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. ![]() READ MORE: The ‘Father of Modern Gynecology’ Performed Shocking Experiments on Enslaved Women The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Prologue My father gave consent, so his story is of course very different from Henrietta’s, but as a child with a father in a clinical trial I became obsessed with the question of who are the individuals behind the research and how does that impact them and their families? My next book returns to related ground: Animals, research, and ethics-another area of science where everyone benefits, and where it’s important to ask where to draw the line between the benefit of science and the impact on research subjects. I imagine that’s because I was a kid watching her own parent be part of scientific research and experiencing the ups and downs of that: The hope that it will help, the fear of what might happen, and in my dad’s case, the pain of research going wrong. 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. (Credit: John Lamparski/WireImage)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. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks author Rebecca Skloot, April 2017.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |