The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.,Rebecca Skloot

Reviewed by: Tanya L. Sharpe University of Maryland, School of Social Work, USA

Medical misconduct and betrayal, disregard for human dignity, and a lack of integrity for the patients and family members of Blacks in need of medical care; it is a story I am all too familiar with growing up in a Black household of educators and social workers who never let me forget the physical, mental, and spiritual sacrifices of those who had come before me. The reminders of anticipated hardship were not given to me in the hopes of overcoming those obstacles, but were bestowed upon me with the certainty that I would share in the responsibility of maintaining that legacy of fortitude and service in spite of discriminatory and oppressive obstructions that were certain to cross my path.

In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, provides a missing piece to that ‘familiar’ story by revealing the true origin of the first immortal human cell to live outside of the body. A cluster of cells that were taken from a Black (Colored) woman named Henrietta Lacks without her permission, and for the next sixty years those cells continued to thrive, multiply, and be used by scientists in laboratories throughout the globe contributing to some of the greatest scientific discoveries (e.g. causes of cancer, origins and affects of HIV, polio and HPV vaccine).

Through extensive ethnographic-like inquiry, Skloot carefully weaves together a story of scientific discovery, researcher humility and perseverance while telling the story of a family’s search for understanding and truth. Skloot’s work makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evolution of ethical research protocols and the impact of race-based structured inequality on the lived experiences and perceptions of the researcher and respondents.

In Part One of the book, Skloot takes the reader with her as she learns more about Henrietta’s humble yet communal upbringing in her hometown of Clover, Virginia. Despite her challenges of making contact with Lacks’ family members, Skloot manages to transport us to an era where Blacks were considered to be Colored property – lacking equal rights and denied access to many services – by providing us with a detailed account of Henrietta’s first and subsequent visits to Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, MD, of a large knot in her womb.

The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients, most of them Black, and unable to pay their medical bills. David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated Black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow – when Black people showed up at White only hospitals, the staff was likely to send then away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot. Even Hopkins, which did treat Black patients, segregated them in colored wards, and had colored-only fountains. So when the nurse called Henrietta from the waiting room, she led her through a single door to a colored-only exam room  …  for Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. (pp. 15–16)

In Part Two, Skloot provides historical accounts of how the death of Henrietta Lacks breathed life into a medical revolution through the examination, exploration, and world-wide distribution of her cells (known throughout the world a HeLa cells). Upon her death, Henrietta’s remains were transported in a plain pine wood box (all that her family could afford), from Baltimore, Maryland to Clover, Virginia while the scientific world was bursting at the seams with the potential profitable advancement of science as they had known it:

… Henrietta’s cells grew unlike any human cells he’d [Dr. George Gey] seen. Most cells in culture grew in a single layer in a clot on a glass surface, which meant they ran out of space quickly … HeLa cells weren’t limited by space in the same way other cells were; they could simply divide until they ran out of culture medium. The bigger the vat of medium, the more the cells grew … HeLa was a workhorse: it was hardy, it was inexpensive and it was everywhere  … when it became clear that there was no risk of a HeLa shortage, they began sending the cells to any scientist interested in buying them, for ten dollars plus Air Express fees. (pp. 94–97)

In Part Three, the worlds of Henrietta’s family and that of Rebecca Skloot intersect, as Skloot becomes the primary trustworthy source of information for the family regarding what happened to Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells.

I will not give away all the details, but members of the Lacks family have their own theories about the immortality of Henrietta’s cells and these ideas are woven into the conversations and actions of the family members. Her family would refer to the cells as both a curse and a miracle – a difficult dichotomy.

Them doctors say her cells is so important and did all this and that to help people. But it didn’t do no good for her, and it don’t do no good for us. If me and my sister need something, we can’t even go see a doctor’cause we can’t afford it. (p. 246)

Henrietta was chosen, and when the Lord chooses an angel to do his work, you never know what they going to come back looking like. (p. 295)

Scientists would call it the discovery that launched a medical revolution, that enabled ‘researchers around the world to work with the same cells, growing in the same media, using the same equipment’ (p. 99), saving scientists millions of dollars and launching rapid scientific advancement in the field of virology.

I read the book twice recalling Deborah’s (Henrietta’s daughter) search for understanding of what happened to her mother before and after her death as if it were my own personal journey of self-discovery.

I applaud Skloot’s ability to thoughtfully explain the duplex and yet myopic nature of scientific research while paying homage to the essence of the biological and spiritual immortality of a people that reside within Henrietta Lacks.

As a Black researcher, focused on examining the coping strategies of Black family members who are surviving the homicide of a loved one, I am often asked if gaining access to the population of which I am a part is an ‘easier’ process than that of my White colleagues. My response is consistently the same. As a Black, female, social work researcher, issues of race, class, power and privilege are always a part of my internal and external, personal, and professional dialogue. Therefore, carefully straddling the fence of serving my community while examining it is a challenge that requires a great deal of strategic resolve, requiring that I serve as a translator of two worlds that historically have not spoken the same language; helping others to understand that traditionally greater value has been placed on the work of research institutions in spite of the important voices of those we serve. Creating credibility and trust within and outside research institutions is not ‘easier’, for me but it is a fundamental challenge I accept in order to do this work and I train my students to do the same.

Not too long after reading this book my family and I laid my maternal grandmother to rest. While preparing her eulogy I remembered my cousin telling me that weeks before her passing, my grandmother told her that she did not ‘know how to die’. At the cemetery, I remember the winds howling, creating the strangest weather pattern I had ever seen, on one side of the cemetery grounds snowflakes were falling and on the opposite side, the sky was clear and sunny. No one said a word but I watched some of my elders just shake their heads and smile as if to acknowledge that the weather in fact symbolized the great power and spirit of my grandmother still walking among the living.

In the end, or perhaps it is the beginning (beyond biological cell structure); I would like to think that there is a little Henrietta Lacks in all of us. Henrietta’s story reminds us of her everlasting gift, and our sacred responsibility, as researchers, clinicians, and as human beings, to unveiling the falsehoods and truths of humanity in preservation of greater quality of life for all.