were the only

times anyone could ever remember seeing Henrietta mad. “She was tough,”

Sadie said. “Nothin scared Hennie.”

For a month and a half, no one in Turner Station knew Henrietta was

sick. The cancer was easy to keep secret, because she only had to go back to

Hopkins once, for a checkup and a second radium treatment. At that point

the doctors liked what they saw: her cervix was a bit red and inflamed from

the first treatment, but the tumor was shrinking. Regardless, she had to start

X-ray therapy, which meant visiting Hopkins every weekday for a month.

For that, she needed help: Henrietta lived twenty minutes from Hopkins,

and Day worked nights, so he couldn’t take her home after radiation until

late. She wanted to walk to her cousin Margaret’s house a few blocks from

Hopkins and wait there for Day after her treatments. But first she’d have to

tell Margaret and Sadie she was sick.

Henrietta told her cousins about the cancer at a carnival that came to

Turner Station each year. The three of them climbed onto the Ferris wheel

as usual, and she waited till it got so high they could see across Sparrows

Point toward the ocean, till the Ferris wheel stopped and they were just

kicking their legs back and forth, swinging in the crisp spring air.

“You remember when I said I had a knot inside me?” she asked. They

nodded yes. “Well, I got cancer,” Henrietta said. “I been havin treatments

down at John Hopkins.”

“What?!” Sadie said, looking at Henrietta and feeling suddenly dizzy,

like she was about to slide off the Ferris wheel seat.

“Nothin serious wrong with me,” Henrietta said. “I’m fine.”

And at that point it looked like she was right. The tumor had completely

vanished from the radium treatments. As far as the doctors could see,

Henrietta’s cervix was normal again, and they felt no tumors anywhere else.

Her doctors were so sure of her recovery that while she was in the hospital

for her second radium treatment, they’d performed reconstructive surgery

on her nose, fixing the deviated septum that had given her sinus infections

and headaches her whole life. It was a new beginning. The radiation

treatments were just to make sure there were no cancer cells left anywhere

inside her.

But about two weeks after her second radium treatment, Henrietta got her

period—the flow was heavy and it didn’t stop. She was still bleeding weeks

later on March 20, when Day began dropping her off each morning at

Hopkins for her radiation treatments. She’d change into a surgical gown, lie

on an exam table with an enormous machine mounted on the wall above

her, and a doctor would put strips of lead inside her vagina to protect her

colon and lower spine from the radiation. On the first day he tattooed two

black dots with temporary ink on either side of her abdomen, just over her

uterus. They were targets, so he could aim the radiation into the same area

each day, but rotate between spots to avoid burning her skin too much in

one place.

After each treatment, Henrietta would change back into her clothes and

walk the few blocks to Margaret’s house, where she’d wait for Day to pick

her up around midnight. For the first week or so, she and Margaret would

sit on the porch playing cards or bingo, talking about the men, the cousins,

and the children. At that point, the radiation seemed like nothing more than

an inconvenience. Henrietta’s bleeding stopped, and if she felt sick from the

treatments, she never mentioned it.

But things weren’t all good. Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta

asked her doctor when she’d be better so she could have another child.

Until that moment, Henrietta didn’t know that the treatments had left her

infertile.

Warning patients about fertility loss before cancer treatment was standard

practice at Hopkins, and something Howard Jones says he and TeLinde did

with every patient. In fact, a year and a half before Henrietta came to

Hopkins for treatment, in a paper about hysterectomy, TeLinde wrote:

The psychic effect of hysterectomy, especially on the young, is considerable, and it should not be

done without a thorough understanding on the part of the patient [who is] entitled to a simple

explanation of the facts [including] loss of the reproductive function. … It is well to present the

facts to such an individual and give her ample time to digest them. … It is far better for her to make

her own adjustment before the operation than to awaken from the anesthetic and find it a fait

accompli.

In this case, something went wrong: in Henrietta’s medical record, one of

her doctors wrote, “Told she could not have any more children. Says if she

had been told so before, she would not have gone through with treatment.”

But by the time she found out, it was too late.

Then, three weeks after starting X-ray therapy, she began burning inside,

and her urine came out feeling like broken glass. Day said he’d been having

a funny discharge, and that she must have given him that sickness she kept

going to Hopkins to treat.

“I would rather imagine that it is the other way around,” Jones wrote in

Henrietta’s chart after examining her. “But at any rate, this patient now has

… acute Gonorrhea superimposed on radiation reaction.”

Soon, however, Day’s running around was the least of Henrietta’s

worries. That short walk to Margaret’s started feeling longer and longer, and

all Henrietta wanted to do when she got there was sleep. One day she

almost collapsed a few blocks from Hopkins, and it took her nearly an hour

to make the walk. After that, she started taking cabs.

One afternoon, as Henrietta lay on the couch, she lifted her shirt to show

Margaret and Sadie what the treatments had done to her. Sadie gasped: The

skin from Henrietta’s breasts to her pelvis was charred a deep black from

the radiation. The rest of her body was its natural shade—more the color of

fawn than coal.

“Hennie,” she whispered, “they burnt you black as tar.”

Henrietta just nodded and said, “Lord, it just feels like that blackness be

spreadin all inside me.”

6

“Lady’s on the Phone”

Eleven years after learning about Henrietta in Defler’s classroom—on

my twenty-seventh birthday—I stumbled on a collection of scientific papers

from something called “The HeLa Cancer Control Symposium” at

Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, one of the oldest historically

black colleges in the country. The symposium had been organized in

Henrietta’s honor by Roland Pattillo, a professor of gynecology at

Morehouse who’d been one of George Gey’s only African-American

students.

When I called Roland Pattillo to see what he knew about Henrietta, I told

him I was writing a book about her.

“Oh you are?” he said, laughing a slow, rumbling laugh that said, Oh

child, you have no idea what you’re getting into. “Henrietta’s family won’t

talk to you. They’ve had a terrible time with the HeLa cells.”

“You know her family?” I said. “Can you put me in touch with them?

“I do have the ability to put you in touch with them, but you need to

answer a few questions, starting with ‘Why should I?’ “

For the next hour, Pattillo grilled me about my intentions. As I told him

about the history of my HeLa obsession, he grumbled and sighed, letting

out occasional mmmmmms and wellllllls.

Eventually he said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you are white.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Yes,” he said. “What do you know about African-Americans and

science?”

I told him about the Tuskegee syphilis study like I was giving an oral

report in history class: It started in the thirties, when U.S. Public Health

Service researchers at the Tuskegee Institute decided to study how syphilis

killed, from infection to death. They recruited hundreds of African-

American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and

preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them. The

research subjects didn’t ask questions. They were poor and uneducated, and

the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides

into town on clinic days, plus fifty-dollar burial stipends for their families

when the men died. The researchers chose black subjects because they, like

many whites at the time, believed black people were “a notoriously

syphilis-soaked race.”

The public didn’t learn about the Tuskegee study until the seventies, after

hundreds of men enrolled in it had already died. The news spread like pox

through black communities: doctors were doing research on black people,

lying to them, and watching them die. Rumors started circulating that the

doctors had actually injected the men with syphilis in order to study them.

“What else?” Pattillo grumbled.

I told him I’d heard about so-called Mississippi Appendectomies,

unnecessary hysterectomies performed on poor black women to stop them

from reproducing, and to give young doctors a chance to practice the

procedure. I’d also read about the lack of funding for research into sickle-

cell anemia, a disease that affected blacks almost exclusively.

“It’s interesting that you called when you did,” he said. “I’m organizing

the next HeLa conference, and when the phone rang, I’d just sat down at

my desk and typed the words Henrietta Lacks on my screen.” We both

laughed. It must be a sign, we said; perhaps Henrietta wanted us to talk.

“Deborah is Henrietta’s baby girl,” he said, very matter-of-fact. “The

family calls her Dale. She’s almost fifty now, still living in Baltimore, with

grandchildren of her own. Henrietta’s husband is still alive. He’s around

eighty-four—still goes to the clinics at Johns Hopkins.” He dropped this

like a tease.

“Did you know Henrietta had an epileptic daughter?” Pattillo asked.

“No.”

“She died at fifteen, soon after Henrietta’s death. Deborah is the only

daughter left,” he said. “She came near a stroke recently because of the

agony she’s gone through regarding inquiries into her mother’s death and

those cells. I won’t be a part of anyone doing that to her again.”

I started to speak, but he interrupted me.

“I need to go see patients now,” he said abruptly. “I’m not ready to put

you in touch with the family yet. But I think you’re honest about your

intentions. We will talk again after I think. Call back tomorrow.”

After three straight days of grilling, Pattillo finally decided to give me

Deborah’s phone number. But first, he said, there were a few things I

needed to know. He lowered his voice and rattled off a list of dos and don’ts

for dealing with Deborah Lacks: Don’t be aggressive. Do be honest. Don’t

be clinical, don’t try to force her into anything, don’t talk down to her, she

hates that. Do be compassionate, don’t forget that she’s been through a lot

with these cells, do have patience. “You’ll need that more than anything,”

he told me.

         Moments after hanging up the phone with Pattillo, his list of dos and

don’ts in my hand, I dialed Deborah’s number, then paced as her phone

rang. When she whispered hello, I blurted out, “I’m so excited you

answered because I’ve been wanting to talk to you for years! I’m writing a

book about your mother!”

“Huh?” she said.

I didn’t know that Deborah was nearly deaf—she relied heavily on lip

reading and couldn’t follow anyone who talked fast.

I took a deep breath and tried again, forcing myself to sound out every

syllable.

“Hi, my name is Rebecca.”

“How ya doin?” she said, weary but warm.

“I’m very excited to talk to you.”

“Mmmhmm,” she said, like she’d heard that line many times before.

I told her again that I wanted to write a book about her mother and said I

was surprised no one seemed to know anything about her, even though her

cells were so important for science.

Deborah sat silent for a long moment, then screamed, “That’s right!” She

giggled and started talking like we’d known each other for years.

“Everything always just about the cells and don’t even worry about her

name and was HeLa even a person. So hallelujah! I think a book would be

great!”

This was not what I’d expected.

I was afraid to say anything that might make her stop talking, so I simply

said, “Great.” And that was the last word I spoke until the end of our call. I

didn’t ask a single question, just took notes as fast as I could.

Deborah crammed a lifetime of information into a manic and confusing

forty-five minutes that jumped without warning, and in no particular order,

from the 1920s to the 1990s, from stories of her father to her grandfather,

cousins, mother, and total strangers.

“Nobody never said nothing,” she told me. “I mean, where my mother

clothes at? Where my mother shoes? I knew about her watch and ring, but it

was stolen. That was after my brother killed that boy.” She talked about a

man she didn’t name, saying, “I didn’t think it was fit for him to steal my

mother medical record and autopsy papers. He was in prison for fifteen

years in Alabama. Now he sayin John Hopkin killed my mother and them

white doctors experimented on her cause she was black.

“My nerve broke down,” she said. “I just couldn’t take it. My speech is

coming back a little better—I almost had two strokes in two weeks cause of

all that stuff with my mother cells.”

Then suddenly she was talking about her family history, saying

something about “the Hospital for Crazy Negroes” and her mother’s great-

grandfather having been a slave owner. “We all mixed. And one of my

mother sisters converted to Puerto Rican.”

