The name says it all!

1. Haley Lynn Shoemaker
Senior Seminar
Spring 2013
Words
Henrietta Lacks
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks gave readers across the United States a blisteringly
personal look into the life of a poor uneducated African American woman who unknowingly
changed science and medicine forever. It was written by Rebecca Skloot, a journalist whose
coverage of scientific stories has appeared in several prominent publications such as The New
York Times Magazine and Discover.1 Skloot obtained a B.S. degree in biological sciences from
Colorado State and an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburg.2 Skloot
wove the story of Henrietta Lacks into a profoundly empathetic narrative. She attempted to
return basic human dignity to this woman after years of clinical obsession posthumously
dehumanized and objectified her. By choosing this approach, Skloot also aimed her work at the
widest possible audience. However, it would be misleading to call The Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks a “human interest” piece; doing so would suggest that Skloot came as an
outsider and recorded the tragedy of others in order to sell books. Instead, Skloot did that which
so few people dare to: she took the problems of a stranger and made them her own. Her work is a
testament to human compassion.
Henrietta Lacks was born on August 1st, 1920. She grew up in Clover, Virginia. Her
family was excruciatingly poor. She lived with her grandfather and her cousin David “Day”
Lacks in a former slave cabin with no electricity or running water. When she was 14, she and
1 “Rebecca Skloot: Bio,” accessed April 2, 2013, http://rebeccaskloot.com/about/bio/.
2 Jeff Baker, “Like father, like daughter: Rebecca Skloot follows her father's literary path,” published April 23,
2010, http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/04/like_father_like_daughter_rebe.html.

2. Day had their first child, Lawrence. When their second child, Lucile Elsie Pleasant, was born
four years later, she suffered from epilepsy, mental retardation and congenital neurosyphilis.
Henrietta and Day got married when she was 20 and he was 25, on April 10th, 1941. The next
year the family moved to Baltimore. Nearly a decade later, Henrietta found a knot on her cervix.
A year after that, she could no longer ignore it, and on January 29th, 1951, Day took her to Johns
Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Howard Jones found a tumor on her cervix and took a sample for biopsy.
The biopsy showed that she had “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage 1.”3 On February
5th, 1951, Jones called Henrietta to tell her to return for treatment. While administering the
treatment, the surgeon took samples from Henrietta’s cervix without her knowledge or consent.
These samples were taken to Dr. George Gey, a researcher at Hopkins, to aid him in his attempt
to grow an immortal line of human cells. He christened them HeLa cells, using the first two
letters of the “donor’s” first and last name. Henrietta’s cancer cells soon grew at an unheard-of
rate, doubling their numbers every 24 hours.4 Gey started sending vials of cells to any colleagues
who asked, spreading them to labs around the world. Meanwhile, Henrietta began to get worse,
and her body filled with tumors. On August 8th, 1951, she was admitted to Hopkins. She was in
horrific pain as the tumors took over her body, and she passed away on October 4th, 1951. Gey
immediately requested an autopsy of her body to get more HeLa cells. Day initially refused, but
was persuaded. Soon after her death, Gey set out to mass produce the HeLa cells to test Joseph
Salk’s new polio vaccine. A “HeLa Factory” was set up at the Tuskegee institute, and they began
sending out the cells in ever-increasing quantities. Various discoveries were made using the
cells, and on November 2nd, 1953, the Minneapolis Star wrote a story about “Henrietta Lakes”
and her immortal cells. Gey and others at Hopkins were upset by what they saw as a breach of
3 Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Random House: New York, 2010, pg. 27.
4 Henrietta Lacks, pg. 40-1.

3. patient privacy, and they asked their colleagues to use the name “Helen L.” in future. This
stopped the Lacks family from learning for years that Henrietta’s cells were still alive, and in fact
had become a pillar of scientific research. Then, in 1973, Henrietta’s family learned about the
HeLa cells. First, genetic researchers came to the family to obtain blood samples. The family
thought they were being tested for cancer. Nothing was explained to them. Then, Mike Rogers
from Rolling Stone interviewed the family. His article sparked a flurry of media interest and
alerted the Lacks men that millions of dollars had already been made from Henrietta’s cells, part
of which they tried without success to collect. A subsequent book published about Henrietta
quoted extensively from her medical records, but neither the author nor Henrietta’s doctors
admitted knowing how the records were released. Eventually, a con man tried to obtain
Henrietta’s records, and when he was prevented, he sued the Lacks family, who were
understandably shaken when piles of incomprehensible legal paperwork began arriving. Thus, by
the time Skloot began trying to contact the family to write her book, they had become extremely
reticent and frustrated. Only by being extremely patient and persistent and by immersing herself
fully in the lives of the Lacks family was Skloot able to gain any information about Henrietta.
There was no tidy ending to the Lacks’ story: the family still struggles with extreme poverty and
lack of education. Following the release of the book, Skloot set up a foundation for the Lacks
children, which has to date raised 50 thousand dollars and provided the children with medical
and dental care, tuition and emergency assistance.5
Rebecca Skloot did not spend ten years chasing a story she thought would sell, or even
simply a story she thought deserved to be told. She saw the human being behind a scientific
footnote and was unable to revert to seeing her only as a vat of cells. She spent the years of her
5 Patricia Cohen, “Returning the Blessings of an Immortal Life,” The New York Times, February 4, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/books/05lacks.html?_r=0.

4. research investing herself deeply in the well-being of a group of strangers. Skloot shared nothing
in common with the Lacks; she was of a different race, class, culture, faith, and educational
level. Despite all this, there rang throughout her work a clear, sincere and intensely personal
sense of outrage at the abuses the Lacks family had suffered. At one point, she literally took the
spiritual burden of the cells from Henrietta’s daughter Deborah.6 She had the courage to open
herself up to truly caring about a stranger, for no immediate or guaranteed personal gain.
However great her commitment to the subject may have been, Rebecca Skloot did not use
historical methodology when writing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In a note preceding
the text, Skloot called the book “a work of nonfiction.”7 This statement is true as it applies to
journalism; but from a historical standpoint too much dramatic license has been taken for that to
be true. Much of the narrative read as novel, as the reader was presented with the thoughts of
major characters and no clear source for the conspicuous levels of detail within the intimate
scenes constructed. Skloot explained this by saying “I relied on interviews, legal documents, and
her medical records to re-create scenes from her life… dialogue is either deduced from the
written record or quoted verbatim as it was recounted to me in an interview.”8 The book also
contained no textual citations of any kind or a complete bibliography. In fact, in the notes
following the text, Skloot wrote “my sources are too extensive to list in their entirety,” which is
the historical equivalent of a cardinal sin.
While Henrietta Lacks does not hold up as a scholarly historical text, the argument must
be made that it doesn’t have to. The story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells is in part
motivated by scholarly disinterest and the possible dehumanizing effect of academia. It is a tale
that needed desperately to be told, and it needed to be told in such a way that those who read it
6 Henrietta Lacks, pg. 293.
7 Henrietta Lacks, pg. xiii.
8 Henrietta Lacks, pg. xiv.

5. felt compelled to see the woman behind the scientific breakthroughs and to identify with her.
Skloot was able to bring emotional and societal truths out of the tragedy surrounding the Lacks
family in part because she was not fettered by a need to establish a sense of historical
detachment, and it would be a mistake to discount those truths just because they cannot be neatly
footnoted. Henrietta Lack’s subjectivity makes the work infinitely more enthralling, more
emotionally immediate and more likely to inspire empathy in its readers; that subjectivity could
in fact be its greatest strength.
In conclusion, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks showed the intersection of poverty,
ignorance, racism and lack of scientific oversight in sharp relief. It was a cautionary tale against
abstraction and a searing indictment of medical and scientific arrogance, but most of all it was a
long-overdue memorial to a woman objectified by science in the most literal sense. What the
work lacks in historical methodology it makes up in courage, immediacy and humanity.