The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Page 6

  “It’s interesting that you called when you did,” he said. “I’m or ganizing the next HeLa conference, and when the phone rang, I’d just sat down at my desk and typed the words Henrietta Lacks on my screen.” We both laughed. It must be a sign, we said; perhaps Henrietta wanted us to talk.

  “Deborah is Henrietta’s baby girl,” he said, very matter-of-fact. “The family calls her Dale. She’s almost fifty now, still living in Baltimore, with grandchildren of her own. Henrietta’s husband is still alive. He’s around eighty-four—still goes to the clinics at Johns Hopkins.” He dropped this like a tease.

  “Did you know Henrietta had an epileptic daughter?” Pattillo asked.

  “No.”

  “She died at fifteen, soon after Henrietta’s death. Deborah is the only daughter left,” he said. “She came near a stroke recently because of the agony she’s gone through regarding inquiries into her mother’s death and those cells. I won’t be a part of anyone doing that to her again.”

  I started to speak, but he interrupted me.

  “I need to go see patients now,” he said abruptly. “I’m not ready to put you in touch with the family yet. But I think you’re honest about your intentions. We will talk again after I think. Call back tomorrow.”

  After three straight days of grilling, Pattillo finally decided to give me Deborah’s phone number. But first, he said, there were a few things I needed to know. He lowered his voice and rattled off a list of dos and don’ts for dealing with Deborah Lacks: Don’t be aggressive. Do be honest. Don’t be clinical, don’t try to force her into anything, don’t talk down to her, she hates that. Do be compassionate, don’t forget that she’s been through a lot with these cells, do have patience. “You’ll need that more than anything,” he told me.

  Moments after hanging up the phone with Pattillo, his list of dos and don’ts in my hand, I dialed Deborah’s number, then paced as her phone rang. When she whispered hello, I blurted out, “I’m so excited you answered because I’ve been wanting to talk to you for years! I’m writing a book about your mother!”

  “Huh?” she said.

  I didn’t know that Deborah was nearly deaf—she relied heavily on lip reading and couldn’t follow anyone who talked fast.

  I took a deep breath and tried again, forcing myself to sound out every syllable.

  “Hi, my name is Rebecca.”

  “How ya doin?” she said, weary but warm.

  “I’m very excited to talk to you.”

  “Mmmhmm,” she said, like she’d heard that line many times before.

  I told her again that I wanted to write a book about her mother and said I was surprised no one seemed to know anything about her, even though her cells were so important for science.

  Deborah sat silent for a long moment, then screamed, “That’s right!” She giggled and started talking like we’d known each other for years. “Everything always just about the cells and don’t even worry about her name and was HeLa even a person. So hallelujah! I think a book would be great!”

  This was not what I’d expected.

  I was afraid to say anything that might make her stop talking, so I simply said, “Great.” And that was the last word I spoke until the end of our call. I didn’t ask a single question, just took notes as fast as I could.

  Deborah crammed a lifetime of information into a manic and confusing forty-five minutes that jumped without warning, and in no particular order, from the 1920s to the 1990s, from stories of her father to her grandfather, cousins, mother, and total strangers.

  “Nobody never said nothing,” she told me. “I mean, where my mother clothes at? Where my mother shoes? I knew about her watch and ring, but it was stolen. That was after my brother killed that boy.” She talked about a man she didn’t name, saying, “I didn’t think it was fit for him to steal my mother medical record and autopsy papers. He was in prison for fifteen years in Alabama. Now he sayin John Hopkin killed my mother and them white doctors experimented on her cause she was black.

  “My nerve broke down,” she said. “I just couldn’t take it. My speech is coming back a little better—I almost had two strokes in two weeks cause of all that stuff with my mother cells.”

  Then suddenly she was talking about her family history, saying something about “the Hospital for Crazy Negroes” and her mother’s great-grandfather having been a slave owner. “We all mixed. And one of my mother sisters converted to Puerto Rican.”

  Again and again, she said, “I can’t take it anymore,” and “Who are we supposed to trust now?” More than anything, she told me, she wanted to learn about her mother and what her cells had done for science. She said people had been promising her information for decades and never delivering it. “I’m sick of it,” she said. “You know what I really want? I want to know, what did my mother smell like? For all my life I just don’t know anything, not even the little common little things, like what color she like? Did she like to dance? Did she breastfeed me? Lord, I’d like to know that. But nobody ever say nothing.”

  She laughed and said, “I tell you one thing—the story’s not over yet. You got your work cut out for you, girl. This thing’s crazy enough for three books!”

  Then someone walked through her front door and Deborah yelled straight into the receiver, “Good morning! I got mail?” She sounded panicked by the idea of it. “Oh my God! Oh no! Mail?!”

  “Okay, Miss Rebecca,” she said. “I got to go. You call me Monday, promise? Okay, dear. God bless. Bye-bye.”

  She hung up and I sat stunned, receiver crooked in my neck, frantically scribbling notes I didn’t understand, like brother = murder, mail = bad, man stole Henrietta’s medical records, and Hospital for Negro Insane?

