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Do you notice the subtle detail that connects Henrietta (even in death) to a larger occasion in the nation? (89 - second sentence)

Examine paragraph #2 closely. What is the irony here?

See the paragraph on p. 90 beginning "The official cause of death..." which uses a number of metaphors and similes. What two things are her tumors compared to? What is the implication of those comparisons?

What does Mary (Gey's assistant) react to most when she first sees Henrietta's dead body?

Henrietta's body travels through Lacks Town to home-house and when the casket is opened, what causes Sadie to cry? (92) How does this repeated detail about Henrietta characterize her?

How does the family interpret the storm that develops just as Henrietta is buried?

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Bobbette discovers Henrietta's cells are alive and being used all over the world from a neighbor!

Notice how Skloot uses language to build suspense and to highlight the shock of family as they discover that Henrietta's cells are alive. What do they believe about Henrietta? What do they believe about doctors and scientists?

In order to sort out the contamination problem, researchers need blood samples from the family. Look at the contrast between what the blood was truly for and what the family thought it was for!

Notice how even in 1973 the idea of "informed consent" is still not understood nor applied (184). It wasn't until late in 1973 that the Protection of Human Subject regulations were first being reviewed.

How does the author use pathos when describing how Susan Hsu obtained blood samples from the family?

Analyze the last paragraph of the chapter. What does Hsu's request reveal about her attitude toward the Lackses? (190)

What does Skloot reveal by ending the chapter with Hsu's request? (190)

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"bad blood" (14) syphilis

"heavy metals (14) controlled measure of lead, arsenic, and copper

"Sadie always figured Henrietta kept it secret because she was afraid a doctor would take her womb and make her stop having children" (14) Henrietta's fears were not unfounded; history in the Jim Crowe south of black women being sterilized without their knowledge when they came to hospital to give birth and also being told they needed an "appendix" surgery

Johns Hopkins Hospital's history dealing with segregation and the legacy of Henrietta Lacks

Notice "foreign country" simile (16)

Unique description of the tumor (17)

Chapter ends with mystery: "Either her doctors had missed it during her last exams - which seemed impossible - or it had grown at a terrifying rate" (17)

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For old pictures of Clover, check out the video link in the NOTES section of the Appendix in this padlet.

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You'll notice events consistent with the Jim Crowe era throughout Henrietta's life story, but there are some direct references to separation of the blacks and whites in this chapter.

On Sparrows Point (start at slide 100 in link above) Steel Mills in Baltimore, see in Part I (Life), ch.2: Clover…1920-1942 (pp.25-26), ch.5: “Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside”…1951 ( pp.45-46), ch.9: Turner Station…1999 (p.69), & ch.10: The Other Side of the Tracks…1999 (p.83).

Background to her cousin/husband Day, Crazy Joe, Elsie.

Dramatic end to chapter as the family leaves for Turner Station.

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Lots of ethos. Author establishing herself with the reader.

Notice: asyndeton, parallelism

Take a look at the official book trailer!

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Since we are missing out on so many opportunities for class discussion, I wanted to share some resources and ideas that will help your understanding. I also wanted to provide you with some annotation support. Many of these posts hint strongly at areas of importance in the text as well as ways the author uses language.

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Fascinating look at the legality - then and now - of all that happened to Henrietta's cancer cells.

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The columns in this padlet coincide mostly with sections in the Table of Contents.

Underlined text refers to a link. Click on it!

What's included? Annotation hints, helpful background knowledge, explanation of references in the text, and things to think about when reading.

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How did Rolling Stone reporter Michael Rogers find Henrietta's real name?

What facts about Gey's life support the assertion that he never personally profited from the development of HeLa? (193-194)

Who does profit from HeLa cells? To what extent?

Deborah begins researching HeLa, but it terrifies her.

McKusick and Hsu published the Lackses genetic information. Thanks partially to HIPPA law passed in 1996, this unethical practice is also illegal and can result in a $250,000 fine and 10 years in jail (197-198)

Why do you think Skloot ends this chapter with teh introduction of John Moore's story?

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On a mild, rainy Thursday, early in February of 1951, an energetic young black woman, just 31, appeared for examination at the outpatient gynecologic clinic of Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital - a massive, copper-spired castle of brick, ten minutes' walk east of downtown. That same day, 21 German war criminals, sentenced to die on the gallows, were spared in the most sweeping American clemency move since the cessation of hostilities.

At just about the same time the Germans received their clemency, the young woman received her death sentence, phrased in the precise language of the pathology lab: a tiny purplish lesion on her cervix, less than an inch in diameter, was cancer.

Her malignancy diagnosed, the patient would spend the remaining eight months of her life shuttling in and out of Johns Hopkins for treatment, to die there, finally, during the long humid days of late summer, leaving behind a soft-spoken husband, five children, a handful of photographs - and a tiny piece of her own flesh that by now, a quarter-century later, thrives and conquers in laboratories around the world.

The first time I heard about Helen Lane was the spring of 1974 in the men's room of a San Francisco medical school library, where an odd, felt-pen scrawl over the urinal read "Helen Lane Lives!"

The observation was meaningless to me then, and I likely would have forgotten it altogether - except less than two months later I ran across Helen Lane again. This time it was in the prestigious pages of Science. Helen Lane was the topic of a brief, highly technical paper that immediately sent tremors through the whole structure of international medical research.

According to the paper, the oldest and most dependable line of human cells, dubbed HeLa, had suddenly been found to be not only old and dependable, but positively aggressive. These tiny human cells had surreptitiously spread from their own glass containers to infiltrate and subvert whole sets of other cell lines - altogether unbeknownst to the countless medical researchers who based their work on them.

HeLa, according to Science, is cell culture shorthand for Helen Lane, and Helen Lane is a big name in that arcane pursuit. Human tissue culture is essentially the art of convincing a glass-bound set of cells that it is in fact still safely ensconced within some warm body and thereby prompting its continued reproduction. That's not an easy trick, but over the past 20 years, tissue culture has become a critical tool in medical research, allowing the scientist to observe all sorts of cellular processes - from virus infections to nutrition - without actually having to fool around with a whole live human being. And it started, really, with Helen Lane-a Baltimore woman now long dead, whose cancerous cervical cells performed so spectacularly in laboratory glassware that they became, almost overnight, one of the hottest items in experimental biomedicine.

Now, a quarter of a century later, HeLa also looks like a major problem. For, it develops, even a single HeLa cell transferred on a glass pipette by a careless technician can overgrow an entire precisely labeled colony of different cells and settle in, right at home. At that point, of course, that precise label becomes meaningless and thus, by now, some number of researchers who had thought all along that they were experimenting with kidney cells from Los Angeles or breast tumors from Vladivostok were in fact all working with identical versions of those vigorous cervical cells from Baltimore.

In the delicate realms of biomedical research that's not exactly a minor error. It is closer, all in all, to disaster.

Just how disastrous, the Science paper wouldn't even hint. How, I wondered, does this tissue culture business work? How did this HeLa cell become a monster amidst the Pyrex? What are the implications for research - and most of all, who was this Helen Lane?

That wet Baltimore February day when the young black woman first appeared at the Johns Hopkins clinic, a physician/researcher named George Gey and his wife, Margaret, in a small laboratory in the same building, were rapidly approaching the culmination of a quarter-century's work in the techniques of growing human cells in glass. Gey - who died in 1970 - will likely be recognized someday as a significant figure in the medical history of the early 20th century. "Biology and medicine," said one journal, a few months after his death, "are greatly indebted to George Gey, whose skill with the tissue culture technique made so much possible."

Back in 1951, however, Gey was less lionized; he blew his own glassware, employed his wife and worked long hours to support his laboratory. His research had little funding - during most of Gey's career the great war on cancer, which would put living human cells at a premium, was still well in the future.

In 1933 - after eight years of shoestring research-Gey had invented the "roller tube" - a device for cell culture which, by means of slow rotation, offers the developing cells more nutrition than was possible in the traditional hollow-ground depression of a glass microscope slide. While human cells had been cultured before Gey's roller tube, it was a major step forward in simplifying what had previously been a spectacularly delicate, erratic operation.

Gey's wife, Margaret, still has the first roller tube. "He blew the glass for it himself," she says, "put the cells in and rolled it in an incubator overnight. And that was the breakthrough. Pretty soon bacteriologists were using it, and then . . . Oh my!"

But even the roller tube didn't mark smooth sailing for the Geys. "We were lucky," says Margaret Gey, "during the Depression to have $5000 a year to work with. We had to do everything from scratch. I painted our lab myself. These days people waste so much money."

Almost 20 years after the first roller tube, the young Baltimore black woman walked into Johns Hopkins and eight days after that, the resident gynecologist passed onto the Geys a tiny bit of her ultimately fatal lesion - rescued, as it were, just before the first round of her radium treatments. Gey grew that tissue in his roller tube and after several weeks of mounting excitement, he realized that this time he had cultured something very special. Historical, even. "HeLa," noted one journal, "with a generation time of about 24 hours, if allowed to grow uninhibited under optimum culture conditions, would have taken over the world by this time."

HeLa's contribution to modern medicine began immediately. The day before the young woman first visited the Baltimore clinic, 10,000 mothers marched against polio in New York City; three years later, the HeLa strain would take those mothers off the street permanently. Polio is caused by a virus and viruses require cells in which to grow. These indefatigable, undeflatable HeLa cells proved to be ideal hosts for polio virus - a pivotal development in the creation of a successful vaccine. And that was only the beginning. Within a few years, HeLa was in laboratories around the world. Why, one wonders, did the Geys keep at their tissue culturing for all those years when no one was paying any attention?

"Well," says Margaret Gey, "that's what everybody asked us. Why do you do it? It won't get anyplace. But I believed in George and George kept saying that there's a field in this - he could feel it coming!"

Dr. Gey was right. Ask, for example, Walter Nelson-Rees, the ebullient California cell geneticist whose terse Science paper, coauthored with colleagues Robert Flandermeyer and Paula Hawthorne, produced the first hard data that triggered the HeLa controversy. Nelson-Rees's sole business is, in fact, the maintenance and distribution of life in glass. The business is, however, still sufficiently new that some mysteries remain. "I don't think," says Nelson-Rees, "that anyone really knows why one cell grows and another doesn't."

HeLa - while it is still human, reflecting the genetic makeup of its donor - is also cancerous, as are many other popular cell lines in the tissue culture business. Might this explain HeLa's laboratory longevity? Nelson-Rees considers the possibility for a moment. "It's really not that easy," he shrugs finally, "even to grow tumor cells."

Nelson-Rees, almost certainly, should know: in a small laboratory tucked away on Navy property just south of Berkeley, he runs a thorough reference library of human and other vertebrate cell lines for the National Cancer Institute.

Everyone on Nelson-Rees's mailing list receives, annually, a thick computer-generated catalog that may well be one of the more exclusive mail-order services on the planet. The catalog describes, for example, the conditions surrounding the early demise of a 16-year-old Los Angeles male, and then offers, by number, a variety of cultured samples of those deceased teenaged tissues: lung, liver, heart or kidney.

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On a mild, rainy Thursday, early in February of 1951, an energetic young black woman, just 31, appeared for examination at the outpatient gynecologic clinic of Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital - a massive, copper-spired castle of brick, ten minutes' walk east of downtown.

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Polio was a communicable disease that shut down public places for fear of catching it. Sound familiar. Check out this fantastic article that will help you better understand the importance of a vaccine and how HeLa paved the way!

Prior to using HeLa cells, scientists used monkeys which were expensive to obtain and had to be killed as part of the research. HeLa made many types of research affordable and this contributed to the explosion of advancements in medicine.

"Unit at Tuskegee Helps Polio Fight - Corps of Negro Scientists Has Key Role in Evaluating of Dr. Salk's Vaccine - HeLa Cells are Grown" (97) - What is the irony of the Tuskegee advancements with HeLa at this time? (See the Pre-Reading Medical Ethics Padlet for a reminder of the OTHER thing happening at Tuskegee at that time!)

Simile (again) used to explain the science of freezing cells (98)

What made standardization possible and why was it important? (99)

So many medical advancements and understandings made possible by HeLa are described in this chapter. Be sure you are noting some of the bigger ones.

