The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (30 page)

South Boston tobacco auction, circa 1920s. Henrietta and her family sold their crops at this auction house.

Sparrows Point workers cleaning a furnace by removing “slag,” a toxic by-product of molten metal, sometime in the 1940s.
COURTESY OF THE DUNDALK-PATAPSKO NECK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Howard W. Jones, the gynecologist who diagnosed Henrietta’s tumor, sometime in the 1950s.

George Gey, who directed the laboratory in which HeLa cells were first grown, circa 1951.
©
ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVE

Henrietta Lacks’s death certificate.

Sadie Sturdivant, Henrietta’s cousin and close friend, in the early 1940s.

In 1949, labs had to make their own culture medium, a laborious process. In this picture, the man is stirring broth in a vat while the women filter the broth into smaller bottles. After HeLa, it became possible to order ready-made media by mail.
© HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

Margaret Gey and Minnie, a lab technician, in the Gey lab at Hopkins, circa mid-1960s.
COURTESY OF MARY KUBICEK

Mary Kubicek, the technician in the Gey lab who processed Henrietta’s tumor sample and grew her cells in culture.
COURTESY OF MARY KUBICEK

Four technicians at the Tuskegee Institute’s HeLa mass production center inspecting HeLa cells before shipping them.
© MARCH OF DIMES FOUNDATION

a
. One HeLa cell dividing into two.
COURTESY OF PAUL D. ANDREWS

b
. These HeLa cells were stained with special dyes that highlight specific parts of each cell. Here, the DNA in the nucleus is yellow, the actinfilaments are light blue, and the mitochondria—the cell’s power generators—are pink.
© OMAR QUINTERO

c
. These HeLa cells were stained with fluorescent dye and photographed under a confocal microscope.
COURTESY OF TOM DEERINCK

Deborah at about thirteen, the age when she was fending off her cousin Galen.

Deborah with her children, LaTonya and Alfred, and her second husband, James Pullum, in the mid-1980s.