path: root/markley/16_hela

# The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Chapter 12

Henrietta Lacks is dissected, and the inhuman dissection in the morgue
contrasts with her stark humanity in her funeral and the deep pain that
she was in because of the tumors (were they prolonged for the medical
experiment).
Also: it's legal to take cells from living people w/o consent, but
autopsies require consent of relatives.
Her ?husband (Day) consented to a partial autopsy and they took a bunch
of samples.
body "filled with pearls" and huge tumors across her body.

Chapter 13
A HeLa culture is developed: Henrietta's cells grow in a magnetically
stirred medium and can be transported with little care.
There is a polio pandemic going on, and the vaccine needs to be tested
on primate (human or monkey) cells.
Monkey cells are expensive, so human culture is far preferable.
Tuskegee Institute builds factory to mass-produce HeLa culture.
Originally given only to polio researchers but later widened to all
researchers for $10 plus Air Express fees.
- Widened research opportunies for in vitro infections, proteins, etc
Doctor Gey is the discoverer of HeLa.
This develops the field of tissue culture greatly: how viruses work,
freezing cells, standardization in the field (same cells, media, method)
Chromosome count, cloning discovered and perfected.
Tuskegee Institute superceded by Microbiological Associates
mass-producing cells and overnighting them
Gey wanted to move on from HeLa, but he was renowned for it, and his
colleagues pushed him to publish. He tired of it.
Gey still wanted some control over HeLa, and had created some
unpublished research, but prematurely turned HeLa into "general
scientific property."
He created other cell lines, but they didn't take off like HeLa

Chapter 14
The cat is out of the bag: "Henrietta Lane" is released as the owner of
the cells as early as 1953 (first publicized in 1951).
Gey, when approached by journalists, denies the use of her real name or
backstory.
I think this is probably out of fear of backlash from her family.
Called by pseudonym Helen L. "Unsung hero of medicine," while Gey still
has much sway

Chapter 15

Day, Henrietta's husband, had three kids: Deborah, Sonny, and baby Joe.
After they got tuberculosis between one and four, cousins Ethel and
Galen moved in. Ethel was horrifically abusive of Joe and the others,
probably because she hated Henrietta. Day kept what happened to
Henrietta from his kids, and they didn't ask because they were taught to
keep quiet. Galen molested Deborah repeatedly, but with their eldest
brother Lawrence and Bobetta's help, the children eventually got out of
the situation after six terrible years. (the abusers were still around,
but Lawrence and Bobetta housed them and helped protect them)

Chapter 16

Skloot is interviewing Lackses.
Cootie recammends she go talk to one of the other cousins about
Henrietta, whom he remembers well. Shows her the grave site where she is
buried with the white people.
But Lacks Town and Clover are plagued by poor race relations. Most of
the black Lackses have white ancestry who inherited parts of the
plantation, but there is also an old constituent of white Lackses in
Clover who don't want to "intermix" (confederate flag people). They
won't admit they are related by blood to the black Lackses.
Lillian, Henrietta's sister, moved out to NY and "converted to Puerto
Rican" because she didn't want to be black anymore.
There were lynchings and the Klan into the 1980s, but people claim
that race relations never were bad.

Chapter 17

Chester Southam---"Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable"
He, without consent, tested Henrietta's cells on people w/ and then w/o
cancer, believing that there was significant possibility of risk of them
getting cancer, under the guise of testing "immune systems."
He also tested prison populations.
This was 16 years after the Nuremberg trials (1966) and eventually outed
by Jewish doctors he asked to help him continue his "research."
Informed consent was poorly established in the courts and in physician
communities, but the Nuremberg Code had created a single ethical
standard lawyers could point to.
Southam and co-conspirator Mandel only got one-year probations, and
their professional careers were hardly affected.
But they did make a long-lasting change to the medical
profession---requiring informed consent was the standard.
Scientists warned this would halt scientific research, but it didn't.

Chapter 18

The cell tissue research community begins to worry about cell
intercontamination and has the NIH begin preserving cells and immortal
cell lines as securely as possible, and testing for cross-species and
viral/antibacterial contamination.
"Cell sex" or somatic cell fusion is a new invention.
Previously, geneticists could only test plants or mice with high
reproductive counts and low gestation periods, but now cells can be
intermixed with certain viruses to test how diseases work from genes and
the basic discovery of the immune system.
PR nightmare about scientists creating monsters.

Chapter 19

The Lacks family are at best struggling. Joe, who was most severely
abused by Ethel, becomes incredibly violent. He joins the military but
is kicked out because of his violence. Back at home, he kills a man
named Ivy in an alcohol-induced rage. He goes to court and receives 15
of 30 possible years when pleading guilty, finds Islam when in jail, and
becomes Zakariyya.
Deborah wants to kill Cheetah, whom impregnated her at age sixteen. She
makes several attempts, but Bobetta eventually talks her down and
Deborah takes the kids with her---getting a second job and becoming a
single mother.

Chapter 20

HeLa contaminates dozens of cell lines because it can travel on dust and
is extremely hardy.
This is revealed by Stanley Gartler and lauded by Robert Stevenson,
although many scientists are disappointed by the invalidation of many
results in the tissue culture community.
Spontaneous transformation (of normal cells into cancer cells) was a
myth.

Chapter 21

The first bit is an interview with most of the remaining (now old) Lacks
family. She meets Sonny, after she was stood up two months ago and he
shows up two hours late. He brings her to Lawrence, the eldest, who is
now sixty-four. He doesn't even know what a cell is, since "nobody tells
us [anything? nothing?]." Day feels wronged by Hopkins for lying to him
about that the autopsy would allow them to take her cells by saying it
"could help his children."

Bobette enunciates this distrust of Jon Hopkins by talking about how
they would kidnap black people to experiment on them.
This is mostly not true of Hopkins---although it is true of other "night
doctors" in other cities.
The fear was helped perpetuated by plantation owners who wanted to
discourage slaves from organizing and shows up in many black oral
histories.
Jon Hopkins, however, was created as a charity for poor and colored
people, which is why it was constructed in Baltimore.
However, there were still many violations of black people's rights, such
as willful lead poisoning, unconsented gene sampling, and Henrietta.
(Return to interview)
Lawrence: "If our mother so important to science, why can't we get
health insurance?"
Sonny believes Hopkins didn't snatch black people but they did willfully
keep the Lacks in the dark because, Sonny thinks, they made money.
There is anger at Hopkins and Gey for maligning the Lacks family.

Chapter 22

George Gey got pancreatic cancer and wanted his team to remove a sample
and create a (possibly immortal) cell line GeGe. The cancer was
inoperable, so he resorted to volunteering for random less-approved
medical trials instead, one for a drug making him violently ill, until
he died.
After his death, in 1970, his colleagues released notes about
Henrietta's misdiagnosis---which wouldn't have changed her treatment,
unintentionally releasing her name.
At this time, the War on Cancer is going on, but the contamination
problem is still raging.
Walter Nelson-Rees, for the National Cancer Institute, is publishing a
"HeLa Hit List" of contaminated cell lines.
J Douglas, a biologist at Brunei University, wants to find out He..La.'s
true identity.

# Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z