Again and again, she said, “I can’t take it anymore,” and “Who are we

supposed to trust now?” More than anything, she told me, she wanted to

learn about her mother and what her cells had done for science. She said

people had been promising her information for decades and never

delivering it. “I’m sick of it,” she said. “You know what I really want? I

want to know, what did my mother smell like? For all my life I just don’t

know anything, not even the little common little things, like what color she

like? Did she like to dance? Did she breastfeed me? Lord, I’d like to know

that. But nobody ever say nothing.”

She laughed and said, “I tell you one thing—the story’s not over yet. You

got your work cut out for you, girl. This thing’s crazy enough for three

books!”

Then someone walked through her front door and Deborah yelled straight

into the receiver, “Good morning! I got mail?” She sounded panicked by

the idea of it. “Oh my God! Oh no! Mail?!”

“Okay, Miss Rebecca,” she said. “I got to go. You call me Monday,

promise? Okay, dear. God bless. Bye-bye.”

She hung up and I sat stunned, receiver crooked in my neck, frantically

scribbling notes I didn’t understand, like brother = murder, mail = bad, man

stole Henrietta’s medical records, and Hospital for Negro Insane?

When I called Deborah back as promised, she sounded like a different

person. Her voice was monotone, depressed, and slurred, like she was

heavily sedated.

“No interviews,” she mumbled almost incoherently. “You got to go away.

My brothers say I should write my own book. But I ain’t a writer. I’m

sorry.”

I tried to speak, but she cut me off. “I can’t talk to you no more. Only

thing to do is convince the men.” She gave me three phone numbers: her

father; her oldest brother, Lawrence; and her brother David Jr.’s pager.

“Everybody call him Sonny,” she told me, then hung up. I wouldn’t hear her

voice again for nearly a year.

          I started calling Deborah, her brothers, and her father daily, but they

didn’t answer. Finally, after several days of leaving messages, someone

answered at Day’s house: a young boy who didn’t say hello, just breathed

into the receiver, hip-hop thumping in the background.

When I asked for David, the boy said, “Yeah,” and threw the phone

down.

“Go get Pop!” he yelled, followed by a long pause. “It’s important. Get

Pop!”

No response.

“Lady’s on the phone,” he yelled, “come on …”

The first boy breathed into the receiver again as a second boy picked up

an extension and said hello.

“Hi,” I said. “Can I talk to David?”

“Who this?” he asked.

“Rebecca,” I said.

He moved the phone away from his mouth and yelled, “Get Pop, lady’s

on the phone about his wife cells.”

Years later I’d understand how a young boy could know why I was

calling just from the sound of my voice: the only time white people called

Day was when they wanted something having to do with HeLa cells. But at

the time I was confused—I figured I must have heard wrong.

A woman picked up a receiver saying, “Hello, may I help you?” She was

sharp, curt, like I do not have time for this.

I told her I was hoping to talk to David, and she asked who was calling.

Rebecca, I said, afraid she’d hang up if I said anything more.

“Just a moment.” She sighed and lowered the phone. “Go take this to

Day,” she told a child. “Tell him he got a long-distance call, somebody

named Rebecca calling about his wife cells.”

The child grabbed the phone, pressed it to his ear, and ran for Day. Then

there was a long silence.

“Pop, get up,” the kid whispered. “There’s somebody about your wife.”

“Whu …”

“Get up, there’s somebody about your wife cells.”

“Whu? Where?”

“Wife cells, on the phone … get up.”

“Where her cells?”

“Here,” the boy said, handing Day the phone.

“Yeah?”

“Hi, is this David Lacks?”

“Yeah.”

I told him my name and started to explain why I was calling, but before I

could say much, he let out a deep sigh.

“Whanowthis,” he mumbled in a deep Southern accent, his words slurred

like he’d had a stroke. “You got my wife cells?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking he was asking if I was calling about his wife’s

cells.

“Yeah?” he said, suddenly bright, alert. “You got my wife cells? She

know you talking?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking he was asking if Deborah knew I was calling.

“Well, so let my old lady cells talk to you and leave me alone,” he

snapped. “I had enough ’a you people.” Then he hung up.

7

The Death and Life of Cell Culture

On April 10, 1951, three weeks after Henrietta started radiation therapy,

George Gey appeared on WAAM television in Baltimore for a special show

devoted to his work. With dramatic music in the background, the announcer

said, “Tonight we will learn why scientists believe that cancer can be

conquered.”

The camera flashed to Gey, sitting at a desk in front of a wall covered

with pictures of cells. His face was long and handsome, with a pointed

nose, black plastic bifocals, and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. He sat stiff

and straight-backed, tweed suit perfectly pressed, white hand kerchief in his

breast pocket, hair slicked. His eyes darted off screen, then back to the

camera as he drummed his fingers on the desk, his face expressionless.

“The normal cells which make up our bodies are tiny objects, five

thousand of which would fit on the head of a pin,” he said, his voice a bit

too loud and stilted. “How the normal cells become cancerous is still a

mystery.”

He gave viewers a basic overview of cell structure and cancer using

diagrams and a long wooden pointer. He showed films of cells moving

across the screen, their edges inching further and further into the empty

space around them. And he zoomed in on one cancer cell, its edges round

and smooth until it began to quiver and shake violently, exploding into five

cancer cells.

At one point he said, “Now let me show you a bottle in which we have

grown massive quantities of cancer cells.” He picked up a clear glass pint-

sized bottle, most likely full of Henrietta’s cells, and rocked it in his hands

as he explained that his lab was using those cells to find ways to stop

cancer. He said, “It is quite possible that from fundamental studies such as

these that we will be able to learn a way by which cancer cells can be

damaged or completely wiped out.”

To help make that happen, Gey began sending Henrietta’s cells to any

scientist who might use them for cancer research. Shipping live cells in the

mail—a common practice today—wasn’t done at the time. Instead, Gey

sent them via plane in tubes with a few drops of culture medium, just

enough to keep them alive for a short time. Sometimes pilots or stewards

tucked the tubes in their shirt pockets, to keep the cells at body temperature

as if they were still in an incubator. Other times, when the cells had to ride

in the cargo hold, Gey tucked them into holes carved in blocks of ice to

keep them from overheating, then packed the ice in cardboard boxes filled

with sawdust. When shipments were ready to go, Gey would warn

recipients that the cells were about to “metastasize” to their cities, so they

could stand ready to fetch the shipment and rush back to their labs. If all

went well, the cells survived. If not, Gey packaged up another batch and

tried again.

He sent shipments of HeLa cells to researchers in Texas, India, New

York, Amsterdam, and many places between. Those researchers gave them

to more researchers, who gave them to more still. Henrietta’s cells rode into

the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules. As Gey flew from

one lab to another, demonstrating his culturing techniques and helping to set

up new laboratories, he always flew with tubes of Henrietta’s cells in his

breast pocket. And when scientists visited Gey’s lab to learn his techniques,

he usually sent them home with a vial or two of HeLa. In letters, Gey and

some of his colleagues began referring to the cells as his “precious babies.”

The reason Henrietta’s cells were so precious was because they allowed

scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a

living human. They cut HeLa cells apart and exposed them to endless

toxins, radiation, and infections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping

to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones.

They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa

cells into immune-compromised rats, which developed malignant tumors

much like Henrietta’s. If the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter—

scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start

over again.

Despite the spread of HeLa and the flurry of new research that followed,

there were no news stories about the birth of the amazing HeLa cell line and

how it might help stop cancer. In Gey’s one appearance on television, he

didn’t mention Henrietta or her cells by name, so the general public knew

nothing of HeLa. But even if they had known, they probably wouldn’t have

paid it much mind. For decades the press had been reporting that cell

culture was going to save the world from disease and make man immortal,

but by 1951 the general public had stopped buying it. Cell culture had

become less a medical miracle than something out of a scary science-fiction

movie.

     It all started on January 17, 1912, when Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon

at the Rockefeller Institute, grew his “immortal chicken heart.”

Scientists had been trying to grow living cells since before the turn of the

century, but their samples had always died. As a result, many researchers

believed it was impossible to keep tissues alive outside the body. But Carrel

set out to prove them wrong. At age thirty-nine he’d already invented the

first technique for suturing blood vessels together, and had used it to

perform the first coronary bypass and develop methods for transplanting

organs. He hoped someday to grow whole organs in the laboratory, filling

massive vaults with lungs, livers, kidneys, and tissues he could ship through

the mail for transplantation. As a first step, he’d tried to grow a sliver of

chicken-heart tissue in culture, and to everyone’s amazement, it worked.

Those heart cells kept beating as if they were still in the chicken’s body.

Months later, Carrel won a Nobel Prize for his blood-vessel-suturing

technique and his contributions to organ transplantation, and he became an

instant celebrity. The prize had nothing to do with the chicken heart, but

articles about his award conflated the immortal chicken-heart cells with his

transplantation work, and suddenly it sounded like he’d found the fountain

of youth. Headlines around the world read:

CARREL’S NEW MIRACLE POINTS WAY TO AVERT OLD AGE! …

SCIENTISTS GROW IMMORTAL CHICKEN HEART …

DEATH PERHAPS NOT INEVITABLE

Scientists said Carrel’s chicken-heart cells were one of the most

important advances of the century, and that cell culture would uncover the

secrets behind everything from eating and sex to “the music of Bach, the

poems of Milton, [and] the genius of Michelangelo.” Carrel was a scientific

messiah. Magazines called his culture medium “an elixir of youth” and

claimed that bathing in it might make a person live forever.

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.

Carrel’s eccentricities fed into the media frenzy about his work. He was a

stout, fast-talking Frenchman with mismatched eyes—one brown, the other

blue—who rarely went out without his surgeon’s cap. He wrongly believed

that light could kill cell cultures, so his laboratory looked like the photo

negative of a Ku Klux Klan rally, where technicians worked in long black

robes, heads covered in black hoods with small slits cut for their eyes. They

sat on black stools at black tables in a shadowless room with floors,

ceilings, and walls painted black. The only illumination came from a small,

dust-covered skylight.

Carrel was a mystic who believed in telepathy and clairvoyance, and

thought it was possible for humans to live several centuries through the use

of suspended animation. Eventually he turned his apartment into a chapel,

began giving lectures on medical miracles, and told reporters he dreamed of

moving to South America and becoming a dictator. Other researchers

distanced themselves, criticizing him for being unscientific, but much of

white America embraced his ideas and saw him as a spiritual adviser and a

genius.

Reader’s Digest ran articles by Carrel advising women that a “husband

should not be induced by an oversexed wife to perform a sexual act,” since

sex drained the mind. In his best-selling book, Man, the Unknown, he

proposed fixing what he believed was “an error” in the U.S. Constitution

that promised equality for all people. “The feebleminded and the man of

genius should not be equal before the law,” he wrote. “The stupid, the

unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have

no right to a higher education.”

His book sold more than two million copies and was translated into

twenty languages. Thousands showed up for Carrel’s talks, sometimes

requiring police in riot gear to keep order as buildings filled to capacity and

fans had to be turned away.

Through all of this, the press and public remained obsessed with Carrel’s

immortal chicken heart. Each year on New Year’s Day, the New York World

Telegram called Carrel to check on the cells; and every January 17 for

decades, when Carrel and his assistants lined up in their black suits to sing

“Happy Birthday” to the cells, some newspaper or magazine retold the

same story again and again:

CHICKEN HEART CELLS ALIVE TEN YEARS … FOURTEEN YEARS … TWENTY …

Each time, the stories promised the cells would change the face of

medicine, but they never did. Meanwhile, Carrel’s claims about the cells

grew more fantastical.

At one point he said the cells “would reach a volume greater than that of

the solar system.” The Literary Digest reported that the cells could have

already “covered the earth,” and a British tabloid said they could “form a

rooster … big enough today to cross the Atlantic in a single stride, [a bird]

so monstrous that when perched on this mundane sphere, the world, it

would look like a weathercock.” A string of best-selling books warned of

the dangers of tissue culture: one predicted that 70 percent of babies would

soon be grown in culture; another imagined tissue culture producing giant

“Negroes” and two-headed toads.

But the fear of tissue culture truly found its way into American living

rooms in an episode of Lights Out, a 1930s radio horror show that told the

story of a fictional Dr. Alberts who’d created an immortal chicken heart in

his lab. It grew out of control, filling the city streets like The Blob,

consuming everyone and everything in its path. In only two weeks it

destroyed the entire country.

The real chicken-heart cells didn’t fare so well. In fact, it turned out that

the original cells had probably never survived long at all. Years after Carrel

died awaiting trial for collaborating with the Nazis, scientist Leonard

Hayflick grew suspicious of the chicken heart. No one had ever been able to

replicate Carrel’s work, and the cells seemed to defy a basic rule of biology:

that normal cells can only divide a finite number of times before dying.

Hayflick investigated them and concluded that the original chicken-heart

cells had actually died soon after Carrel put them in culture, and that,

intentionally or not, Carrel had been putting new cells in the culture dishes

each time he “fed” them using an “embryo juice” he made from ground

tissues. At least one of Carrel’s former lab assistants verified Hayflick’s

suspicion. But no one could test the theory, because two years after Carrel’s

death, his assistant unceremoniously threw the famous chicken-heart cells

in the trash.

Either way, by 1951, when Henrietta Lacks’s cells began growing in the

Gey lab—just five years after the widely publicized “death” of Carrel’s

chicken heart—the public image of immortal cells was tarnished. 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.

8

“A Miserable Specimen”

In early June, Henrietta told her doctors several times that she thought

the cancer was spreading, that she could feel it moving through her, but they

found nothing wrong with her. “The patient states that she feels fairly well,”

one doctor wrote in her chart, “however she continues to complain of some

vague lower abdominal discomfort. … No evidence of recurrence. Return

in one month.”

There’s no indication that Henrietta questioned him; like most patients in

the 1950s, she deferred to anything her doctors said. This was a time when

“benevolent deception” was a common practice—doctors often withheld

even the most fundamental information from their patients, sometimes not

giving them any diagnosis at all. They believed it was best not to confuse or

upset patients with frightening terms they might not understand, like

cancer. Doctors knew best, and most patients didn’t question that.

Especially black patients in public wards. This was 1951 in Baltimore,

segregation was law, and it was understood that black people didn’t

question white people’s professional judgment. Many black patients were

just glad to be getting treatment, since discrimination in hospitals was

widespread.

There’s no way of knowing whether or how Henrietta’s treatment would

have differed if she’d been white. According to Howard Jones, Henrietta

got the same care any white patient would have; the biopsy, the radium

treatment, and radiation were all standard for the day. But several studies

have shown that black patients were treated and hospitalized at later stages

of their illnesses than white patients. And once hospitalized, they got fewer

pain medications, and had higher mortality rates.

All we can know for sure are the facts of Henrietta’s medical records: a

few weeks after the doctor told her she was fine, she went back to Hopkins

saying that the “discomfort” she’d complained about last time was now an

“ache” in both sides. But the doctor’s entry was identical to the one weeks

earlier: “No evidence of recurrence. Return in one month.”

Two and a half weeks later, Henrietta’s abdomen hurt, and she could

barely urinate. The pain made it hard to walk. She went back to Hopkins,

where a doctor passed a catheter to empty her bladder, then sent her home.

Three days later, when she returned complaining once again of pain, a

doctor pressed on her abdomen and felt a “stony hard” mass. An X-ray

showed that it was attached to her pelvic wall, nearly blocking her urethra.

The doctor on duty called for Jones and several others who’d treated

Henrietta; they all examined her and looked at the X-ray. “Inoperable,” they

said. Only weeks after a previous entry declared her healthy, one of the

doctors wrote, “The patient looks chronically ill. She is obviously in pain.”

He sent her home to bed.

Sadie would later describe Henrietta’s decline like this: “Hennie didn’t

fade away, you know, her looks, her body, it didn’t just fade. Like some

peoples be sick in the bed with cancer and they look so bad. But she didn’t.

The only thing you could tell was in her eyes. Her eyes were tellin you that

she wasn’t gonna be alive no more.”

     Until that point, no one except Sadie, Margaret, and Day knew Henrietta

was sick. Then, suddenly, everyone knew. When Day and the cousins

walked home from Sparrows Point after each shift, they could hear

Henrietta from a block away, wailing for the Lord to help her. When Day

drove her back to Hopkins for X-rays the following week, stone-hard

tumors filled the inside of her abdomen: one on her uterus, one on each

kidney and on her urethra. Just a month after a note in her medical record

said she was fine, another doctor wrote, “In view of the rapid extension of

the disease process the outlook is quite poor.” The only option, he said, was

“further irradiation in the hopes that we may at least relieve her pain.”

Henrietta couldn’t walk from the house to the car, but either Day or one

of the cousins managed to get her to Hopkins every day for radiation. They

didn’t realize she was dying. They thought the doctors were still trying to

cure her.

Each day, Henrietta’s doctors increased her dose of radiation, hoping it

would shrink the tumors and ease the pain until her death. Each day the skin

on her abdomen burned blacker and blacker, and the pain grew worse.

On August 8, just one week after her thirty-first birthday, Henrietta

arrived at Hopkins for her treatment, but this time she said she wanted to

stay. Her doctor wrote, “Patient has been complaining bitterly of pain and

she seems genuinely miserable. She has to come in from a considerable

distance and it is felt that she deserves to be in the hospital where she can

be better cared for.”

After Henrietta checked into the hospital, a nurse drew blood and labeled

the vial COLORED, then stored it in case Henrietta needed transfusions later. A

doctor put Henrietta’s feet in stirrups once again, to take a few more cells

from her cervix at the request of George Gey, who wanted to see if a second

batch would grow like the first. But Henrietta’s body had become so

contaminated with toxins normally flushed from the system in urine, her

cells died immediately in culture.

During Henrietta’s first few days in the hospital, the children came with

Day to visit her, but when they left, she cried and moaned for hours. Soon

the nurses told Day he couldn’t bring the children anymore, because it upset

Henrietta too much. After that, Day would park the Buick behind Hopkins

at the same time each day and sit on a little patch of grass on Wolfe Street

with the children, right under Henrietta’s window. She’d pull herself out of

bed, press her hands and face to the glass, and watch her children play on

the lawn. But within days, Henrietta couldn’t get herself to the window

anymore.

Her doctors tried in vain to ease her suffering. “Demerol does not seem to

touch the pain,” one wrote, so he tried morphine. “This doesn’t help too

much either.” He gave her Dromoran. “This stuff works,” he wrote. But not

for long. Eventually one of her doctors tried injecting pure alcohol straight

into her spine. “Alcohol injections ended in failure,” he wrote.

New tumors seemed to appear daily—on her lymph nodes, hip bones,

labia—and she spent most days with a fever up to 105. Her doctors stopped

the radiation treatment and seemed as defeated by the cancer as she was.

“Henrietta is still a miserable specimen,” they wrote. “She groans.” “She is

constantly nauseated and claims she vomits everything she eats.” “Patient

acutely upset… very anxious.” “As far as I can see we are doing all that can

be done.”

There is no record that George Gey ever visited Henrietta in the hospital,

or said anything to her about her cells. And everyone I talked to who might

know said that Gey and Henrietta never met. Everyone, that is, except

Laure Aurelian, a microbiologist who was Gey’s colleague at Hopkins.

“I’ll never forget it,” Aurelian said. “George told me he leaned over

Henrietta’s bed and said, ‘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.”

9

Turner Station

A few days after my first conversation with Day, I drove from Pittsburgh

to Baltimore to meet his son, David “Sonny” Lacks Jr. He’d finally called

me back and agreed to meet, saying he’d gotten worn out from my number

showing up on his pager. I didn’t know it then, but he’d made five panicked

phone calls to Pattillo, asking questions about me before calling.

The plan was that I’d page Sonny when I got to Baltimore, then he’d pick

me up and take me to his brother Lawrence’s house to meet their father and

—if I was lucky—Deborah. So I checked in to the downtown Holiday Inn,

sat on the bed, phone in my lap, and dialed Sonny’s pager. No reply.

I stared through my hotel room window at a tall, Gothic-looking brick

tower across the street with a huge clock at the top. It was a weatherbeaten

silver, with big letters spelling B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R in a circle

around its face. I watched the hands move slowly past the letters, paged

Sonny every few minutes, and waited for the phone to ring.

Eventually I grabbed the fat Baltimore phone book, opened to the Ls, and

ran my finger down a long line of names: Annette Lacks … Charles Lacks

… I figured I’d call every Lacks in the book asking if they knew Henrietta.

But I didn’t have a cell phone and didn’t want to tie up the line, so I paged

Sonny again, then lay back on the bed, phone and White Pages still in my

lap. I started rereading a yellowed copy of a 1976 Rolling Stone article

about the Lackses by a writer named Michael Rogers—the first reporter

ever to contact Henrietta’s family. I’d read it many times, but wanted every

word fresh in my mind.

Halfway through the article, Rogers wrote, “I am sitting on the seventh

floor of the downtown Baltimore Holiday Inn. Through the thermopane

picture window is a huge public clock in which the numerals have been

replaced by the characters B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R; in my lap is a

telephone, and the Baltimore White Pages.”

I bolted upright, suddenly feeling like I’d been sucked into a Twilight

Zone episode. More than two decades earlier—when I was just three years

old—Rogers had gone through those same White Pages. “Half way through

the ‘Lacks’ listings it becomes clear that just about everybody had known

Henrietta,” he wrote. So I opened the phone book again and started dialing,

hoping I’d find one of those people who knew her. But they didn’t answer

their phones, they hung up on me, or they said they’d never heard of

Henrietta. I dug out an old newspaper article where I’d seen Henrietta’s

Turner Station address: 713 New Pittsburgh Avenue. I looked at four maps

before finding one where Turner Station wasn’t covered by ads or blow-up

grids of other neighborhoods.

It turned out Turner Station wasn’t just hidden on the map. To get there, I

had to drive past the cement wall and fence that blocked it from the

interstate, across a set of tracks, past churches in old storefronts, rows of

boarded-up houses, and a buzzing electrical generator as big as a football

field. Finally I saw a dark wooden sign saying WELCOME TO TURNERS STATION in the

parking lot of a fire-scorched bar with pink tasseled curtains.

To this day no one’s entirely sure what the town is actually called, or how

to spell it. Sometimes it’s plural (Turners Station), other times possessive

(Turner’s Station), but most often it’s singular (Turner Station). It was

originally deeded as “Good Luck,” but never quite lived up to the name.

