The Lacks’s story is at once singular - certainly, HeLa cells are unique in their massive application - and emblematic of a larger, shameful pattern: Black people have long served as unwitting, involuntary subjects for (sometimes violent) medical research. Skloot’s book lays out the ethical concerns in the Lacks family’s ongoing struggle to receive compensation and explores tangled histories of race, medicine, and exploitation in the process. But for black people like the Lacks family, especially those from poor or working class backgrounds, limited access to health care made that premise effectively inapplicable. Patient consent for research using tissue removed during a procedure was not required in 1951 the medical providers’ reasoning was that such research would benefit the common good.
They spread to facilities far and wide, eventually being used for studies that would herald unimagined breakthroughs in treating everything from leukemia to Parkinson’s disease to the flu.įor years, the Lacks family has pursued restitution for their mother’s involuntary contribution to science. Named HeLa for the first two letters of Lacks’s first and last names, the sample became the first "immortal" cell line - meaning the cells could be reproduced in a lab, outside Henrietta’s body, making them invaluable for research. Before the cancer killed Lacks in 1951, Johns Hopkins Hospital removed some of her cells during a biopsy and used them for research experiments without permission from Henrietta or any family members. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the HBO adaptation of journalist Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling 2011 book, chronicles the real-life saga of Henrietta’s cells and the children they still haunt. Their "unknown" late mother, a Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lacks (played in the film by Renée Elise Goldsberry), died of cervical cancer when Deborah was a toddler. It’s the closest they’ve ever come to her as adults. Cathy), stand awestruck in the glow of the cells’ projection, basking in their mother’s light. Deborah and her brother, Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman (Reg E. Moments later, with the laboratory lights dimmed, the researcher projects images of the cells onto a wall.
"You’re famous," she whispers to the cells, blowing vapor away from their container. When a medical researcher pulls cells out of the cryo-chamber that keeps them alive, an astonished Deborah Lacks (Oprah Winfrey) cradles the vial in her hands.
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