The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

All the cousins teased Joe, saying, “Maybe he thought that ice water might’a cool him off, but he so hot for her, that water nea ...

enough tobacco each season to feed the family and plant the next crop. So after their wedding, Day went back to gripping the spl ...

The work was tough, especially for black men, who got the jobs white men wouldn’t touch. Like Fred, black workers usually starte ...

fter her visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went about life as usual, cleaning and cooking for Day, their children, and the many cousin ...

Diagnosing carcinoma in situ had only been possible since 1941, when George Papanicol- aou, a Greek researcher, published a pape ...

earlier biopsies first had carcinoma in situ. In addition to that study, TeLinde thought, if he could find a way to grow living ...

page. It said: I hereby give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under an ...

One nurse placed the Brack plaques on a stainless-steel tray. Another wheeled Henrietta into the small colored-only operating ro ...

G ey’s twenty-one-year-old assistant, Mary Kubicek, sat eating a tuna-salad sandwich at a long stone culture bench that doubled ...

pipette. Mary didn’t realize until months later that he’d been studying her hands, checking their dexterity and strength to see ...

Margaret taught George everything he knew about keeping cultures sterile, and she did the same with every technician, grad stude ...

G eorge Gey was born in 1899 and raised on a Pittsburgh hillside overlooking a steel mill. Soot from the smokestacks made his pa ...

Gey was a reckless visionary—spontaneous, quick to start dozens of projects at once, filling the lab and his basement at home wi ...

But Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intens- ity. By the next morning they’d doub ...

When she wasn’t in Clover, Henrietta spent her time cooking for Day, the children, and whichever cousins happened to be at her h ...

Ethel showed up. When they weren’t sneaking out, Henrietta, Sadie, and Sadie’s sister Margaret spent evenings in Henrietta’s liv ...

the water being contaminated by Sparrows Point. Anytime Henrietta got word that Lawrence was at the pier, she’d storm down there ...

lower spine from the radiation. On the first day he tattooed two black dots with temporary ink on either side of her abdomen, ju ...

One afternoon, as Henrietta lay on the couch, she lifted her shirt to show Margaret and Sadie what the treatments had done to he ...

For the next hour, Pattillo grilled me about my intentions. As I told him about the history of my HeLa obsession, he grumbled an ...