When Henrietta arrived there in the forties, the town was booming. But

the end of World War II brought cutbacks at Sparrows Point. Baltimore Gas

and Electric demolished three hundred homes to make room for a new

power plant, leaving more than 1,300 homeless, most of them black. More

and more land was zoned for industrial use, which meant more houses torn

down. People fled for East Baltimore or back to the country, and the

population of Turner Station dropped by half before the end of the fifties.

By the time I got there, it was about one thousand and falling steadily,

because there were few jobs.

In Henrietta’s day, Turner Station was a town where you never locked

your doors. Now there was a housing project surrounded by a 13,000-foot-

long brick-and-cement security wall in the field where Henrietta’s children

once played. Stores, nightclubs, cafés, and schools had closed, and drug

dealers, gangs, and violence were on the rise. But Turner Station still had

more than ten churches.

The newspaper article where I’d gotten Henrietta’s address quoted a local

woman, Courtney Speed, who owned a grocery store and had created a

foundation devoted to building a Henrietta Lacks museum. But when I got

to the lot where Speed’s Grocery was supposed to be, I found a gray, rust-

stained mobile home, its broken windows covered with wire. The sign out

front had a single red rose painted on it, and the words REVIVING THE SPIRIT TO

RECAPTURE THE VISION. PROVERBS 29:18. Six men gathered on the front steps,

laughing. The oldest, in his thirties, wore red slacks, red suspenders, a black

shirt, and a driving cap. Another wore an oversized red and white ski jacket.

They were surrounded by younger men of various shades of brown in

sagging pants. The two men in red stopped talking, watched me drive by

slowly, then kept on laughing.

Turner Station is less than a mile across in any direction, its horizon lined

with skyscraper-sized shipping cranes and smokestacks billowing thick

clouds from Sparrows Point. As I drove in circles looking for Speed’s

Grocery, children stopped playing in the streets to stare and wave. They ran

between matching red-brick houses and past women hanging fresh laundry,

following me as their mothers smiled and waved too.

I drove by the trailer with the men out front so many times, they started

waving at me with each pass. I did the same with Henrietta’s old house. It

was a unit in a brown brick building divided into four homes, with a chain-

link fence, several feet of grass out front, and three steps leading up to a

small cement stoop. A child watched me from behind Henrietta’s old screen

door, waving and playing with a stick.

I waved back at everyone and feigned surprise each time the group of

children following me appeared on various streets grinning, but I didn’t stop

and ask for help. I was too nervous. The people of Turner Station just

watched me, smiling and shaking their heads like, What’s that young white

girl doing driving around in circles?

Finally I saw the New Shiloh Baptist Church, which the newspaper

article had mentioned as the site of community meetings about the Henrietta

Lacks museum. But it was closed. As I pressed my face to the tall glass out

front, a black town car pulled up, and a smooth, handsome man in his

forties jumped out, with gold-tinted glasses, black suit, black beret, and the

keys to the church. He slid his glasses to the end of his nose and looked me

over, asking if I needed help.

I told him why I was there.

“Never heard of Henrietta Lacks,” he said.

“Not many people have,” I said, and told him I’d read that someone had

hung a plaque in Henrietta’s honor at Speed’s Grocery.

“Oh! Speed’s?” he said, suddenly all smiles and a hand on my shoulder.

“I can take you to Speed’s!” He told me to get in my car and follow him.

Everyone on the street waved and yelled as we passed: “Hi Reverend

Jackson!” “How you doin, Reverend?” He nodded and yelled right back,

“How you doin!” “God bless you!” Just two blocks away, we stopped in

front of that gray trailer with the men out front and the Reverend jammed

his car into park, waving for me to get out. The cluster of men on the steps

smiled, grabbed the pastor’s hand, and gave it two-handed shakes, saying,

“Hey Reverend, you brought a friend?”

“Yes I did,” he told them. “She’s here to talk to Ms. Speed.”

The one in the red pants and red suspenders—who turned out to be

Speed’s oldest son, Keith—said she was out, and who knew when she’d be

back, so I may as well grab a seat on the porch with the boys and wait. As I

sat down, the man in the red and white ski jacket smiled a big bright smile,

then told me he was her son Mike. Then there were her sons Cyrus and Joe

and Tyrone. Every man on that porch was her son; so was nearly every man

that walked in the store. Pretty soon, I’d counted fifteen sons and said,

“Wait a minute. She’s got fifteen kids?”

“Oh!” Mike yelled. “You don’t know Mama Speed, do you?! Oooh, I

look up to Mama—she tough! She keep Turners Station in line, boy! She

fears no man!”

The men on the porch all nodded and said, “That’s right.”

“Don’t you get scared if anybody come in here try to attack Mama when

we’re not around,” Mike said, “cause she’ll scare them to death!” Speed’s

sons let out a chorus of amens as Mike told a story, saying, “This man came

in the store once yellin, ‘I’m gonna come cross that counter and get you.’ I

was hidin behind Mama I was so scared! And do you know what Mama

did? She rocked her head and raised up them arms and said, ‘Come on!

Come onnnnnn! If you think you crazy, you just try it!’ “

Mike slapped me on the back and all the sons laughed.

At that moment, Courtney Speed appeared at the bottom of the steps, her

long black hair piled loose on her head, strands hanging in wisps around her

face, which was thin, beautiful, and entirely ageless. Her eyes were soft

brown with a perfect halo of sea blue around the edges. She was delicate,

not a hard edge on her. She hugged a grocery bag to her chest and

whispered, “But did that man jump across that counter at me?”

Mike screamed and laughed so hard he couldn’t answer.

She looked at him, calm and smiling. “I said, Did that man jump?”

“No, he did not!” Mike said, grinning. “That man didn’t do nuthin but

run! That’s why Mama got no gun in this store. She don’t need one!”

“I don’t live by the gun,” she said, then turned to me and smiled. “How

you doin?” She walked up the stairs into the store, and we all followed.

“Mama,” Keith said, “Pastor brought this woman in here. She’s Miss

Rebecca and she’s here to talk to you.”

Courtney Speed smiled a beautiful, almost bashful smile, her eyes bright

and motherly. “God bless you, sweetie,” she said.

Inside, flattened cardboard boxes covered most of the floor, which was

worn from years of foot traffic. Shelves lined each wall, some bare, others

stacked with Wonder Bread, rice, toilet paper, and pigs’ feet. On one, Speed

had piled hundreds of editions of the Baltimore Sun dating back to the

1970s, when her husband died. She said she’d given up replacing the

windows each time someone broke in because they’d just do it again. She’d

hung handwritten signs on every wall of the store: one for “Sam the Man

Snowballs,” others for sports clubs, church groups, and free GED and adult

literacy classes. She had dozens of “spiritual sons,” who she treated no

different than her six biological sons. And when any child came in to buy

chips, candy, or soda, Speed made them calculate how much change she

owed them—they got a free Hershey’s kiss for each correct answer.

Speed started straightening the items on her shelves so each label faced

out, then yelled over her shoulder at me, “How did you find your way

here?”

I told her about the four maps, and she threw a box of lard onto the shelf.

“Now we got the four-map syndrome,” she said. “They keep trying to push

us off the earth, but God won’t let them. Praise the Lord, he brings us the

people we really need to talk to.”

She wiped her hands on her white shirt. “Now that He brought you here,

what can I do for you?”

“I’m hoping to learn about Henrietta Lacks,” I said.

Courtney gasped, her face suddenly ashen. She took several steps back

and hissed, “You know Mr. Cofield? Did he send you?”

I was confused. I told her I’d never heard of Cofield, and no one had sent

me.

“How did you know about me?” she snapped, backing away further.

I pulled the old crumpled newspaper article from my purse and handed it

to her.

“Have you talked to the family?” she asked.

“I’m trying,” I said. “I talked to Deborah once, and I was supposed to

meet Sonny today, but he didn’t show up.”

She nodded, like I knew it. “I can’t tell you anything until you got the

support of the family. I can’t risk that.”

“What about the plaque you got for the museum?” I asked. “Can I see

that?”

“It’s not here,” she snapped. “Nothing’s here, because bad things

happened around all that.”

She looked at me for a long moment, then her face softened. She took my

hand in one of hers, and touched my face with the other.

“I like your eyes,” she said. “Come with me.”

She hurried out the door and down the stairs to her old brown station

wagon. A man sat in the passenger seat, staring straight at the road as if the

car were moving. He didn’t look up as she jumped in, saying, “Follow me.”

We drove through Turner Station to the parking lot of the local public

library. As I opened my car door, Courtney appeared, clapping, grinning,

and bouncing on her tiptoes. Words erupted from her: “February first is

Henrietta Lacks day here in Baltimore County,” she said. “This February

first is going to be the big kickoff event here at the library! We’re still trying

to put a museum together, even though the Cofield situation did cause so

many problems. Terrified Deborah. We were supposed to be almost done

with the museum by now—we were so close before all that horribleness.

But I’m glad He sent you,” she said, pointing to the sky. “This story just got

to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!”

“Who’s Cofield?” I asked.

She cringed and slapped her hand over her mouth. “I really can’t talk

until the family says it’s okay,” she said, then grabbed my hand and ran into

the library.

“This is Rebecca,” she told the librarian, bouncing on her toes again.

“She’s writing about Henrietta Lacks!”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” the librarian said. Then she looked at Courtney.

“Are you talking to her?”

“I need the tape,” Courtney said.

The librarian walked down a row of videos, pulled a white box from the

shelf, and handed it to her.

Courtney tucked the video under her arm, grabbed my hand, and ran me

back to the parking lot, where she jumped into her car and sped off, waving

for me to follow. We stopped outside a convenience store while the man in

her front seat got out and bought a loaf of bread. Then we dropped him off

in front of his house as Courtney yelled back to me, “He’s my deaf cousin!

Can’t drive!”

Finally she led me to a small beauty parlor she owned, not far from

Speed’s Grocery. She unlocked two bolts on the front door and waved her

hand in the air, saying, “Smells like I got a mouse in one of those traps.”

The shop was narrow, with barber chairs lining one wall and dryers along

the other. The hair-washing sink, propped up with a piece of plywood,

drained into a large white bucket, the walls around it splattered with years’

worth of hair dye. Next to the sink sat a price board: Cut and style ten

dollars. Press and curl, seven. And against the back wall, on top of a supply

cabinet, sat a photocopy of the picture of Henrietta Lacks, hands on hips, in

a pale wood frame several inches too big.

I pointed to the photo and raised my eyebrows. Courtney shook her head.

“I’ll tell you everything I know,” she whispered, “just as soon as you talk

to the family and they say it’s okay. I don’t want any more problems. And I

don’t want Deborah to get sick over it again.”

She pointed to a cracked red vinyl barber’s chair, which she spun to face

a small television next to the hair dryers. “You have to watch this tape,” she

said, handing me the remote and a set of keys. She started to walk out the

door, then turned. “Don’t you open this door for nothing or nobody but me,

you hear?” she said. “And don’t you miss nothing in that video—use that

rewind button, watch it twice if you have to, but don’t you miss nothing.”

Then she left, locking the door behind her.

What rolled in front of me on that television screen was a one-hour BBC

documentary about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, called The Way of All

Flesh, which I’d been trying to get a copy of for months. It opened to sweet

music and a young black woman who wasn’t Henrietta, dancing in front of

the camera. A British man began narrating, his voice melodramatic, like he

was telling a ghost story that just might be true.

