![]() There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. I’m pretty sure that she-like most of us-would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever-bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. ![]() She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells-her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.” Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her-a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. When I first heard about Henrietta I thought: I wonder if she had any kids and what they think about those cells. He enrolled in a clinical trial that had some ethical problems, and I watched it all. It was terrifying-no one knew what was wrong with him, and it left him permanently disabled. ![]() He lost his memory, he couldn’t move from a recliner in the living room. Because of a viral infection, one day he went from being my healthy marathon-running dad to being incapacitated. When I was 16, the year I first learned about HeLa cells, my father got very sick. In the excerpt below, you can read the beginning of that story-the moment I first learned about HeLa cells.īut since the book’s publication in 2010, many people have asked “What made you become so obsessed with her in that moment?” I was obsessed with the question of who Henrietta was for decades. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks author Rebecca Skloot, April 2017.Īll I knew when I first called Henrietta’s family was that HeLa cells were of the most important advances in science and that they’d come from a black woman who no one knew anything about. ![]()
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