The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks summary

In the early 1950s, scientists and doctors were searching for ways to keep human cells alive outside the body so that they could conduct experimental research that would contribute to curing such illnesses as cancer, polio, herpes and influenza.

However, they struggled to keep the cells alive. When extracted from the body and placed in a culture medium (a liquid which helps cells survive), most of the cells would quickly die.

Soon after Henrietta’s death in 1951, preparations were underway for the creation of a “HeLa factory,” a project to mass-produce HeLa cells on a weekly basis. The project had one overarching goal: to find a cure for polio.

But why were the HeLa cells so amenable to mass production? There were several reasons.

The HeLa cells spread around the world, from lab to lab, at a fantastic rate. Yet as the cells’ fame and importance grew, their source was quickly forgotten.

In 1999, the author stumbled across a number of articles that were presented at a conference on the HeLa cells at Morehouse Medical School in Atlanta – one of the oldest historically black universities in the United States.

Following the death of Henrietta, her family struggled financially. To make ends meet, Henrietta’s widower, Day, began working two jobs. Meanwhile, her oldest son, Lawrence, left school to look after his two brothers, Sonny and Joe, and his sister, Deborah.

In the midst of these difficult times, there was also the burning question among the children of what had happened to their mother. Even though they were keen to know the answer, the children didn’t press their father; he’d already told them explicitly not to ask any questions that might rock the boat, and to accept that their mother had simply gone away.

The author’s uphill battle in researching Henrietta’s life was in large part due to the family’s deep-seated lack of faith in her – a white reporter – to tell the story. Also, as mentioned previously, their hesitancy had its roots in a major distrust of and apprehension toward the medical field, because of its history with black Americans.

However, even though there are documented cases of the exploitation of black people by scientists, many of the stories circulating among black Americans were fictional. Since the 1800s, one of the tales shared via black oral history was a particularly sinister one: the case of the “night doctors” that kidnap black people to experiment on them.

After distributing HeLa cells to research centers and hospitals all over the world, scientists continued research on HeLa and other cell cultures in the hope that cures for various diseases would shortly follow.

But in 1966, a major problem with the research was revealed.

The widespread contamination of HeLa cells led doctors to try to locate Henrietta’s surviving family. Luckily, the family were patients at Johns Hopkins, so there was little difficulty in obtaining their contact information.

The doctors hoped that by taking samples from the family, they would be able to continue research on the contamination, and develop a way to map the human genome.

The case of Henrietta and the HeLa cells is certainly exceptional, since Henrietta was unfortunate enough to have a very aggressive form of cancer that nonetheless aided research and development to cure other diseases.

But it’s also unexceptional, in that what happened to Henrietta could have happened to others – and in fact did, in at least two similar cases.

At this point, you might reasonably wonder whether the actions of doctors in cases such as Henrietta’s – that is, isolating and marketing a patient’s cells without their consent – were illegal or not.

In fact, from Henrietta’s day to the time the author was writing (2009), such practices were not illegal.