The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

the patient’s name. The editor eventually agreed, and on May 14, 1954, Collier’s published a story about the power and promise o ...

A fter Henrietta’s funeral, cousins came from Clover and all over Turner Station to help cook for her family and care for the ba ...

Henrietta’s children grew up hungry. Every morning Ethel fed them each a cold biscuit that had to last them until dinner. She pu ...

gether when Bobbette was twenty and Lawrence was twenty-four, and they had their first child that same year. They also found out ...

wanted him to leave her alone. Deborah had started scrubbing people’s floors and ironing for small amounts of money. She’d try t ...

Bobbette stormed over to Galen and Ethel’s house, and burst in their front door screaming that if either of them touched one of ...

Deborah didn’t know she had a sister for much of her childhood. When Day finally told her, all he said was that Elsie was deaf a ...

“It sound strange,” he said, “but her cells done lived longer than her memory.” If I wanted to know anything about Henrietta, he ...

“Henrietta kept it nice—a real home-house. Now I can’t hardly recognize it.” The floors inside were covered with straw and manur ...

ELIZA WIFE OF J.R . PLEASANT JUL 12, 1888 OCTOBER 28, 1924 GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN Until I read those dates, I hadn’t done the ma ...

Then suddenly he yelled at the ground, as if he was talking directly to Henrietta. “They named them HeLa! And they still living! ...

The other brothers, Albert and Benjamin, led more private lives and left behind little history aside from their wills and land d ...

W hen I went to visit Carlton and Ruby Lacks, the oldest white Lackses in Clover, they smiled and chitchatted as they led me fro ...

Later, I asked Henrietta’s sister Gladys what she thought of their theory. Though she’d lived about a mile from Carlton and Ruby ...

Southam had a frightening thought: What if Henrietta’s cancer cells could infect the scientists working on them? Gey and several ...

an ad in the Ohio State Penitentiary newsletter: Physician seeks 25 volunteers for cancer re- search. A few days later he had ni ...

they are foreign to the recipient and hence are rejected. The only drawback to the use of can- cer cells is the phobia and ignor ...

But the Nuremberg Code—like other codes that would come after it—wasn’t law. It was, essentially, a list of recommendations. It ...

One member of the hospital’s board of directors, a lawyer named William Hyman, didn’t think they were being overly sensitive. Wh ...

“Let’s face it,” Southam responded, “there are relatively few skilled cancer researchers, and it seemed stupid to take even the ...