"Gey was relieved that companies had taken over HeLa distribution so that he didn't have to do it himself, but he didn't like the fact that HeLa was now completely out of his control" (103).

Pomerat, one of Gey's friends and colleagues "suggested that Gey should have finished his own HeLa research before 'releasing [HeLa] to the general public since once released it becomes general scientific property" (104)

See final sentence/paragraph.

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[Elie Wiesel quote]

Who was Elie Wiesel and what is the Nuremberg Code?

In this famous speech "The Perils of Indifference" by Wiesel, he cautions that indifference reduces others to abstractions.

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Photo: Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s

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Skloot provides extensive science history

"since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment" (30) - This would be considered unethical and illegal today, but was not uncommon thinking at the time. Many of the medical ethics rights we enjoy are a result of misdeeds from the past that have been exposed.

See the simple consent statement Henrietta signed upon arrival at JH.

History of radium use

Final sentence of chapter is ironic and foreshadows the failure of treatment [The events are true, but think about the way the author tells them. She builds intrigue by ordering details and also by telling what was expected vs what actually happened.]

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Establishes the mystery surrounding HL.

Shows empathy for her subject

Ethos

Tons of simile (and a few other devices) when she explains cells. Think about her purpose for this AND definitely consider the effect of all those similes.

Consider the juxtaposition between Skloot and Deborah Lacks.

Final paragraph: examine for the PURPOSE of the book.

Skloot careful to say she has always been curious about the person (Henrietta) and not necessarily the cells (HeLa).

Watch HeLa cells divide!

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George Gey

Margaret Gey

Mary Kubicek

***
Listen > Fascinating interview with Skloot and pre-recorded interview with Mary Kubicek who describes discovering the immortal nature of Henrietta's cells.
Final sentence of chapter (again) foreshadows the global spread of cells.

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5. "Blackness Be Spreadin' All Inside" (1951)

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5. "Blackness Be Spreadin' All Inside" (1951)

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Chapter title from the final line of the chapter - in Henrietta's words.

Consider Henrietta's thoughts about treatment and infertility.

Gonorrhea, a venereal disease Henrietta contracted from her husband who was cheating on her, while getting radiation treatments.

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Once a nearly correct name was published, Gey works to discourage Henrietta's real name from getting out. What are some of the possible reasons Gey tried to keep her name out of the public?

TeLinde suggests there would be trouble if Henrietta's true name was disclosed. What do you think he meant by this? (107)

Why did Henrietta's family never find out that her cells were alive?

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"I stumbled upon a collection of scientific papers...at Morehouse School of Medicine" (49) - Morehouse college is a private black men's college in Atlanta, GA and alma mater of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Roland Pattillo - one of Gey's only African America students, is STILL a professor at Morehouse.Phone" (1999)

Look at the events Skloot shares with Pattillo when he tests her sincerity about contacting Henrietta's family. LOTS of larger occasion!

Pattillo is a gatekeeper to the family. He acts as protector in keeping opportunists from taking advantage of Henrietta's surviving relatives.

Rebecca talks to Deborah for the first time. How is Deborah characterized?

Chapter ends with Skloot talking to Day (David Lacks) who expresses the family's disgust with reporters...and hangs up on Skloot. Another cliffhanger!

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7. The Death and Life of Cell Culture (1951)

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7. The Death and Life of Cell Culture (1951)

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George Gey refers to HeLa cells as "his 'precious babies'" (58) - consider how Gey is characterized

Alexis Carrel's "immortal chicken heart" (58) diminishes the reputation of cell culture

Eugenicist - "to preserve what he saw as the superior white race" (59)

Quite a few metaphor connected to the section about Carrel

See page 60 for Skloot's account of who revered Carrel. Think about DC/IC and why Skloot includes this darker side of cell culture.

Powerful final three sentences of chapter: "Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil. It wasn't something to be celebrated. In fact, no one paid much attention to it at all" (62).

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Story focus returns to Henrietta.

Notice the language used to describe Henrietta's unbelievably rapid decline in this short chapter.

Henrietta's cells, post-treatment, die immediately in culture (65).

Read the final two paragraphs carefully. Do you think George Gey ever visited Henrietta? If not, what do you make of claims Gey made to the contrary? (66)

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Author stood up by Sonny and finds Courtney Speed. Consider how and why Skloot includes the details of her investigation rather than just telling a polished family story.

