The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Reflection #4, Chapters 24–31)

I loved these chapters, because it showed a completely different side of the Lacks’ family. Before this point, the Lacks’ have tried to present themselves as devoid of emotion as possible, to avoid getting hurt again. In these chapters, we see a range of emotions that came from finding out the fate of their mother’s cells.

Michael Rogers was one of the first reporters to try to find out the story of Henrietta Lacks, the mysterious woman behind the famous HeLa cells. He sat in the same hotel room as Rebecca Skloot, which Rebecca discovered looking in his Rolling Stone article sitting in the exact same place, with similar thoughts. When he was on his way to meet the Lacks, he got in a car accident which Deborah took as a sign that her mother did not want the family to speak to him. Rebecca drops slight hints here that because she did not have any warning sign that Henrietta did want Rebecca to share the story of her, her family, her cells, and the turmoil it caused.

Deborah had a very different reaction than that of Sonny and Lawrence when they found out that their mother’s cells were being used for research. None of them were mad that their mother’s cells had been used — they believed that because of her personality she would want others to benefit from her cells if they could. Sonny and Lawrence knew that someone was making profit from selling their mother’s cells — and they assumed it was John Hopkins. They were furious that their mother’s cells had done so much for medical history, and that someone has most likely made billions of the HeLa cells. They believed that because it was their mother that they deserved a cut of the profits. Deborah, on the other hand, just wanted her mother and her accomplishments to be appreciated. The cells had progressed treatments for numerous diseases, and at the same time most people handling cells still believed that the cells came from “Helen Lane” instead of Henrietta Lacks, and Deborah believed that her mother was due to recognition and respect but she was being denied both.

Another element that Rebecca Skloot brought up was race and class. Henrietta was a poor black woman, and was taken advantage most likely for this fact — based on the time period in which it took place. Another way that Henrietta’s race was brought into the matter of the HeLa cell line was that people were trying to perceive that the fact the woman behind the HeLa cells was black caused the “contamination” of many other cell cultures.