Skloot first learns about Lacks in a community college biology class. Her teacher describes cell division as a choreographed dance. Embryos grow, wounds heal, but it takes only one mistake, an enzyme misfiring or a wrong protein activation, and you have cancer. He writes a name on the board: HENRIETTA LACKS, and tells of how when Lacks was dying of cervical cancer a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University sliced a piece of her tumor and put it in a petri dish.
Unlike other attempts to make human cells survive beyond a few days, Lacks’s cells reproduced vigorously. Great advances in medicine followed as the so-called HeLa cells, named after Henrietta, allowed research to be done outside the human body. As he erases her name he says, “She was a black woman.” Skloot follows the teacher to his office, wanting to know who Henrietta Lacks was. “No one knows anything about her,” he tells her.
Skloot eventually sets out to answer her question, and the first part of the book is a biography of the woman whose tissue resulted in the first immortal cell line. We learn of the tobacco town where Lacks was born, before she and her husband moved to Baltimore. Skloot traces the family back to slavery times and the white plantation owner whose blood Lacks shared.
Besides being about Henrietta, this book also serves as a biography of her cells and the discoveries they made possible. The vigor of the cell line allowed researchers to make large-scale tests for vaccines. Jonas Salk made use of the HeLa cells, testing his polio vaccine on them and ultimately saving thousands of lives. HeLa cells have led to discoveries in chemotherapy, gene mapping, the development of drugs for leukemia, herpes, Parkinson’s disease, and more.
Skloot then skillfully weaves in the story of the Lacks family and their abominable treatment by medical researchers. When Skloot, who began to work on the book while completing a master’s in fine arts at the University of Pittsburgh, first approaches the Lackses she is met by stony silence.
