Almost all of us have been touched by cancer. My father just successfully fought off kidney cancer (knock on wood), aided by his ability to access quality (and expensive) medical facilities. Medicare ensured that the bills wouldn't ruin him or our family financially. If ever faced with that disease, I hope I too can face it with the same courage and determination with which he did. Despite the pervasive impact the disease has had on many families, until the publication of Rebecca Skloot's award-winning and best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, many of us have had few opportunities to learn more about the history of how scientists have come to understand the disease and the ongoing fight to find a cure.
One person who stood at the center of this fight, despite being forgotten for a half a century, was Henrietta Lacks. At the age of 30, Lacks, an African American working mother, was diagnosed with cervical cancer likely contracted through the Human Papilloma Virus, more commonly referred to as HPV. It was 1950 in Baltimore, Maryland. Jim Crow ruled, even in charity hospitals like Johns Hopkins.
After her diagnosis, a cell researcher by the name of George Guy, who followed a common practice of undertaking research without consent on the hospital's poor and African American patients, took a sample of Lacks' cancerous tissue for a study he was conducting. Guy, as Skloot relates, had been trying for years to keep a line of human cells alive outside of the body in order to conduct new scientific experiments. So far, all of his attempts had failed.
But Henrietta Lacks' cancerous cells, now known in the scientific community as HeLa, proved different. Not only did they stay alive, but they grew so rapidly that within a few years researchers all of the world were using them to study and discover polio vaccines, genetic research, cancer research, and so much more. Scientists today still use her cells for a wide variety of purposes.
For most of that time, however, no one knew Henrietta Lacks' name. George Guy had kept it a secret, out of the desire to preserve her family's privacy, he said. But quite possibly also because he didn't want the world to know that the basis of much of the experimental medical and scientific research of the century derived from the body of a Black woman. Can you imagine the racial theorists of the 1950s having to deal with the irrefutable fact that cell tissue from an African American woman had turned the scientific world on its head?
Skloot's book is important for both its accessible but detailed discussion of the medical research involved as well as the poignant story of the Henrietta Lacks' life and the ongoing struggle of her children and grandchildren to know her story and to fight for her recognition. Through her contact and years' long relationship with Deborah Lacks, who was two when her mother passed away, Skloot wonderfully pieces together the details of life that would otherwise have remained anonymous. Indeed, the it was Deborah and her brothers who fought to ensure that their mother's memory would not be left to the dustbin of history.
This story resurrects Henrietta Lacks the woman, the mother, the caretaker, the fun-loving, beautiful young woman, from the the abstraction of the name given by George Guy to her cells, HeLa. In the process, with the constant aid of Deborah LAcks, Skloot humanizes Henrietta's family, uncovers details about race and the healthcare system, and brings to light the social forces that make a life and a family.
It is a powerfully moving story, a must read; it is also a book you will find yourself unable to put down until the end.