People in this chapter: Sonny, Courtney Speed, Cofield, Fred

Author reads a 1976 Rolling Stone article about the Lackses

Take a look at the short video in this news article featuring Courtney Speed talking about Turner station in the 1960s vs today.

Keenan Cofield introduced. How does the author build a sense of mystery? How is he characterized? How is the reader made to understand how deceptive he is?

BBC Documentary about Henrietta and HeLa called The Way of All Flesh (75). Watch even a few minutes of it!

Consider how Sonny is characterized and the author's choice to end a chapter with his challenge to go to Clover(76).

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First sentence filled with place names that are NOT made up. Think about how ominous they sound when put together!

2017 Footage inside "home-house" where Henrietta grew up

Author meets Henrietta's cousin "Cootie" - polio left him partially paralyzed

Cootie points out that people made money from those cells, but her family never saw any of it.

See top of page 82: What does Cootie think keeps Henrietta's cells alive?

Final sentence of chapter represents a point-of-view about Henrietta's cancer.

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Henrietta's children who ranged in age from 1 to 16 at the time of her death were neglected and abused after her death.

This chapter describes the abuse that would forever affect the Lacks children.

Bobbette becomes a positive force in Deborah's life.

Deborah is told she has an older sister named Elsie who was "deaf and dumb" and died in an institution at age 15. What does Deborah think caused Elsie's medical issues? (116)

Deborah becomes obsessed with finding out about the two women in her family: her mother, Henrietta, and her sister, Elsie.

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Henrietta, Gladys & Emmett

"She got so much blood that one doctor wrote a note in her record stopping all transfusions 'until her deficit with the blood bank was made up'" (83) - unlikely this would be true for white patients

Some great examples of INDIRECT characterization in this chapter.

Who donates blood and why?

First hints at conditions in Crownsville where Elsie lived (84). Consider conditions at Crownsville and how Elsie behaves AND consider Henrietta's statements about how Elsie is doing.

What do Henrietta's final wishes say about her?

Consider the final sentence of this chapter as it is also the final sentence of the section titled "Life".

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Photo: Lacks Family Cemetery in Saxe, Virginia

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16. "Spending Eternity in the Same Place" (1999)

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16. "Spending Eternity in the Same Place" (1999)

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Consider how Skloot uses imagery to describe the family cemetery.

Compare and contrast the attitudes of the black and white Lackses on the subject of race.

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Check out the Foundation Website!

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17. Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable (1954-1966)

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17. Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable (1954-1966)

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Note what Skloot teaches the reader about "informed consent" (32).

Consider the behavior of respected researchers such as Chester Southam prior to what became known as informed consent.

Compare what Southam did in the Ohio State Penitentiary (1280129) to the Holmesburg Prison Experiments you studied in the pre-reading activity. Why did some prisoners agree to it?

Southam's reasons for withholding the truth from patients would not be considered unusual in the 1950s (130).

Jewish doctors refused to do what Southam was doing and compared it to what the Nazi's had done. (131)

Learn more about the History of Clinical Research with this Interactive Timeline

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How does Skloot use language to help the reader understand how the science at the time frightened people?

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Photo: Lacks family. Members identified in the book on the color page just before page 207.

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19. "The Most Critical Time on This Earth Is Now" (1966-1973)

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19. "The Most Critical Time on This Earth Is Now" (1966-1973)

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Consider the language used when describing the difficulties the Lacks children had as the got older.

For the Lacks children, few adults are trustworthy advocates for them. In what ways is Bobbette an exception? How does Skloot indirectly characterize her?

How does Deborah ultimately deal with Cheetah's abuse?

Examine the language of Joe Lacks' letter to the judge.

Zakariyya - Pronunciation addressed much later in book (243) Click name.

Consider the significance of where the title of this chapter comes from (147).

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What is the HeLa Bomb that Stanley Gartler reveals to scientists around the world in 1966?

Tone, diction, metaphor abound: "'He showed up at that meeting with no background or anything else in cell culture and proceeded to drop a turd in the punch bowl'"(154)

Understand this: At the time, scientists thought they were using HeLa and OTHER cell cultures for research. Eighteen OTHER cell cultures had become, over time, contaminated with HeLa.

Scientists wanted to be able to tell which cells were HeLa and which were not, so they developed genetic tests. In order to knwo FOR CERTAIN which were HeLa, they needed the family....the family that did not know Henrietta's cells had been alive for the past 15 years!

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Sonny directly characterizes his mother and then attributes the usefulness of her cells to her natural kindness. (159)

By referring to Lawrence as "The Big Kahuna", how does the family see him? Why?

What do Lawrence's beliefs about HeLa tell you about his understanding of cell culture?

When asked about his mother, Lawrence says little more than "She was pretty" - revealing that he does not really remember his mother either even though he is revered among his siblings for knowing her the best. The knows more about the cells than about her.

Day finally speaks and explains that he allowed an autopsy because he was told it would help his children one day.

The story shifts from the Lackses to the origins of "night doctors" dating back to slavery. First paragraph on 166 is a succinct explanation of not only how slave owners and the Ku Klux Klan exploited African-American fear of ghosts, but also the origins of a cultural distrust of doctors.

"In 1969, a Hopkins research used blood samples from more tha 7,000 neighborhood children - most of them from poor and black families -- to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior" (167) - the nature of such research reveals racism inherent in the research question. Such research today would not be premitted.

Notice multiple instances of indirect characterization in this chapter that shows the Lacks family distrust doctors/medicine.

Details about Johns Hopkins: one of the few hospitals to treat blacks, but also did experiments that revealed institutional racism at the time.

Irony: Henrietta's cells advanced medicine in a way that improved life for people all over the world - yet her family can't get health insurance.

What upsets the family most about HeLa is not being informed.

Click the miage below for a fantastic (10 minutes) PBS NewsHour report on Baltimore hospitals which discusses black mistrust of hospitals and includes mention of Night Doctors and Henrietta Lacks.

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Baltimore hospitals work to repair frayed trust in black communities

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In a city renowned for medical schools and research, there’s a striking contrast in the dismal health and life expectancy in some Baltimore neighborhoods. There’s a deep distrust of the medical system among many African-American residents, dating back to the 1800s. Special correspondent Sarah Varney reports on efforts to repair the relationship, as part of a collaboration with Kaiser Health News.

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22. "The Fame She So Richly Deserves" (1970-1973)

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22. "The Fame She So Richly Deserves" (1970-1973)

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Irony: Gey dies of cancer.

Howard Jones realizes from images of Henrietta's cancer that she had a different form of cancer than they thought. While treatment would not have been different, it did explain the rapid growth of the cancer.

Her syphilis could have impacted the growth of cancer cells as well (173).

In December 1971, Henrietta's correct name is officially linked to HeLa.

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25. "Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?" (1976-1988)

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25. "Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?" (1976-1988)

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This chapter deals with many of the legal aspects of cells.

How does the story of John Moore and "Mo" connect to Henrietta's cells?

Moore's LA Times Obituary

1980 Supreme Court case sets a legal precedent for patenting biological products such as cells.

Think about this: Once Golde patented Moore's blood, Moore could no longer sell his own tissues. Do we know what happens to the parts of us left behind after medical procedures?

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This is a terrific section. After becoming so familiar with the characters, it is interesting to see where they were at the time of publication.

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Consider the ethical consequences of excerpts of Henrietta's medical records being released by a writer who neither verified the information nor sought approval from the family.

Catalog the ways in which the medical community rationalized using HeLa cells without permission.

Richard Axel wins a Nobel Prize for using HeLa cells to better understand HIV.

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Several theories about the reason HeLa cells are so powerful are presented. Which is the most compelling? Why?

Explain the argument that HeLa are their own species now.

What is the Hayflick Limit? How does this relate to HeLa?

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A great resource! Bookmark this page. Will be helpful when you lose track of the name of a particular cousin or child.

TIP: Add your own notes to help you remember important details about the people in the book!

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What did Deborah hope would happen as a result of the BBC documentary?

Roland Pattillo organizes the HeLa Cancert Control Symposium.

Reread Deborah's Morehouse College speech. What kind of understanding did she want people to have?

Notice the reaction to the BBC doc in Turner's Station.

What do you learn about Cofield?

What are Deborah's fears about her sister Elsie?

Notice how three storylines converge at the end of this chapter

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Why do you think Deborah decided to talk with Skloot? How do you know?

What is the effect of the gift from Christoph Lengauer on the family?

Sensationalized journalism led Deborah to believe that her mother's clones could be found all over London.

Why do you think Deborah is so protective of her mother's medical records?

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Deborah with the colorful picture of her mother's cells.

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How does Skloot select anecdotes and events which build suspense about meeting Zakariyya?

Examine tone and diction to evaluate Zakariyya's varying attitudes.

How does Zakariyya react to the gift of the image of his mother's cells?

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What similarities are drawn between Hela (the Marvel super villain and goddess of Death) and Henrietta and her cells?

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Compare and contrast Skloot, Deborah, and Zakariyya's interactions at the Jesus Statue at Johns Hopkins. How are each characterized in that moment?

How is Christoph Langauer characterized?

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This is more a timeline of HeLa cells than of Henrietta's life.

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33. The Hospital for the Negro Insane (2001)

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33. The Hospital for the Negro Insane (2001)

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Contrast the tone of the word "Crownsville" with "Hospital for the Negro Insane."

How does Paul Lurz foreshadow what happened to Elsie?

Examine the written description of the photo of Elsie. What do the records indicate about how she died? What can you infer from the records?

Compare and contrast the reactions Deborah has to the information about her older sister.

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In what ways does Skloot become part of the story of Henrietta?

How are nonverbals misinterpreted?

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How does the laying of hands further connect Deborah and Rebecca?

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What does Rebecca come to understand about the family in this chapter? How does it change her perspective?

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Don't miss the great resources in the Notes Section!
Here's a tour!

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What event prevented Deborah from attending the conference?

What prevents Deborah from attending school?

What physical ailments does Deborah suffer from?

How does Davon save Deborah's life?

Compare and contrast the way Henrietta's cells helped the world and the family's difficulties? How are the two interconnected?

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In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Upon examination, renowned gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. At the time, The Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of only a few hospitals to treat poor African-Americans.

As medical records show, Mrs. Lacks began undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer. This was the best medical treatment available at the time for this terrible disease. A sample of her cancer cells retrieved during a biopsy were sent to Dr. George Gey's nearby tissue lab. For years, Dr. Gey, a prominent cancer and virus researcher, had been collecting cells from all patients - regardless of their race or socioeconomic status - who came to The Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer, but each sample quickly died in Dr. Gey's lab. What Dr. Gey would soon discover was that Mrs. Lacks' cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, Mrs. Lacks' cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.

Today, these incredible cells - nicknamed "HeLa" cells, from the first two letters of her first and last names - are used to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans. They have been used to test the effects of radiation and poisons, to study the human genome, to learn more about how viruses work, and played a crucial role in the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines.

Although Mrs. Lacks ultimately passed away on October 4, 1951, at the age of 31, her cells continue to impact the world.

Although these were the first cells that could be easily shared and multiplied in a lab setting, Johns Hopkins has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line. Rather, Johns Hopkins offered HeLa cells freely and widely for scientific research.

Johns Hopkins applauds and regularly participates in efforts to raise awareness of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks. Having reviewed our interactions with Henrietta Lacks and with the Lacks family over more than 50 years, we found that Johns Hopkins could have - and should have - done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks' family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests. Though the collection and use of Henrietta Lacks' cells in research was an acceptable and legal practice in the 1950s, such a practice would not happen today without the patient's consent.

We are deeply committed to the ongoing efforts at our institutions and elsewhere to honor the contributions of Henrietta Lacks and to ensure the appropriate protection and care of the Lacks family's medical information.

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In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Upon examination, renowned gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. At the time, The Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of only a few hospitals to treat poor African-Americans.

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Descendants of Henrietta Lacks discuss her famous cell line

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Examine the language used to describe the changes in Clover.

Imagine what would have been lost had Skloot not begun her research when she did.

What is the effect of ending the book with Deborah's words.

Henrietta's Grandchildren speak at Stanford