The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (32 page)

Van Valen explained this idea years later, saying, “HeLa cells are evolving separately from humans, and having a separate evolution is really what a species is all about.” Since the species name
Hela
was already taken by a type of crab, the researchers proposed that the new HeLa cell species should be called
Helacyton gartleri
, which combined
HeLa
with
cyton
, which is Greek for “cell,” and
gartleri
, in honor of Stanley Gartler, who’d dropped the “HeLa Bomb” twenty-five years earlier.

No one challenged this idea, but no one acted on it either, so Henrietta’s cells remained classified as human. But even today some scientists argue that it’s factually incorrect to say that HeLa cells are related to Henrietta, since their DNA is no longer genetically identical to hers.

Robert Stevenson, one of the researchers who devoted much of his career to straightening out the HeLa contamination mess, laughed when he heard that argument. “It’s just ridiculous,” he told me. “Scientists don’t like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it’s much easier to do science when you disassociate your materials from the people they come from. But if you could get a sample from Henrietta’s body today and do DNA fingerprinting on it, her DNA would match the DNA in HeLa cells.”

     
A
round the time Van Valen suggested HeLa was no longer human, researchers began exploring whether Henrietta’s cells might hold the key to human life extension—perhaps even immortality—and headlines once again claimed that scientists had found the fountain of youth.

In the early 1900s, Carrel’s chicken-heart cells supposedly proved that all cells had the potential for immortality. But
normal
human cells—either in culture or in the human body—can’t grow indefinitely like cancer cells. They divide only a finite number of times, then stop growing and begin to die. The number of times they can divide is a specific number called the Hayflick Limit, after Leonard Hayflick, who’d published a paper in 1961 showing that normal cells reach their limit when they’ve doubled about fifty times.

After years of disbelief and argument from other scientists, Hayflick’s paper on cell limits became one of the most widely cited in his field. It was an epiphany: scientists had been trying for decades to grow immortal cell lines using normal cells instead of malignant ones, but it had never worked. They thought their technique was the problem, when in fact it was simply that the lifespan of normal cells was preprogrammed. Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

Scientists knew from studying HeLa that cancer cells could divide indefinitely, and they’d speculated for years about whether cancer was caused by an error in the mechanism that made cells die when they reached their Hayflick Limit. They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a
telomere
, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they’re almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die.

By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called
telomerase
that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa’s immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta’s chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. It was this immortality, and the strength with which Henrietta’s cells grew, that made it possible for HeLa to take over so many other cultures—they simply outlived and outgrew any other cells they encountered.

28
After London

T
he story of Henrietta Lacks eventually caught the attention of a BBC producer in London named Adam Curtis, and in 1996, he began making the documentary about Henrietta that I would later watch in Courtney Speed’s beauty parlor. When Curtis arrived in Baltimore with his assistants and cameras and microphones, Deborah thought everything would change, that she and the rest of the world would learn the true story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells, and she would finally be able to move on. She started referring to periods in her life as “before London” and “after London.”

Curtis and his crew covered the Lacks family story in more depth than anyone ever had, filling dozens of hours of video interviewing Deborah, prompting her from off camera to speak in complete sentences, and not wander off topic. Deborah said things like “I used to go into a corner after I was married. My husband didn’t even know anything about me, you know, just being sad and crying to myself…. I just ask these questions in my head. …
Why, Lord, did you take my mother when I needed her so much?”

The interviewer asked, “What is cancer?”

The BBC interviewed Deborah in front of the home-house in Clover; they shot Day and Sonny leaning on Henrietta’s mother’s tombstone, talking about what a good cook Henrietta was, and how they never heard anything about the cells until researchers called wanting blood. And they followed the Lacks family to Atlanta for a conference organized in Henrietta’s honor by Roland Pattillo, the scientist who would soon steer me to Deborah.

Pattillo grew up in the thirties, the son of a blacksmith turned railroad worker in a small segregated Louisiana town. He was the first in his family to go to school, and when he learned about Henrietta as a postdoctoral fellow in Gey’s lab, he felt immediately connected to her. He’d wanted to honor her contributions to science ever since. So on October 11, 1996, at Morehouse School of Medicine, he organized the first annual HeLa Cancer Control Symposium. He invited researchers from around the world to present scientific papers on cancer in minorities, and he petitioned the city of Atlanta to name October 11, the date of the conference, Henrietta Lacks Day. The city agreed and gave him an official proclamation from the mayor’s office. He asked Howard Jones to contribute an article recording his memories of diagnosing Henrietta’s tumor. Jones wrote:

From a clinical point of view, Mrs. Lacks never did well. … As Charles Dickens said at the beginning of
[A] Tale of Two Cities
, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ But it was the best of times for science in that this very peculiar tumor gave rise to the HeLa cell line. … For Mrs. Lacks and the family she left behind, it was the worst of times. Scientific progress and indeed progress of all kinds is often made at great cost, such as the sacrifice made by Henrietta Lacks.