  When I called Deborah back as promised, she sounded like a different person. Her voice was monotone, depressed, and slurred, like she was heavily sedated.

  “No interviews,” she mumbled almost incoherently. “You got to go away. My brothers say I should write my own book. But I ain’t a writer. I’m sorry.”

  I tried to speak, but she cut me off. “I can’t talk to you no more. Only thing to do is convince the men.” She gave me three phone numbers: her father; her oldest brother, Lawrence; and her brother David Jr.’s pager. “Everybody call him Sonny,” she told me, then hung up. I wouldn’t hear her voice again for nearly a year.

  I started calling Deborah, her brothers, and her father daily, but they didn’t answer. Finally, after several days of leaving messages, someone answered at Day’s house: a young boy who didn’t say hello, just breathed into the receiver, hip-hop thumping in the background.

  When I asked for David, the boy said, “Yeah,” and threw the phone down.

  “Go get Pop!” he yelled, followed by a long pause. “It’s important. Get Pop!”

  No response.

  “Lady’s on the phone,” he yelled, “come on …”

  The first boy breathed into the receiver again as a second boy picked up an extension and said hello.

  “Hi,” I said. “Can I talk to David?”

  “Who this?” he asked.

  “Rebecca,” I said.

  He moved the phone away from his mouth and yelled, “Get Pop, lady’s on the phone about his wife cells.”

  Years later I’d understand how a young boy could know why I was calling just from the sound of my voice: the only time white people called Day was when they wanted something having to do with HeLa cells. But at the time I was confused—I figured I must have heard wrong.

  A woman picked up a receiver saying, “Hello, may I help you?” She was sharp, curt, like I do not have time for this.

  I told her I was hoping to talk to David, and she asked who was calling. Rebecca, I said, afraid she’d hang up if I said anything more.

  “Just a moment.” She sighed and lowered the phone. “Go take this to Day,” she told a child. “Tell him he got a long-distance call, somebody named Rebecca calling about his wife cells.”

  The child grabbed the phone, pr
essed it to his ear, and ran for Day. Then there was a long silence.

  “Pop, get up,” the kid whispered. “There’s somebody about your wife.”

  “Whu …”

  “Get up, there’s somebody about your wife cells.”

  “Whu? Where?”

  “Wife cells, on the phone … get up.”

  “Where her cells?”

  “Here,” the boy said, handing Day the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hi, is this David Lacks?”

  “Yeah.”

  I told him my name and started to explain why I was calling, but before I could say much, he let out a deep sigh.

  “Whanowthis,” he mumbled in a deep Southern accent, his words slurred like he’d had a stroke. “You got my wife cells?”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking he was asking if I was calling about his wife’s cells.

  “Yeah?” he said, suddenly bright, alert. “You got my wife cells? She know you talking?”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking he was asking if Deborah knew I was calling.

  “Well, so let my old lady cells talk to you and leave me alone,” he snapped. “I had enough ’a you people.” Then he hung up.

  7

  The Death and Life of Cell Culture

  On April 10, 1951, three weeks after Henrietta started radiation therapy, George Gey appeared on WAAM television in Baltimore for a special show devoted to his work. With dramatic music in the background, the announcer said, “Tonight we will learn why scientists believe that cancer can be conquered.”

  The camera flashed to Gey, sitting at a desk in front of a wall covered with pictures of cells. His face was long and handsome, with a pointed nose, black plastic bifocals, and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. He sat stiff and straight-backed, tweed suit perfectly pressed, white hand kerchief in his breast pocket, hair slicked. His eyes darted off screen, then back to the camera as he drummed his fingers on the desk, his face expressionless.

  “The normal cells which make up our bodies are tiny objects, five thousand of which would fit on the head of a pin,” he said, his voice a bit too loud and stilted. “How the normal cells become cancerous is still a mystery.”

  He gave viewers a basic overview of cell structure and cancer using diagrams and a long wooden pointer. He showed films of cells moving across the screen, their edges inching further and further into the empty space around them. And he zoomed in on one cancer cell, its edges round and smooth until it began to quiver and shake violently, exploding into five cancer cells.

  At one point he said, “Now let me show you a bottle in which we have grown massive quantities of cancer cells.” He picked up a clear glass pint-sized bottle, most likely full of Henrietta’s cells, and rocked it in his hands as he explained that his lab was using those cells to find ways to stop cancer. He said, “It is quite possible that from fundamental studies such as these that we will be able to learn a way by which cancer cells can be damaged or completely wiped out.”

  To help make that happen, Gey began sending Henrietta’s cells to any scientist who might use them for cancer research. Shipping live cells in the mail—a common practice today—wasn’t done at the time. Instead, Gey sent them via plane in tubes with a few drops of culture medium, just enough to keep them alive for a short time. Sometimes pilots or stewards tucked the tubes in their shirt pockets, to keep the cells at body temperature as if they were still in an incubator. Other times, when the cells had to ride in the cargo hold, Gey tucked them into holes carved in blocks of ice to keep them from overheating, then packed the ice in cardboard boxes filled with sawdust. When shipments were ready to go, Gey would warn recipients that the cells were about to “metastasize” to their cities, so they could stand ready to fetch the shipment and rush back to their labs. If all went well, the cells survived. If not, Gey packaged up another batch and tried again.

