Vol 463|4 February 2010 BOOKS & ARTS

The woman behind HeLa SPL Steve Silberman enjoys a moving account that probes racial and ethical issues in medicine through the story of the young mother whose death from cancer led to the first immortal line.

The Immortal of bombarded with γ-rays, infused with mouse by Rebecca Skloot DNA and launched into space. Yet many HeLa Crown: 2010. 320 pp. $26 researchers know little about the woman behind them. The one previous book-length account of One day in 1951, a young woman named HeLa history, Michael Gold’s A Conspiracy Henrietta Lacks noticed blood on her under- of Cells (SUNY Press, 1986), largely ignored wear. She had been feeling pains for months Lacks to focus on Walter Nelson-Rees, the that were not relieved by the birth of her fifth cytogeneticist who published lists of cell child, a boy. Finding what she described as a lines that had been contaminated by aggres- “knot” on her womb, Lacks was told by her sive HeLa strains. By bringing the Lacks physician to see a specialist. family out of HeLa’s shadow, Skloot reveals Because Lacks was black, the nearest clinic the societal forces and passions at that would admit her was 30 kilometres work in a scientific advance that has saved away. There, in the segregated ward of Johns millions of . Hopkins University hospital in Baltimore, The architects of Lacks’s virtual immor- Maryland, a gynaecologist discovered a lesion tality were TeLinde along with George and on Lacks’s cervix that was “as big as a 25-cent Margaret Gey, pioneering cell culturists piece … raised, smooth, glistening, and very who had tried for years to invent a method purple.” The chairman of the hospital gynae- of sustaining human cells in vitro. They cology department, Richard TeLinde, thought succeeded when they immersed a portion of that such lesions were a harbinger of invasive Lacks’s tissue in their home-made nutrient . He was right. Lacks’s knot was broth. Within days, “Henrietta’s cells weren’t an adenocarcinoma of formidable metastatic merely surviving — they were growing power. Eight months later she was dead. with mythological intensity,” writes Skloot, In a strange twist of fate, Lacks’s cancer has “doubling their numbers every twenty-four lived on to this day — as HeLa, the first mass- hours, stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, produced human cell line. In an impressive accumulating by the millions.” non-fiction debut, science writer Rebecca The Geys became HeLa evangelists, mail- Skloot weaves the travails of the Lacks family ing out free vials of cells to labs worldwide. with the endeavours of the researchers who To furnish with a way of testing Henrietta Lacks: Twenty years after her death, created HeLa. A real-life detective story, The his vaccine, other researchers scaled up her family learned that her cells lived on in a lab. Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks probes deeply the Geys’s methods. The biotechnology firms into racial and ethical issues in medicine. now known as Invitrogen and BioReliance heady pioneer days of cell research, and the ‘Immortal’ cells such as HeLa can proliferate each got their start by marketing HeLa cells in hard existence of the Lacks family, beset by indefinitely because they do not have the mech- industrial quantities. Meanwhile, Lacks’s five poverty, disease and a succession of people anisms that limit the number of times a cell children were living in Baltimore, too poor to — including a professional con man — who can divide before disintegrating. Key medical afford health insurance and unaware that their tried to turn Henrietta’s legacy to their own advances — including the mother’s cells had taken advantage. development of vaccines on a life of their own. The author forged a particularly tight bond for polio and the human The notion of requiring with Lacks’s feisty daughter Deborah, who papillomavirus — were informed consent before learned from journalists in the 1970s that part made by experimenting taking a tissue sample — of her mother was still alive. Half a century on HeLa cells. In recent particularly from a black after Henrietta first walked into the segre- years, they have been patient on a public ward gated ward at Johns Hopkins, the two worlds VISUALS UNLIMITED/CORBIS VISUALS used to develop chemo- — was foreign to the of Skloot’s book came together in a lab at the therapy drugs, to study medical establishment of university when Deborah saw her mother’s monoclonal antibodies the time. cells under a microscope for the first time. and to examine the effects The emotional impact “They’re beautiful,” she whispered. ■ of exposing human tis- of Skloot’s tale is intensi- Steve Silberman writes on health-related topics sue to nano materials. fied by its skilfully orches- for magazines including Wired and The New The plump, sticky cells trated counterpoint Yorker from San Francisco, California. have been frozen, cloned, ‘Immortal’ HeLa cells just keep on dividing. between two worlds: the e-mail: [email protected]

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