Was blog-hopping today and came across a mention of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book that was immediately was added to my to-read list.
Hilary Mantel reviewed it for the Guardian:
In old-fashioned museums you can see the unconscious benefactors of mankind, trapped in glass cases: the freaks and monsters of their day, the anomalies, sometimes skeletonised and entire, sometimes cut into parts and labelled. When we look at them, fascination and repulsion uneasily mixed, we bow our heads to their contribution to knowledge, but it is hard to locate their humanity. The thread of empathy has frayed and snapped. They have become objects, more stone than flesh: petrified, post-human.
Henrietta Lacks is a medical specimen of quite another kind. No dead woman has done more for the living, and yet we can imagine her easily from her photograph, a vivacious woman who was only 31 years when she died in 1951 in a “coloured ward” in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Beloved by her family, a lively, open-hearted woman, Henrietta died in intractable pain, and at the autopsy her body’s interior was pearled by tumours. Towards the end she had been given only palliative treatment, but no one had explained this to her family, who still hoped she might be cured. She left behind a husband and five children, the youngest only a baby. But she also left behind a slice of tissue, a piece excised from the cervical cancer that was her primary tumour. From this sample her cells were cultured.
Previously, researchers had found it frustratingly difficult to keep alive fragile human cell lines, but these cells were robust and multiplied at an astonishing rate. In the years following Henrietta’s death, the cell line, by laboratory convention known as HeLa, became an unparalleled research tool. Cells were sent to laboratories through the world, bought and sold by research teams. They could be frozen, and their development paused and restarted. Because of them, thousands of experiments on live animals were not needed. Trillions of them are still alive, more than ever grew in Henrietta’s living body. They have been employed in research into the polio vaccine, and into the effects of atomic warfare; they were shot into space, used in AIDS research. But the woman who generated them, frequently misnamed, remained largely unknown, and her family benefited not at all from the unwitting donation of her money-spinning tissues.
I am thunderstruck by this story, truly. And though there has been tremendous benefit from it, I am appalled by the way this poor, black woman’s person was exploited without her knowledge or consent, and I look askance at recent moves to “honour” her contribution to modern medicine and science. I find the whole thing more than slightly disquieting.
If you’re interested, there’s more at Wikipedia about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells, and you can read an excerpt from the book at the New York Times website.