“In 1951 a woman died in Baltimore in America,” he said, pausing for

effect. “She was called Henrietta Lacks.” The music grew louder and more

sinister as he told the story of her cells: “These cells have transformed

modern medicine. … They shaped the policies of countries and of

presidents. They even became involved in the Cold War. Because scientists

were convinced that in her cells lay the secret of how to conquer death….”

What really grabbed me was footage of Clover, an old plantation town in

southern Virginia, where some of Henrietta’s relatives still seemed to live.

The last image to appear on the screen was Henrietta’s cousin Fred Garret,

standing behind an old slave shack in Clover, his back to the family

cemetery where the narrator said Henrietta lay buried in an unmarked

grave.

Fred pointed to the cemetery and looked hard into the camera.

“Do you think them cells still livin?” he asked. “I talkin bout in the

grave.” He paused, then laughed a long, rumbling laugh. “Hell naw,” he

said, “I don’t guess they are. But they’re still livin out in the test tubes.

That’s a miracle.”

The screen went blank and I realized, if Henrietta’s children and husband

wouldn’t talk to me, I needed to visit Clover and find her cousins.

That night, back at the hotel, I finally got Sonny on the phone. He said

he’d decided not to meet me but wouldn’t tell me why. When I asked him to

put me in touch with his family in Clover, he told me to go there and find

them myself. Then he laughed and wished me luck.

10

The Other Side of the Tracks

Clover sits a few rolling hills off Route 360 in southern Virginia, just past

Difficult Creek on the banks of the River of Death. I pulled into town under

a blue December sky, with air warm enough for May, a yellow Post-it note

with the only information Sonny had given me stuck on my dashboard:

“They haven’t found her grave. Make sure it’s day—there are no lights, gets

darker than dark. Ask anybody where Lacks Town is.”

Downtown Clover started at a boarded-up gas station with RIP spray-

painted across its front, and ended at an empty lot that once held the depot

where Henrietta caught her train to Baltimore. The roof of the old movie

theater on Main Street had caved in years ago, its screen landing flat in a

field of weeds. The other businesses looked like someone left for lunch

decades earlier and never bothered coming back: one wall of Abbott’s

clothing store was lined with boxes of new Red Wing work boots stacked to

the ceiling and covered in thick dust; inside its long glass counter, beneath

an antique cash register, lay rows and rows of men’s dress shirts, still folded

starch-stiff in their plastic. The lounge at Rosie’s restaurant was filled with

overstuffed chairs, couches, and shag carpet, all in dust-covered browns,

oranges, and yellows. A sign in the front window said OPEN 7 DAYS, just above

one that said CLOSED. At Gregory and Martin Super Market, half-full

shopping carts rested in the aisles next to decades-old canned foods, and the

wall clock hadn’t moved past 6:34 since Martin closed up shop to become

an undertaker sometime in the eighties.

Even with kids on drugs and the older generation dying off, Clover didn’t

have enough death to keep an undertaker in business: in 1974 it had a

population of 227; in 1998 it was 198. That same year, Clover lost its town

charter. It did still have several churches and a few beauty parlors, but they

were rarely open. The only steady business left downtown was the one-

room brick post office, but it was closed when I got there.

Main Street felt like a place where you could sit for hours without seeing

a pedestrian or a car. But a man stood in front of Rosie’s, leaning against his

red motorized bicycle, waiting to wave at any cars that might pass. He was

a short, round white man with red cheeks who could have been anywhere

from fifty to seventy. Locals called him the Greeter, and he’d spent most of

his life on that corner waving at anyone who drove by, his face

expressionless. I asked if he could direct me to Lacks Town, where I

planned to look for mailboxes with the name Lacks on them, then knock on

doors asking about Henrietta. The man never said a word, just waved at me,

then slowly pointed behind him, across the tracks.

The dividing line between Lacks Town and the rest of Clover was stark.

On one side of the two-lane road from downtown, there were vast, well-

manicured rolling hills, acres and acres of wide-open property with horses,

a small pond, a well-kept house set back from the road, a minivan, and a

white picket fence. Directly across the street stood a small one-room shack

about seven feet wide and twelve feet long; it was made of unpainted wood,

with large gaps between the wallboards where vines and weeds grew.

That shack was the beginning of Lacks Town, a single road about a mile

long and lined with dozens of houses—some painted bright yellows or

greens, others unpainted, half caved-in or nearly burnt-down. Slave-era

cabins sat next to cinder-block homes and trailers, some with satellite dishes

and porch swings, others rusted and half buried. I drove the length of Lacks

Town Road again and again, past the END OF STATE MAINTENANCE sign where the

road turned to gravel, past a tobacco field with a basketball court in it—just

a patch of red dirt and a bare hoop attached to the top of a weathered tree

trunk.

The muffler on my beat-up black Honda had fallen off somewhere

between Pittsburgh and Clover, which meant everyone in Lacks Town heard

each time I passed. They walked onto porches and peered through windows

as I drove by. Finally, on my third or fourth pass, a man who looked like he

was in his seventies shuffled out of a green two-room wooden cabin

wearing a bright green sweater, a matching scarf, and a black driving cap.

He waved a stiff arm at me, eyebrows raised.

“You lost?” he yelled over my muffler.

I rolled down my window and said not exactly.

“Well where you tryin to go?” he said. “Cause I know you’re not from

around here.”

I asked him if he’d heard of Henrietta.

He smiled and introduced himself as Cootie, Henrietta’s first cousin.

His real name was Hector Henry—people started calling him Cootie

when he got polio decades earlier; he was never sure why. Cootie’s skin

was light enough to pass for Latino, so when he got sick at nine years old, a

local white doctor snuck him into the nearest hospital, saying Cootie was

his son, since the hospitals didn’t treat black patients. Cootie spent a year

inside an iron lung that breathed for him, and he’d been in and out of

hospitals ever since.

The polio had left him partially paralyzed in his neck and arms, with

nerve damage that caused constant pain. He wore a scarf regardless of the

weather, because the warmth helped ease the pain.

I told him why I was there, and he pointed up and down the road.

“Everybody in Lacks Town kin to Henrietta, but she been gone so long,

even her memory pretty much dead now,” he said. “Everything about

Henrietta dead except them cells.”

He pointed to my car. “Turn this loud thing off and come inside. I’ll fix

you some juice.”

His front door opened into a tiny kitchen with a coffeemaker, a vintage

toaster, and an old woodstove with two cooking pots on top, one empty, the

other filled with chili. He’d painted the kitchen walls the same dark olive

green as the outside, and lined them with power strips and fly swatters.

He’d recently gotten indoor plumbing, but still preferred the outhouse.

Though Cootie could barely move his arms, he’d built the house on his

own, teaching himself construction as he went along, hammering the

plywood walls and plastering the inside. But he’d forgotten to use

insulation, so soon after he finished it, he tore down the walls and started

over again. A few years after that, the whole place burned down when he

fell asleep under an electric blanket, but he built it back up again. The walls

were a bit crooked, he said, but he’d used so many nails, he didn’t think it

would ever fall down.

Cootie handed me a glass of red juice and shooed me out of the kitchen

into his dark, wood-paneled living room. There was no couch, just a few

metal folding chairs and a barber’s chair anchored to the linoleum floor, its

cushions covered entirely with duct tape. Cootie had been the Lacks Town

barber for decades. “That chair cost twelve hundred dollars now, but I got it

for eight dollars back then,” he yelled from the kitchen. “Haircut wasn’t but

a dollar—sometimes I cut fifty-eight heads in one day.” Eventually he quit

because he couldn’t hold his arms up long enough to cut.

A small boom box leaned against one wall blaring a gospel call-in show,

with a preacher screaming something about the Lord curing a caller of

hepatitis.

Cootie opened a folding chair for me, then walked into his bedroom. He

lifted his mattress with one arm, propped it on his head, and began

rummaging through piles of paper hidden beneath it.

“I know I got some information on Henrietta in here somewhere,” he

mumbled from under the mattress. “Where the hell I put that… You know

other countries be buying her for twenty-five dollars, sometimes fifty? Her

family didn’t get no money out of it.”

After digging through what looked like hundreds of papers, he came back

to the living room.

“This here the only picture I got of her,” he said, pointing to a copy of the

Rolling Stone article with the ever-present hands-on-hips photo. “I don’t

know what it say. Only education I got, I had to learn on my own. But I

always couldn’t count, and I can’t hardly read or write my name cause my

hand’s so jittery.” He asked if the article said anything about her childhood

in Clover. I shook my head no.

“Everybody liked Henrietta cause she was a very good condition person,”

he said. “She just lovey dovey, always smilin, always takin care of us when

we come to the house. Even after she got sick, she never was a person who

say ‘I feel bad and I’m going to take it out on you.’ She wasn’t like that,

even when she hurtin. But she didn’t seem to understand what was going

on. She didn’t want to think she was gonna die.”

He shook his head. “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.”

In the background, the radio preacher screamed “Hallelujah!” over and

over as Cootie spoke.

“She used to take care of me when my polio got bad,” he told me. “She

always did say she wanted to fix it. She couldn’t help me cause I had it

before she got sick, but she saw how bad it got. I imagine that’s why she

used them cells to help get rid of it for other folk.” He paused. “Nobody

round here never understood how she dead and that thing still livin. That’s

where the mystery’s at.”

He looked around the room, nodding his head toward spaces between the

wall and ceiling where he’d stuffed dried garlic and onions.

“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.”

As he talked, the preacher’s voice on the radio grew louder, saying, “The

Lord, He’s gonna help you, but you got to call me right now. If my daughter

or sister had cancer! I would get on that phone, cause time’s running out!”

Cootie yelled over the radio. “Doctors say they never heard of another

case like Henrietta’s! I’m sure it was either man-made or spirit-made, one

of the two.”

Then he told me about spirits in Lacks Town that sometimes visited

people’s houses and caused disease. He said he’d seen a man spirit in his

house, sometimes leaning against the wall by his woodstove, other times by

the bed. But the most dangerous spirit, he told me, was the several-ton

headless hog he saw roaming Lacks Town years ago with no tail. Links of

broken chain dangled from its bloodstained neck, dragging along dirt roads

and clanking as it walked.

“I saw that thing crossin the road to the family cemetery,” Cootie told

me. “That spirit stood right there in the road, its chain swingin and swayin

in the breeze.” Cootie said it looked at him and stomped its foot, kicking

red dust all around its body, getting ready to charge. Just then, a car came

barreling down the road with only one headlight.

“The car came along, shined a light right on it, I swear it was a hog,”

Cootie said. Then the spirit vanished. “I can still hear that chain draggin.”

Cootie figured that car saved him from getting some new disease.

“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.”

11

“The Devil of Pain Itself”

By September, Henrietta’s body was almost entirely taken over by

tumors. They’d grown on her diaphragm, her bladder, and her lungs. They’d

blocked her intestines and made her belly swell like she was six months

pregnant. She got one blood transfusion after another because her kidneys

could no longer filter the toxins from her blood, leaving her nauseated from

the poison of her own body. She got so much blood that one doctor wrote a

note in her record stopping all transfusions “until her deficit with the blood

bank was made up.”

