The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

forms. The NIH concluded: “In the setting in which the patient is involved in an experimental effort, the judgment of the invest ...

at home using instructions from a Scientific American do-it-yourself article, and both Russian and American scientists had manag ...

transformed cells seemed to behave identically to HeLa, he wrote, which could mean that HeLa was the contaminant. Soon after his ...

The scientists on the Collection Committee set out to create the Fort Knox of pure, uncon- taminated cell culture. They transpor ...

brown mouse with a white one—then breeding their offspring to see how genetic traits passed from one generation to the next. But ...

The Times of London called the HeLa-mouse cells the “strangest hybrid form of life ever seen in the lab—or out of it.” A Washing ...

saying she couldn’t go to school all big and pregnant. “That don’t matter,” Bobbette said, “you’re goin to that special girls sc ...

been drinking, and they’d just started talking up a group of young girls when three other men walked up the street toward them. ...

couldn’t get along there either. The next morning he called Sonny and said, “Come pick me up, I want to turn myself in.” On the ...

... for the record, [he] had some psychiatric help in the service, but he has never been in any hospital. Without knowing anythi ...

Cheetah raised his arm to hit her again, but he was clumsy from the drugs and booze. De- borah blocked him with her empty hand a ...

The HeLa Bomb I n September 1966, a geneticist named Stanley Gartler walked up to the podium at a hotel in Bedford, Pennsylvania ...

Scientists knew they had to keep their cultures free from bacterial and viral contamination, and they knew it was possible for c ...

taneous transformation—one of the most celebrated prospects for finding a cure for can- cer—might not exist. Normal cells didn’t ...

“Caucasian subjects with G6PD-A have not been reported,” Gartler told him. Later that day—in a talk chaired by George Gey—Hayfli ...

wo months after Sonny Lacks stood me up, I sat waiting for him again, this time in the lobby of the Baltimore Holiday Inn. It wa ...

I got out of the car and Sonny drove away, yelling, “Good luck!” out the window. All I knew about Sonny’s brothers was that they ...

“The only memory I have about my mother is her being strict,” he told me. He re- membered her making him hand-wash diapers in th ...

“Imagine that,” Lawrence said, shaking his head. “It’s a miracle!” Suddenly, Sonny threw open the screen door, yelling, “Miss Re ...

Bobbette seemed like a loud person being quiet, like a woman with an enormous laugh and temper who might erupt with either at an ...