Pattillo got Deborah’s phone number through a physician friend at Hopkins and called her. When she heard about his plans for the conference and the official naming of Henrietta Lacks Day, she was ecstatic: finally, a scientist was honoring her mother. Soon the Lacks family—Day, Sonny, Lawrence, Deborah, Bobbette, Zakariyya, and Deborah’s grandson Davon—piled into an RV that Pattillo rented for them and drove to Atlanta, with the BBC film crew following behind.

At a gas station along the way, Deborah smiled into the camera and explained why they were headed to Morehouse.

“They gonna have a lot of doctors there talking on different subjects and different areas of the science field,” she said. “And they’re gonna hand out plaques to my brother and my father and me in honor of our mother name. So I know it’s gonna be a great occasion.”

And it was. For the first time, the Lackses were treated like celebrities: they stayed in a hotel, people asked for their autographs. But there were a few glitches. In all the excitement leading up to the ceremony, Sonny’s blood pressure shot up dangerously high and he ended up in the hospital, nearly missing the whole event. Zakariyya emptied the minibar in his room, then emptied his father’s and Deborah’s. He yelled and threw programs when he saw that they listed him as “Joseph Lacks” and Henrietta as the woman who’d “donated” the HeLa cells.

Deborah did her best to ignore all that. When she walked onto the stage, she was so nervous the podium shook when she touched it. She’d worried for weeks that there might be a sniper in the audience—a scientist who’d want to take her out to do research on her body, or to keep the family from causing problems. But Pattillo assured her she was safe.

“Excuse me if I mispronouncing a word,” she told everyone at the conference, “but I have problems and I didn’t get the right teaching when I was coming up in school. I was not even allowed to have hearing aid until after I was grown. But I’m not ashamed of it.”

Then, with Pattillo cheering nearby, Deborah cleared her throat and began her speech:

When Dr. Pattillo called me, it all became real. For years, it seem to be a dream. Not knowing what was going on all these years. Didn’t know how to even talk about it. Can this about our mother be true? Not knowing who to go to for understanding. No one from the medical field took the time.

Then, without so much as a pause, she began talking directly to her mother:

We miss you, Mama. … I think of you all the time and wish I could see and hold you in my arms, like I know you held me. My father said that you told him on your dying bed to take care of Deborah. Thank you, Ma, we will see you again someday. We read what we can and try to understand. My mind often wonder how things might would be if God had you stay here with me. … I keep with me all I know about you deep in my soul, because I am part of you, and you are me. We love you, Mama.

It seemed like things were going better for the Lackses, like Henrietta would finally begin getting the recognition Deborah hoped for.

Soon the BBC showed up in Turner Station, asking locals about life there in the forties and fifties. News of their visit, like news of everything else that happens in Turner Station, quickly found its way to Speed’s Grocery, where Courtney Speed learned the story of Henrietta Lacks for the first time. It felt like serendipity—she and several other women had recently founded the Turner Station Heritage Committee, and they were organizing events to bring attention to black people from Turner Station who’d contributed good things to the world: a former congressman who became president of the NAACP, an astronaut, and the man who’d won several Emmy awards as the voice of Sesame Street’s Elmo.

When they learned about Henrietta and HeLa, Speed and a sociologist at Morgan State University named Barbara Wyche went into overdrive. They wrote letters to Congress and the mayor’s office demanding recognition of Henrietta’s contribution to science. They also got in touch with Terry Sharrer, a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, who invited the Lacks family to a small event at the museum. There Day admired old farm equipment and insisted that he wanted to see his wife’s cells. (The museum had a flask of HeLa in storage somewhere, the medium as dark as a murky pond, but it wasn’t on display.) People came up to Deborah with tears in their eyes and told her that her mother’s cells had helped them overcome cancer. Deborah was thrilled. After hearing a researcher talk about cloning, Deborah asked Sharrer whether it was possible to take DNA from HeLa cells and put it into one of Deborah’s eggs to bring her mother back to life. Sharrer said no.

After the event, Sharrer wrote a letter to Wyche suggesting that, to commemorate Henrietta, she and Speed consider starting an African-American health museum in Turner Station. The women soon founded the Henrietta Lacks Health History Museum Foundation, Inc., with Speed as president. They planned events featuring Henrietta Lacks look-alikes—a few Turner Station women who’d style their hair like Henrietta’s and wear suits identical to the one she wore in her iconic photo. To raise awareness of Henrietta’s contribution, Speed used her own money to make and give away Henrietta Lacks T-shirts, and someone else made Henrietta Lacks pens. The local papers wrote about their plan for a $7 million museum, and Speed and Wyche opened a Henrietta Lacks Foundation bank account, filed for a tax ID number, and began trying to collect as much money and information as they could for the museum. One of their first goals was getting a life-sized wax Henrietta statue.

Deborah wasn’t appointed as an officer or foundation board member, but Speed and Wyche called occasionally to ask if she’d speak at various celebrations honoring her mother—once under a small tent near Speed’s Grocery, other times at a nearby church. Eventually someone suggested that Deborah donate Henrietta’s Bible and the locks of hair from Henrietta and Elsie that she kept tucked inside. It was for safekeeping, people said, in case Deborah’s house ever caught fire. When Deborah heard that, she ran home and hid her mother’s Bible, telling her husband, “That’s the only things I have from my mother, now they want to take it!”