When Henrietta’s cousin Emmett Lacks heard somebody at Sparrows

Point say Henrietta was sick and needed blood, he threw down the steel

pipe he was cutting and ran looking for his brother and some friends. They

were working men, with steel and asbestos in their lungs and years’ worth

of hard labor under their calluses and cracked fingernails. They’d all slept

on Henrietta’s floor and eaten her spaghetti when they first came to

Baltimore from the country, and anytime money ran low. She’d ridden the

streetcar to and from Sparrows Point to make sure they didn’t get lost

during their first weeks in the city. She’d packed their lunches until they

found their feet, then sent extra food to work with Day so they didn’t go

hungry between paychecks. She’d teased them about needing wives and

girlfriends, and sometimes helped them find good ones. Emmett had stayed

at Henrietta’s so long, he had his own bed in the hallway at the top of the

stairs. He’d only moved out a few months earlier.

The last time Emmett saw Henrietta, he’d taken her to visit Elsie in

Crownsville. They found her sitting behind barbed wire in the corner of a

yard outside the brick barracks where she slept. When she saw them coming

she made her birdlike noise, then ran to them and just stood, staring.

Henrietta wrapped her arms around Elsie, looked her long and hard in the

eyes, then turned to Emmett.

“She look like she doin better,” Henrietta said. “Yeah, Elsie look nice and

clean and everything.” They sat in silence for a long time. Henrietta seemed

relieved, almost desperate, to see Elsie looking okay. That was the last time

she would see her daughter—Emmett figures she knew she was saying

goodbye. What she didn’t know was that no one would ever visit Elsie

again.

A few months later, when Emmett heard Henrietta needed blood, he and

his brother and six friends piled into a truck and went straight to Hopkins. A

nurse led them through the colored ward, past rows of hospital beds to the

one where Henrietta lay. She’d withered from 140 pounds to about 100.

Sadie and Henrietta’s sister Gladys sat beside her, their eyes swollen from

too much crying and not enough sleep. Gladys had come from Clover by

Greyhound as soon as she got word Henrietta was in the hospital. The two

had never been close, and people still teased Gladys, saying she was too

mean and ugly to be Henrietta’s sister. But Henrietta was family, so Gladys

sat beside her, clutching a pillow in her lap.

A nurse stood in the corner watching as the eight big men crowded

around the bed. When Henrietta tried to move her arm to lift herself,

Emmett saw the straps around her wrists and ankles, attaching her to the

bed frame.

“What you doin here?” Henrietta moaned.

“We come to get you well,” Emmett said to a chorus of yeahs from the

other men.

Henrietta didn’t say a word. She just lay her head back on the pillow.

Suddenly her body went rigid as a board. She screamed as the nurse ran

to the bed, tightening the straps around Henrietta’s arms and legs to keep

her from thrashing onto the floor as she’d done many times before. Gladys

thrust the pillow from her lap into Henrietta’s mouth, to keep her from

biting her tongue as she convulsed in pain. Sadie cried and stroked

Henrietta’s hair.

“Lord,” Emmett told me years later. “Henrietta rose up out that bed

wailin like she been possessed by the devil of pain itself.”

The nurse shooed Emmett and his brothers out of the ward to the room

designated for colored blood collection, where they’d donate eight pints of

blood. As Emmett walked from Henrietta’s bedside, he turned to look just

as the fit began to pass and Gladys slid the pillow from Henrietta’s mouth.

“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.”

          Soon after Emmett and his friends visited, at four o’clock on the

afternoon of September 24, 1951, a doctor injected Henrietta with a heavy

dose of morphine and wrote in her chart, “Discontinue all medications and

treatments except analgesics.” Two days later, Henrietta awoke terrified,

disoriented, wanting to know where she was and what the doctors had been

doing to her. For a moment she forgot her own name. Soon after that, she

turned to Gladys and told her she was going to die.

“You make sure Day takes care of them children,” Henrietta told her

sister, tears streaming down her face. “Especially my baby girl Deborah.”

Deborah was just over a year old when Henrietta went into the hospital.

Henrietta had wanted to hold Deborah, to dress her in beautiful clothes and

braid her hair, to teach her how to paint her nails, curl her hair, and handle

men.

Henrietta looked at Gladys and whispered, “Don’t you let anything bad

happen to them children when I’m gone.”

Then she rolled over, her back to Gladys, and closed her eyes.

Gladys slipped out of the hospital and onto a Greyhound back to Clover.

That night, she called Day.

“Henrietta gonna die tonight,” she told him. “She wants you to take care

of them kids—I told her I’d let you know. Don’t let nuthin happen to them.”

Henrietta died at 12:15 a.m. on October 4, 1951.

12

The Storm

There was no obituary for Henrietta Lacks, but word of her death reached

the Gey lab quickly. As Henrietta’s body cooled in the “colored” freezer,

Gey asked her doctors if they’d do an autopsy. Tissue culturists around the

world had been trying to create a library of immortal cells like Henrietta’s,

and Gey wanted samples from as many organs in her body as possible, to

see if they’d grow like HeLa. But to get those samples after her death,

someone would have to ask Henrietta’s husband for permission.

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.

The way Day remembers it, someone from Hopkins called to tell him

Henrietta had died, and to ask permission for an autopsy, and Day said no.

A few hours later, when Day went to Hopkins with a cousin to see

Henrietta’s body and sign some papers, the doctors asked again about the

autopsy. They said they wanted to run tests that might help his children

someday. Day’s cousin said it wouldn’t hurt, so eventually Day agreed and

signed an autopsy permission form.

Soon Henrietta’s body lay on a stainless-steel table in the cavernous

basement morgue, and Gey’s assistant, Mary, stood in the doorway

breathing fast, feeling like she might faint. She’d never seen a dead body.

Now there she was with a corpse, a stack of petridishes, and the pathologist,

Dr. Wilbur, who stood hunched over the autopsy table. Henrietta’s arms

were extended, as if she were reaching above her head. Mary walked

toward the table, whispering to herself, You’re not going to make a fool of

yourself and pass out.

She stepped around one of Henrietta’s arms and took her place beside

Wilbur, her hip in Henrietta’s armpit. He said hello, Mary said hello back.

Then they were silent. Day wanted Henrietta to be presentable for the

funeral, so he’d only given permission for a partial autopsy, which meant no

incision into her chest and no removal of her limbs or head. Mary opened

the dishes one by one, holding them out to collect samples as Wilbur cut

them from Henrietta’s body: bladder, bowel, uterus, kidney, vagina, ovary,

appendix, liver, heart, lungs. After dropping each sample into a petridish,

Wilbur put bits of Henrietta’s tumor-covered cervix into containers filled

with formaldehyde to save them for future use.

The official cause of Henrietta’s death was terminal uremia: blood

poisoning from the buildup of toxins normally flushed out of the body in

urine. The tumors had completely blocked her urethra, leaving her doctors

unable to pass a catheter into her bladder to empty it. Tumors the size of

baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And

her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if

someone had filled her with pearls.

Mary stood beside Wilbur, waiting as he sewed Henrietta’s abdomen

closed. She wanted to run out of the morgue and back to the lab, but

instead, she stared at Henrietta’s arms and legs—anything to avoid looking

into her lifeless eyes. Then Mary’s gaze fell on Henrietta’s feet, and she

gasped: Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish.

“When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me years later, “I nearly fainted.

I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. 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.”

         A few days later, Henrietta’s body made the long, winding train ride

from Baltimore to Clover in a plain pine box, which was all Day could

afford. It was raining when the local undertaker met Henrietta’s coffin at the

Clover depot and slid it into the back of a rusted truck. He rolled through

downtown Clover, past the hardware store where Henrietta used to watch

old white men play checkers, and onto Lacks Town Road, turning just

before The Shack, where she’d danced only a few months earlier. As the

undertaker drove into Lacks Town, cousins filed onto porches to watch

Henrietta pass, their hands on hips or clutching children as they shook their

heads and whispered to the Lord.

Cootie shuffled into his yard, looked straight into the falling rain, and

yelled, “Sweet Jesus, let that poor woman rest, you hear me? She had

enough!”

Amens echoed from a nearby porch.

A quarter-mile down the road, Gladys and Sadie sat on the broken

wooden steps of the home-house, a long pink dress draped across their laps

and a basket at their feet filled with makeup, curlers, red nail polish, and the

two pennies they’d rest on Henrietta’s eyes to keep them closed for the

viewing. They watched silently as the undertaker inched through the field

between the road and the house, his tires sinking into puddles of red mud.

Cliff and Fred stood in the graveyard behind the house, their overalls

drenched and heavy with rain. They’d spent most of the day thrusting

shovels into the rocky cemetery ground, digging a grave for Henrietta. They

dug in one spot, then another, moving each time their shovels hit the coffins

of unknown relatives buried with no markers. Eventually they found an

empty spot for Henrietta near her mother’s tombstone.

When Cliff and Fred heard the undertaker’s truck, they walked toward

the home-house to help unload Henrietta. When they got her into the

hallway, they opened the pine box, and Sadie began to cry. What got her

most wasn’t the sight of Henrietta’s lifeless body, it was her toenails:

Henrietta would rather have died than let her polish get all chipped like that.

“Lord,” Sadie said. “Hennie must a hurt somethin worse than death.”

For several days, Henrietta’s corpse lay in the hallway of the home-

house, doors propped open at each end to let in the cool wet breeze that

would keep her body fresh. Family and neighbors waded through the field

to pay respects, and all the while, the rain kept coming.

The morning of Henrietta’s funeral, Day walked through the mud with

Deborah, Joe, Sonny, and Lawrence. But not Elsie. She was still in

Crownsville and didn’t even know her mother had died.

The Lacks cousins don’t remember much about the service—they figure

there were some words, probably a song or two. But they all remember

what happened next. As Cliff and Fred lowered Henrietta’s coffin into her

grave and began covering her with handfuls of dirt, the sky turned black as

strap molasses. The rain fell thick and fast. Then came long rumbling

thunder, screams from the babies, and a blast of wind so strong it tore the

metal roof off the barn below the cemetery and sent it flying through the air

above Henrietta’s grave, its long metal slopes flapping like the wings of a

giant silver bird. The wind caused fires that burned tobacco fields. It ripped

trees from the ground, blew power lines out for miles, and tore one Lacks

cousin’s wooden cabin clear out of the ground, threw him from the living

room into his garden, then landed on top of him, killing him instantly.

Years later, when Henrietta’s cousin Peter looked back on that day, he

just shook his bald head and laughed: “Hennie never was what you’d call a

beatin-around-the-bush woman,” he said. “We shoulda knew she was tryin

to tell us somethin with that storm.”

13

The HeLa Factory

Not long after Henrietta’s death, planning began for a HeLa factory—a

massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each

week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio.

By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio

epidemic in history. Schools closed, parents panicked, and the public grew

desperate for a vaccine. In February 1952, Jonas Salk at the University of

Pittsburgh announced that he’d developed the world’s first polio vaccine,

but he couldn’t begin offering it to children until he’d tested it on a large

scale to prove it was safe and effective. And doing that would require

culturing cells on an enormous, industrial scale, which no one had done

before.

The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)—a charity

created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d himself been

paralyzed by polio—began organizing the largest field trial ever conducted

to test the polio vaccine. Salk would inoculate 2 million children and the

NFIP would test their blood to see if they’d become immune. But doing this

would require millions of neutralization tests, which involved mixing blood

serum from newly vaccinated children with live poliovirus and cells in

culture. If the vaccine worked, the serum from a vaccinated child’s blood

would block the poliovirus and protect the cells. If it didn’t work, the virus

would infect the cells, causing damage scientists could see using a

microscope.

The trouble was, at that point, the cells used in neutralization tests came

from monkeys, which were killed in the process. This was a problem, not

because of concern for animal welfare—which wasn’t the issue then that it

is today—but because monkeys were expensive. Doing millions of

neutralization tests using monkey cells would cost millions of dollars. So

the NFIP went into overdrive looking for a cultured cell that could grow on

a massive scale and would be cheaper than using monkeys.

The NFIP turned to Gey and a few other cell culture experts for help, and

Gey recognized the opportunity as a gold mine for the field. The NFIP’s

March of Dimes was bringing in an average of $ 50 million in donations

each year, and its director wanted to give much of that money to cell

culturists so they could find a way to mass-produce cells, which they’d been

wanting to do for years anyway.

The timing was perfect: by chance, soon after the NFIP contacted Gey

for help, he realized that Henrietta’s cells grew unlike any human cells he’d

seen.

Most cells in culture grew in a single layer in a clot on a glass surface,

which meant they ran out of space quickly. Increasing their numbers was

labor-intensive: scientists had to repeatedly scrape the cells from one tube

and split them into new ones to give them more space. HeLa cells, it turned

out, weren’t picky—they didn’t need a glass surface in order to grow. They

could grow floating in a culture medium that was constantly stirred by a

magnetic device, an important technique Gey developed, now called

growing in suspension. This meant that HeLa cells weren’t limited by space

in the same way other cells were; they could simply divide until they ran

out of culture medium. The bigger the vat of medium, the more the cells

grew. This discovery meant that if HeLa was susceptible to poliovirus,

which not all cells were, it would solve the mass-production problem and

make it possible to test the vaccine without millions of monkey cells.

So in April 1952, Gey and one of his colleagues from the NFIP advisory

committee—William Scherer, a young postdoctoral fellow at the University

of Minnesota—tried infecting Henrietta’s cells with poliovirus. Within days

they found that HeLa was, in fact, more susceptible to the virus than any

cultured cells had ever been. When they realized this, they knew they’d

found exactly what the NFIP was looking for.

They also knew that, before mass-producing any cells, they’d need to

find a new way to ship them. Gey’s air freight shipping system worked fine

for sending a few cells to colleagues here and there, but it was too

expensive for shipping on a massive scale. And growing cells by the

billions wouldn’t help anyone if they couldn’t get those cells where they

needed to go. So they began experimenting.

On Memorial Day 1952, Gey gathered a handful of tubes containing

HeLa cells and enough media for them to survive for a few days, and

packed them into a tin lined with cork and filled with ice to prevent

overheating. Then he typed up careful instructions for feeding and handling,

and sent Mary to the post office to ship them to Scherer in Minnesota.

Every post office in Baltimore was closed for the holiday except the main

branch downtown. Mary had to take several trolleys to get there, but she

made it. And so did the cells: When the package arrived in Minneapolis

about four days later, Scherer put the cells in an incubator and they began to

grow. It was the first time live cells had ever been successfully shipped in

the mail.

In the coming months—to test different delivery methods, and make sure

the cells could survive long trips in any climate—Gey and Scherer sent

tubes of HeLa cells around the country by plane, train, and truck, from

Minneapolis to Norwich to New York and back again. Only one tube died.

When the NFIP heard the news that HeLa was susceptible to polio virus

and could grow in large quantities for little money, it immediately

contracted William Scherer to oversee development of a HeLa Distribution

Center at the Tuskegee Institute, one of the most prestigious black

universities in the country. The NFIP chose the Tuskegee Institute for the

project because of Charles Bynum, director of “Negro Activities” for the

foundation. Bynum—a science teacher and civil rights activist who was the

first black foundation executive in the country—wanted the center to be

located at Tuskegee because it would provide hundreds of thousands of

dollars in funding, many jobs, and training opportunities for young black

scientists.

In just a few months, a staff of six black scientists and technicians built a

factory at Tuskegee unlike any seen before. Its walls were lined with

industrial steel autoclaves for steam sterilizing; row upon row of enormous,

mechanically stirred vats of culture medium; incubators; glass culturing

bottles stacked on their sides; and automatic cell dispensers—tall

contraptions with long, thin metal arms that squirted HeLa cells into one

test tube after another. The Tuskegee team mixed thousands of liters of Gey

culture medium each week, using salts, minerals, and serum they collected

from the many students, soldiers, and cotton farmers who responded to ads

in the local paper seeking blood in exchange for money.

Several technicians served as a quality-control assembly line, staring

through microscopes at hundreds of thousands of HeLa cultures each week,

making sure the samples were alive and healthy. Others shipped them on a

rigid schedule to researchers at twenty-three polio-testing centers around

the country.

Eventually, the Tuskegee staff grew to thirty-five scientists and

technicians, who produced twenty thousand tubes of HeLa—about 6 trillion

cells—every week. It was the first-ever cell production factory, and it

started with a single vial of HeLa that Gey had sent Scherer in their first

shipping experiment, not long after Henrietta’s death.

With those cells, scientists helped prove the Salk vaccine effective. Soon

the New York Times would run pictures of black women hunched over

microscopes examining cells, black hands holding vials of HeLa, and this

headline:

UNIT AT TUSKEGEE HELPS POLIO FIGHT

Corps of Negro Scientists Has Key Role in Evaluating of Dr. Salk’s Vaccine

HELA CELLS ARE GROWN

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.

         At first the Tuskegee Center supplied HeLa cells only to polio testing

labs. But when it became clear that there was no risk of a HeLa shortage,

they began sending the cells to any scientist interested in buying them, for

ten dollars plus Air Express fees. If researchers wanted to figure out how

cells behaved in a certain environment, or reacted to a specific chemical, or

produced a certain protein, they turned to Henrietta’s cells. They did that

because, despite being cancerous, HeLa still shared many basic

characteristics with normal cells: They produced proteins and

communicated with one another like normal cells, they divided and

generated energy, they expressed genes and regulated them, and they were

susceptible to infections, which made them an optimal tool for synthesizing

and studying any number of things in culture, including bacteria, hormones,

proteins, and especially viruses.

Viruses reproduce by injecting bits of their genetic material into a living

cell, essentially reprogramming the cell so it reproduces the virus instead of

itself. When it came to growing viruses—as with many other things—the

fact that HeLa was malignant just made it more useful. HeLa cells grew

much faster than normal cells, and therefore produced results faster. HeLa

was a workhorse: it was hardy, it was inexpensive, and it was everywhere.

And the timing was perfect. In the early fifties, scientists were just

beginning to understand viruses, so as Henrietta’s cells arrived in labs

around the country, researchers began exposing them to viruses of all kinds

—herpes, measles, mumps, fowl pox, equine encephalitis—to study how

each one entered cells, reproduced, and spread.

Henrietta’s cells helped launch the fledgling field of virology, but that

was just the beginning. In the years following Henrietta’s death, using some

of the first tubes of her cells, researchers around the world made several

important scientific advances in quick succession. First, a group of

researchers used HeLa to develop methods for freezing cells without

harming or changing them. This made it possible to send cells around the

world using the already-standardized method for shipping frozen foods and

frozen sperm for breeding cattle. It also meant researchers could store cells

between experiments without worrying about keeping them fed and sterile.

But what excited scientists most was that freezing gave them a means to

suspend cells in various states of being.

Freezing a cell was like pressing a pause button: cell division,

metabolism, and everything else simply stopped, then resumed after

thawing as if you’d just pressed play again. Scientists could now pause cells

at various intervals during an experiment so they could compare how

certain cells reacted to a specific drug one week, then two, then six after

exposure. They could look at identical cells at different points in time, to

study how they changed with age. And by freezing cells at various points,

they believed they could see the actual moment when a normal cell growing

in culture became malignant, a phenomenon they called spontaneous

transformation.

Freezing was just the first of several dramatic improvements HeLa

helped bring to the field of tissue culture. One of the biggest was the

standardization of the field, which, at that point, was a bit of a mess. Gey

and his colleagues had been complaining that they wasted too much time

just making medium and trying to keep cells alive. But more than anything,

they worried that since everyone was using different media ingredients,

recipes, cells, and techniques, and few knew their peers’ methods, it would

be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate one another’s experiments. And

replication is an essential part of science: a discovery isn’t considered valid

if others can’t repeat the work and get the same result. Without standardized

materials and methods, they worried that the field of tissue culture would

stagnate.

Gey and several colleagues had already organized a committee to

develop procedures to “simplify and standardize the technique of tissue

culturing.” They’d also convinced two fledgling biological supply

companies—Microbiological Associates and Difco Laboratories—to begin

producing and selling ingredients for culture media, and taught them the

techniques necessary to do so. Those companies had just started selling

media ingredients, but cell culturists still had to make the media themselves,

and they all used different recipes.

Standardization of the field wasn’t possible until several things

happened: first, Tuskegee began mass-producing HeLa; second, a

researcher named Harry Eagle at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

used HeLa to develop the first standardized culture medium that could be

made by the gallon and shipped ready to use; and, third, Gey and several

others used HeLa to determine which glassware and test-tube stoppers were

least toxic to cells.

Only then, for the first time, could researchers around the world work

with the same cells, growing in the same media, using the same equipment,

all of which they could buy and have delivered to their labs. And soon

they’d even be able to use the first-ever clones of human cells, something

they’d been working toward for years.

Today, when we hear the word clone, we imagine scientists creating

entire living animals—like Dolly the famous cloned sheep—using DNA

from one parent. But before the cloning of whole animals, there was the

cloning of individual cells—Henrietta’s cells.

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.

The early cell culture and cloning technology developed using HeLa

helped lead to many later advances that required the ability to grow single

cells in culture, including isolating stem cells, cloning whole animals, and

in vitro fertilization. Meanwhile, as the standard human cell in most labs,

HeLa was also being used in research that would advance the new field of

human genetics.

Researchers had long believed that human cells contained forty-eight

chromosomes, the threads of DNA inside cells that contain all of our

genetic information. But chromosomes clumped together, making it

impossible to get an accurate count. Then, in 1953, a geneticist in Texas

accidentally mixed the wrong liquid with HeLa and a few other cells, and it

turned out to be a fortunate mistake. The chromosomes inside the cells

swelled and spread out, and for the first time, scientists could see each of

them clearly. That accidental discovery was the first of several

developments that would allow two researchers from Spain and Sweden to

discover that normal human cells have forty-six chromosomes.

Once scientists knew how many chromosomes people were supposed to

have, they could tell when a person had too many or too few, which made it

possible to diagnose genetic diseases. Researchers worldwide would soon

begin identifying chromosomal disorders, discovering that patients with

Down syndrome had an extra chromosome number 21, patients with

Klinefelter syndrome had an extra sex chromosome, and those with Turner

syndrome lacked all or part of one.

With all the new developments, demand for HeLa grew, and Tuskegee

wasn’t big enough to keep up. The owner of Microbiological Associates—a

military man named Samuel Reader—knew nothing about science, but his

business partner, Monroe Vincent, was a researcher who understood the

potential market for cells. Many scientists needed cells, but few had the

time or ability to grow them in large enough quantities. They just wanted to

buy them. So together, Reader and Vincent used HeLa cells as the

springboard to launch the first industrial-scale, for-profit cell distribution

center.

It started with what Reader lovingly referred to as his Cell Factory. In

Bethesda, Maryland, in the middle of a wide-open warehouse that was once

a Fritos factory, he built a glass-enclosed room that housed a rotating

conveyor belt with hundreds of test-tube holders built into it. Outside the

glass room, he had a setup much like Tuskegee’s, with massive vats of

culture medium, only bigger. When cells were ready for shipping, he’d

sound a loud bell and all workers in the building, including the mailroom

clerks, would stop what they were doing, scrub themselves at the

sterilization station, grab a cap and gown, and line up at the conveyor belt.

Some filled tubes, others inserted rubber stoppers, sealed tubes, or stacked

them inside a walk-in incubator where they stayed until being packaged for

shipping.

Microbiological Associates’ biggest customers were labs like NIH, which

had standing orders for millions of HeLa cells delivered on set schedules.

But scientists all over the world could call in orders, pay less than fifty

dollars, and Microbiological Associates would overnight them vials of

HeLa cells. Reader had contracts with several major airlines, so whenever

he got an order, he’d send a courier with cells to catch the next flight out,

then have the cells picked up from the airport and delivered to labs by taxi.

Slowly, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials

was born.

Reader recruited the top minds in the field to tell him what products they

needed most and show him how to make them. One of the scientists who

consulted for Reader was Leonard Hayflick, arguably the most famous

early cell culturist left in the field today. When I talked with him he said,

“Microbiological Associates and Sam Reader were an absolute revolution

in the field, and I’m not one to use the word revolution lightly.”

As Reader’s business grew, demand for cells from Tuskegee plummeted.

The NFIP closed its HeLa production center because places like

Microbiological Associates now supplied scientists with all the cells they

needed. And soon, HeLa cells weren’t the only ones being bought and sold

for research—with media and equipment standardization, culturing became

easier, and researchers began growing cells of all kinds. But none grew in

quantities like HeLa.

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.

The possibilities seemed endless. At one point, a health-education

director at the Young Women’s Christian Association heard about tissue

culture and wrote a letter to a group of researchers saying she hoped they’d

be able to use it to help the YWCA’s older women. “They complain that the

skin and tissues of the face and neck inevitably show the wear and tear of

years,” she wrote. “My thought was that if you know how to keep tissue

alive there must be some way of equalizing the reserve supply to the area of

the throat and face.”

Henrietta’s cells couldn’t help bring youth to women’s necks, but

cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies throughout the United States and

Europe began using them instead of laboratory animals to test whether new

products and drugs caused cellular damage. Scientists cut HeLa cells in half

to show that cells could live on after their nuclei had been removed, and

used them to develop methods for injecting substances into cells without

destroying them. 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.

At the request of the U.S. government, Gey took Henrietta’s cells with

him to the Far East in 1953 to study hemorrhagic fever, which was killing

American troops. He also injected them into rats to see if they’d cause

cancer. But mostly he tried to move on from HeLa, focusing instead on

growing normal and cancerous cells from the same patient, so he could

compare them to each other. But he couldn’t escape the seemingly endless

questions about HeLa and cell culture from other scientists. Researchers

came to his lab several times each week wanting to learn his techniques,

and he often traveled to labs around the world to help set up cell-culture

facilities.

Many of Gey’s colleagues pressured him to publish research papers so he

could get credit for his work, but he always said he was too busy. At home

he regularly stayed up all night to work. He applied for extensions on

grants, often took months to answer letters, and at one point continued to

pay a dead employee’s salary for three months before anyone noticed. It

took a year of nagging from Mary and Margaret for George to publish

anything about growing HeLa; in the end, he wrote a short abstract for a

conference, and Margaret submitted it for publication. After that, she

regularly wrote and submitted his work for him.

By the mid-fifties, as more scientists began working with tissue culture,

Gey became weary. He wrote to friends and colleagues saying, “Someone

should coin a contemporary phrase and say, at least for the moment, ‘The

world has gone nuts over tissue culture and its possibilities.’ I hope that

some of this hullabaloo over tissue culture has at least had a few good

points which have helped others … I wish for the most part, however, that

things would settle down a bit.”

Gey was annoyed by the widespread fixation on HeLa. After all, there

were other cells to work with, including some he’d grown himself: A.Fi.

and D-i Re, each named after the patient it came from. He regularly offered

them to scientists, but they were harder to culture, so they never took off

like Henrietta’s cells. Gey was relieved that companies had taken over

HeLa distribution so that he didn’t have to do it himself, but he didn’t like

the fact that HeLa was now completely out of his control.

Since the launch of the HeLa production factory at Tuskegee, Gey had

been writing a steady stream of letters to other scientists, trying to restrict

the way they used Henrietta’s cells. At one point he wrote his longtime

friend and colleague Charles Pomerat, lamenting the fact that others,

including some in Pomerat’s lab, were using HeLa for research Gey was

“most capable” of doing himself, and in some cases had already done, but

not yet published. Pomerat replied:

With regard to your … disapproval for a wide exploration of the HeLa strain, I don’t see how

you can hope to inhibit progress in this direction since you released the strain so widely that it now

can be purchased commercially This is a little bit like requesting people not to work on the golden

hamster! … I realize that it is the goodness of your heart that made available the HeLa cell and

therefore why you now find that everybody wants to get into the act.

Pomerat suggested that Gey should have finished his own HeLa research

before “releasing [HeLa] to the general public since once released it

becomes general scientific property.”

But Gey hadn’t done that. And as soon as HeLa became “general

scientific property,” people started wondering about the woman behind the

cells.

14

Helen Lane

So many people knew Henrietta’s name, someone was bound to leak it.

Gey had told William Scherer and his adviser Jerome Syverton in

Minneapolis, plus the people at the NFIP, who’d probably told the team at

Tuskegee. Everyone in the Gey lab knew her name, as did Howard Jones,

Richard TeLinde, and the other Hopkins doctors who’d treated her.

Sure enough, on November 2, 1953, the Minneapolis Star became the

first publication to name the woman behind the HeLa cells. There was just

one thing—the reporter got her name wrong. HeLa, the story said, was

“from a Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lakes.”

No one knows who leaked the near-correct version of Henrietta’s name to

the Minneapolis Star. Soon after the article ran, Gey got a letter from

Jerome Syverton, saying, “I am writing to assure you that neither Bill nor I

provided the [Minneapolis Star] with the name of the patient. As you know,

Bill and I concur in your conviction that the cell strain should be referred to

as HeLa and that the patient’s name should not be used.”

Regardless, a name was out. And two days after it was published, Roland

H. Berg, a press officer at the NFIP, sent Gey a letter saying he planned to

write a more detailed article about HeLa cells for a popular magazine. Berg

was “intrigued with the scientific and human interest elements in such a

story,” he wrote, and he wanted to learn more about it.

Gey replied saying, “I have discussed the matter with Dr. TeLinde, and

he has agreed to allow this material to be presented in a popular magazine

article. We must, however, withhold the name of the patient.”

But Berg insisted:

Perhaps I should describe further to you my ideas on this article, especially in view of your

statement that the name of the patient must be withheld. … To inform [the public] you must also

interest them. … You do not engage the attention of the reader unless your story has basic human

interest elements. And the story of the HeLa cells, from what little I know of it now, has all those

elements. …

An intrinsic part of this story would be to describe how these cells, originally obtained from

Henrietta Lakes, are being grown and used for the benefit of mankind. … In a story such as this,

the name of the individual is intrinsic. As a matter of fact, if I were to proceed with the task my

plan would be to interview the relatives of Mrs. Lakes. Nor would I publish the story without the

full cooperation and approval of Mrs. Lakes’ family. Incidentally, you may not be aware, but the

identity of the patient is already a matter of public record inasmuch as newspaper reports have

completely identified the individual. For example, I can refer you to the story in the Minneapolis

Star, dated November 2, 1953.

I am entirely sympathetic to your reasons for withholding the name of the patient and thus

prevent a possible invasion of privacy. However, I do believe that in the kind of article I am

projecting there would be complete protection of the rights of all individuals.

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.

Gey forwarded the letter to TeLinde and others at Hopkins, including the

head of public relations, asking how they thought he should respond.

“I see no reason why an interesting story cannot be made of it without

using her name,” TeLinde replied. “Since there is no reason for doing it I

can see no point in running the risk of getting into trouble by disclosing it.”

TeLinde didn’t say what “trouble” he worried they might get into by

releasing Henrietta’s name. Keeping patient information confidential was

emerging as a standard practice, but it wasn’t law, so releasing it wasn’t out

of the question. In fact, he wrote Gey, “If you seriously disagree with me in

this, I will be glad to talk to you.”

Gey wrote to Berg saying, “An interesting story could still be built

around a fictitious name.” But he wasn’t entirely opposed to releasing her

real name. “There may still be a chance for you to win your point,” he

wrote. “I fully realize the importance of basic human interest elements in a

story such as this and would propose therefore that you drop down to see

Dr. TeLinde and myself.”

Gey never told Berg that the Minneapolis Star article had Henrietta’s

name wrong, and Berg never wrote his article. But the press wasn’t going

away. A few months later, a reporter from Collier’s magazine by the name

of Bill Davidson contacted Gey—he was planning to write a story identical

to the one Berg had proposed. This time Gey took a harder stance, perhaps

because Davidson wasn’t affiliated with one of Gey’s major funding

organizations, as Berg was. Gey agreed to be interviewed under two

conditions: that he be allowed to read and approve the final article, and that

the magazine not include the personal story or full name of the patient the

cells came from.

The editor of the story balked. Like Berg, she wrote that “the human

story behind these cells would be of great interest to the public.” But Gey

wouldn’t budge. If she wanted him or any of his colleagues to talk with

Davidson, Collier’s would have to publish the article without the patient’s

name.

The editor eventually agreed, and on May 14, 1954, Collier’s published a

story about the power and promise of tissue culture. Watching HeLa cells

divide on a screen, Davidson wrote, “was like a glimpse at immortality.”

Because of cell culture, he said, the world was “on the threshold of a

hopeful new era in which cancer, mental illness and, in fact, nearly all

diseases now regarded as incurable will cease to torment man.” And much

of that was thanks to cells from one woman, “an unsung heroine of

medicine.” The story said her name was Helen L., “a young woman in her

thirties when she was admitted to the Johns Hopkins Hospital with an

incurable cancer of the cervix.” It also said Gey had grown Helen L.’s cells

from a sample taken after her death, not before.

There’s no record of where those two pieces of misinformation came

from, but it’s safe to assume they came from within the walls of Hopkins.

As agreed, the Collier’s editor had sent the story to Gey before publication

for review. One week later she got a corrected version back from Joseph

Kelly, the head of public relations at Hopkins. Kelly had rewritten the

article, presumably with Gey’s help, correcting several scientific errors but

leaving two inaccuracies: the timing of growing the cells and the name

Helen L.

Decades later, when a reporter for Rolling Stone asked Margaret Gey

where the name Helen Lane came from, she’d say, “Oh, I don’t know. It

was confused by a publisher in Minneapolis. The name wasn’t supposed to

be revealed at all. It was just that somebody got confused.”

One of Gey’s colleagues told me that Gey created the pseudonym to

throw journalists off the trail of Henrietta’s real identity. If so, it worked.

From the moment the Collier’s article appeared until the seventies, the

woman behind the HeLa cells would be known most often as Helen Lane,

and sometimes as Helen Larson, but never as Henrietta Lacks. And because

of that, her family had no idea her cells were alive.