  He sent shipments of HeLa cells to researchers in Texas, India, New York, Amsterdam, and many places between. Those researchers gave them to more researchers, who gave them to more still. Henrietta’s cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules. As Gey flew from one lab to another, demonstrating his culturing techniques and helping to set up new laboratories, he always flew with tubes of Henrietta’s cells in his breast pocket. And when scientists visited Gey’s lab to learn his techniques, he usually sent them home with a vial or two of HeLa. In letters, Gey and some of his colleagues began referring to the cells as his “precious babies.”

  The reason Henrietta’s cells were so precious was because they allowed scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. They cut HeLa cells apart and exposed them to endless toxins, radiation, and in fections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa cells into immune-compromised rats, which developed malignant tumors much like Henrietta’s. If the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter—scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again.

  Despite the spread of HeLa and the flurry of new research that followed, there were no news stories about the birth of the amazing HeLa cell line and how it might help stop cancer. In Gey’s one appearance on television, he didn’t mention Henrietta or her cells by name, so the general public knew nothing of HeLa. But even if they had known, they probably wouldn’t have paid it much mind. For decades the press had been reporting that cell culture was going to save the world from disease and make man immortal, but by 1951 the general public had stopped buying it. Cell culture had become less a medical miracle than something out of a scary science-fiction movie.

  It all started on January 17, 1912, when Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon at the Rockefeller Institute, grew his “immortal chicken heart.”

  Scientists had been trying to grow living cells since before the turn of the century, but their samples had always died. As a result, many researchers believed it was impossible to keep tissues alive outside the body. But Carrel set out to prove them wrong. At age thirty-nine he’d already invented the first technique for suturing blood vessels together, and had used it to perform the first coronary bypass and develop methods for transplanting organs. He hoped someday to grow whole organs in the laboratory, filling massive vaults with lungs, livers, kidneys, and tissues he could ship through the mail for transplantation. As a first step, he’d tried to grow a sliver of chicken-heart tissue in culture, and to everyone’s amazement, it worked. Those heart cells kept beating as if they were still in the chicken’s body.

  Months later, Carrel won a Nobel Prize for his blood-vessel-suturing technique and his contributions to organ transplantation, and he became an instant celebrity. The prize had nothing to do with the chicken heart, but articles about his award conflated the immortal chicken-heart cells with his transplantation work, and suddenly it sounded like he’d found the fountain of youth. Headlines around the world read:

  CARREL’S NEW MIRACLE POINTS WAY TO AVERT OLD AGE! …

  SCIENTISTS GROW IMMORTAL CHICKEN HEART …

  DEATH PERHAPS NOT INEVITABLE

  Scientists said Carrel’s chicken-heart cells were one of the most important advances of the century, and that cell culture would uncover the secrets behind everything from eating and sex to “the music of Bach, the poems of Milton, [and] the genius of Michelangelo.” Carrel was a scientific messiah. Magazines called his culture medium “an elixir of youth” and claimed that bathing in it might make a person live forever.

  But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic
measures” he took in that direction.

  Carrel’s eccentricities fed into the media frenzy about his work. He was a stout, fast-talking Frenchman with mismatched eyes—one brown, the other blue—who rarely went out without his surgeon’s cap. He wrongly believed that light could kill cell cultures, so his laboratory looked like the photo negative of a Ku Klux Klan rally, where technicians worked in long black robes, heads covered in black hoods with small slits cut for their eyes. They sat on black stools at black tables in a shadowless room with floors, ceilings, and walls painted black. The only illumination came from a small, dust-covered skylight.

  Carrel was a mystic who believed in telepathy and clairvoyance, and thought it was possible for humans to live several centuries through the use of suspended animation. Eventually he turned his apartment into a chapel, began giving lectures on medical miracles, and told reporters he dreamed of moving to South America and becoming a dictator. Other researchers distanced themselves, criticizing him for being unscientific, but much of white America embraced his ideas and saw him as a spiritual adviser and a genius.

  Reader’s Digest ran articles by Carrel advising women that a “husband should not be induced by an oversexed wife to perform a sexual act,” since sex drained the mind. In his best-selling book, Man, the Unknown, he proposed fixing what he believed was “an error” in the U.S. Constitution that promised equality for all people. “The feebleminded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law,” he wrote. “The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education.”

  His book sold more than two million copies and was translated into twenty languages. Thousands showed up for Carrel’s talks, sometimes requiring police in riot gear to keep order as buildings filled to capacity and fans had to be turned away.

  Through all of this, the press and public remained obsessed with Carrel’s immortal chicken heart. Each year on New Year’s Day, the New York World Telegram called Carrel to check on the cells; and every January 17 for decades, when Carrel and his assistants lined up in their black suits to sing “Happy Birthday” to the cells, some newspaper or magazine retold the same story again and again: