Saturday, March 31, 2012

Chapter 15: Too Young to Remember

After Henrietta's funeral cousins came and went to help care for the children and Day; one of them brought tuberculosis as well. Henrietta's children Sonny, Deborah and Joe all got it. Deborah was sent home with TB pills but Joe was in an isolation chamber coughing up blood for about a year, only the second year of his life. When they overcame their illness they came home and were abused by a cousin named Ethel who stayed there with her husband Galen. Ethel and Day began to mess around and Galen started to sexually abuse Deborah. Lawrence, Henrietta's oldest son was drafted into the army and when the Korean War started and had know idea what was happening to his brothers and Deborah. When he came back he married Bobbette Cooper in 1959 and soon the children moved in with them to escape the abuse. The boys were saved but Galen found Deborah everywhere she went. He would follow her home and drag her into the car; when she refused he got Day and punched her in the face. After that she finally had the courage to tell Bobbette about what Galen did to her and Bobbette told them if they ever hurt any of those kids again she'd kill them herself. Deborah wondered about her mother and sister and what they went through. She often asked about her mother but all Day ever told her was that "Her name was Henrietta Lacks and she died when you were too young to remember."

Chapter 14: Helen Lane

The media wanted to know who Henrietta was and so many knew her name so it was no question as to whether it'd be leaked or not. On November 2, 1953 an article in Minneapolis Star was the first to write about the woman behind the cells, Henrietta Lakes. It would have been a good story if they got her name right. No one knows who leaked Henrietta's name but Gey and his associates were relieved by the misinformation. Only two days after that was published a press officer at NFIP wanted to write a story about Henrietta and he wanted her name and interviews with her family. Gey knew that that couldn't happen because then Henrietta's family would know that her cells were taken without permission and that they were still alive. So they told Berg, the press officer, that he couldn't use the name and that it had to stay confidential. Berg didn't accept the conditions and didn't write he story but soon after a reporter from Collier's magazine wanted to write the same story that Berg wanted. He ended up writing it but using the name Helen L. and said the cells were taken after her death. After that she was always know as Helen Lane or sometimes Helen Larson but never as Henrietta Lacks. "And because of that her family had no idea her cells were alive."

Chapter 13: The HeLa Factory

Not long after Henrietta died plans for a HeLa factory began. A mass production of cells was needed in order to test the polio vaccine made by Jonas Salk. At this time polio was an epidemic and was spreading quickly. In fact, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was paralyzed by polio himself, established The National Foundation for Infantile Parakysis (NFIP) in order to conduct the largest field trial ever to test the polio vaccine. Salk needed to inoculate 2 million children and the NFIP would test their blood to see if they were immune, but to do that millions of neutralization tests would needed to be done. They needed cells to do this, HeLa cells. HeLa cells grew at an intense rate and could grow in suspension of a culture medium so they were perfect for the job. Gey improved his shipping methods and ended up finding a way to ship cells through the mail, the first time it was ever successfully done. After that William Scherer developed a factory of HeLa cells at Tuskegee Institute. With help from all of the scientists and technicians they proved that the polio vaccine worked. Ironically most of those techs were black women and they proved the vaccine worked during the same time that the Tuskegee syphilis studies were going on. HeLa cells were spreading everywhere. They were used to find how viruses act and how they reprogram cells, which pretty much launched the field of virology. Using HeLa scientists found effective ways of freezing cells which opened the doors for so many things from shipping overseas to observing different cell stages. Soon after that they standardized the field of tissue culture and made the culture media, the equipment and the cells available to any scientist. From Henrietta's cells they were able to clone cells which lead to advances that made cloning whole animals, isolating stem cells, and in vitro fertilization possible. Her cells even lead to the discovery of 46 chromosomes in normal human cells which made it possible to identify genetic disorders. Along with the demand for HeLa cells the owner of Microbiological Associates,, Samuel Reader, opened his own industrial-scale cell distribution center, making a multibillion dollar industry from selling human biological materials. HeLa cells were used by cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies, to test the effects of steroids, chemotherapy drugs, hormones, vitamins, environmental stress and were infected with tuberculosis, salmonella, and bacterium that cause things such as vaginitis. As great as the cells were doing, Gey got annoyed by the spread of HeLa cells and that they weren't in his control anymore. His wife and assistants wrote his papers for him because he couldn't escape HeLa, going to laboratories to describe his techniques and to direct new scientists. His colleague told him that he shouldn't have made HeLa 'general scientific property' if he didn't want this type of thing to happen. But since HeLa was 'general scientific property' people started to wonder about the woman they came from.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Part Two- Chapter 12: The Storm

Henrietta had no obituary but Gey and the people in his lab heard the news quickly. They wanted to get samples from as many of her organs as possible so they asked Day if they could perform an autopsy, this was because it was illegal to take cells from the dead without permission. At first he said no, but when they said it could help his children in the future he gave them permission to do a partial autopsy so her body would still be presentable for the funeral. Mary, Gey's assistant went to the morgue where the pathologist, Dr. Wilbur, took sample from her bladder, bowel, uterus, kidney, vagina, ovary, appendix, liver, heart and lungs and put pieces of the tumor covered cervix in formaldehyde for future use. They determined that her official cause of death was terminal uremia, blood poisoning from the buildup of toxins in the body that should be removed through the urine. The tumors that blocked Henrietta's urethra were so large that they couldn't get a catheter through to empty her bladder. "Tumors the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls." A couple days after that her body was shipped back to Clover into Lacks Town for her viewing and funeral. Two of her cousins dug her grave next to her mothers tombstone and as she was buried it began to pour. It rained everyday of Henrietta's viewing but when she was put in the ground a storm that ripped trees out of the ground and roofs off of houses started. The family says that Henrietta was trying to tell them something with that storm.

Chapter 11: The Devil of Pain Itself

By the time September came Henrietta's body was pretty much entirely taken over by tumors that had grown on everything from her lungs to her bladder. The tumors were so bad that they blocked her intestines, making her stomach swell like she was 6 months pregnant. They took over her kidneys, causing her to have blood transfusions one after another because of the toxins that filled her body. Her cousin Emmett Lacks and about 8 other men that Henrietta cared for when they worked at Sparrows Point with Day, went to Hopkins to donate blood to Henrietta. He told Rebecca about how Henrietta's arms and legs were strapped down to the bed to keep her from falling out when her body cringed in pain. Henrietta told her sister Gladys that she was going to die and that she had to make sure her babies were taken care of, especially her baby girl Deborah. She died at 12:15 am on October 4, 1951.

Chapter 10: The Other Side of the Tracks

Rebecca Skloot traveled all the way down to Clover, Virginia to look for Lacks Town, an area where most of Henrietta's family lived. She traveled up and down the length of Lacks Town until a man nicknamed Cootie came out and asked her if she was lost. Cootie, or Henry Hector, was Henrietta's first cousin. He invited Rebecca in to tell her anything he we about Henrietta. He said that she was the type of person who cared for everyone, even when she was sick. He told Rebecca about how she helped care for him when his polio got bad, a disease that left him partially paralyzed in is neck and arms and had him in and out of hospitals since he was nine. Cootie also went on to say how most people think that voodoo had a part in Henrietta's cells. He said that spirits come around to people's homes and give them diseases. He believed that that is what happened to Henrietta because "normal cancer cells don't keep growing after the person is dead".

Chapter 9: Turner Station

Rebecca Skloot went to Turner Station, a small town near Sparrow's Point to meet with Henrietta's family. She got all the way there and then Sonny, Henrietta's son, decided not to meet with her. Skloot ended up driving around looking for anyone who knew something about Henrietta, which was pretty much everyone, but no one would tell her. She got into contact with a woman named Courtney Speed who had her watch a video called "The Way of All Flesh" which was a BBC special about Henrietta and her cells. At the end there was a scene in Clover with Henrietta's cousin Fred. It was then that Rebecca knew that she had to go there to get Henrietta's story. Sonny just laughed at her and said good luck.

Chapter 8: A Miserable Specimen

It was the beginning of June when Henrietta started to complain to her doctors about a discomfort that she felt in her lower abdomen. She said that she could feel the cancer moving through her but they found nothing wrong with her. In her chart there are several records stating that she seems fairly healthy and there's "no evidence of recurrence". This was a time when doctors withheld information from their patients that they thought would upset and confuse them. They called it "benevolent deception". Patients didn't question their doctors, especially not black patient. During the 1950's segregation was still law and black patients were just happy to be getting treatment. About two weeks after the last time Henrietta went to Hopkins she came back in barely able to urinate with a pain in her abdomen that made it hard to walk. They put a catheter in to empty her bladder and sent her home. Three days later she came back and a doctor pressed down where she felt the pain and felt a "stony hard" mass. She got an X-ray and sure enough there was a tumor attached to her pelvic wall almost completely blocking her urethra. He said she was chronically ill, called for the doctors who had been working on her that said she was healthy and sent her home to bed. Soon everyone in her family knew that she was sick. Everyday Day would drive her to Hopkins to get X-rays and almost everyday a new tumor appeared. They were on her uterus, on each kidney, on her urethra, her lymph nodes, hip bones, and labia basically filling the inside of her abdomen. The doctors new that it was unlikely that she'd recover because of the rapid growth of the tumors and gave her radiation in hopes of easing some of her pain and shrink the tumors. Everyday they increased her radiation, her skin got blacker and blacker. Finally on August 8, she asked to stay in the hospital for treatment. They flooded her body with different pain medications but nothing worked. Demerol, Morphine, Dromoran, even pure alcohol injections in her spine did nothing for her. She spent her days with temperatures up to 105 degrees and stopped radiation treatment utterly defeated by the cancer. There is no record that Gey ever met Henrietta. He did want another sample of her cells but they died immediately died from all toxins that contaminated her cervix. Only one person, Laure Aurelian a colleague of Gey's at Hopkins, said that they met. She said that "when Gey told her that her cells would help save the lives of countless people she smiled and said she was glad her pain would come to some good for someone." she was only 31 years old.

Chapter 7: The Death and Life of Cell Culture

April 10, 1951- George Gey was on WAAM television in Baltimore to talk about his immortal cells. He didn't mention Henrietta, in fact at this point she didn't know they were even hers, but he talked about how they would change the world of medicine. Gey hoped that the cells would help to cure or control cancer. He sent her cells everywhere there were scientists who might use them for cancer research. They went to Texas, New York, Amsterdam and even India! But that's not where it stopped. Scientists sent the cells to others and soon HeLa cells were all over the world. Even though the spread of her cells was massive, cell culture wasn't considered important by 1951. In 1912 a Frenchmen named Alexis Carrel grew an "immortal chicken heart" and made the first technique for suturing blood vessels together. They thought that he was a genius and that his medical miracle would allow man to be immortal and virtually disease free, however that was not the case. As Carrel's popularity spread he began proposing radical ideas that only wealthy, white men could benefit from his work. He even went so far as to support Hitler's "energetic measures" for preserving the superior white race. Don't get me wrong Carrel was brilliant, he performed the first coronary bypass surgery and even made methods for organ transplantation, but he was crazy. While the media frenzied around him he turned his apartment into a chapel where he gave lectures about medical miracles and his hopes to become a dictator in South America. Although many white Americans thought he was a genius, other scientists distanced themselves from him. He was reported to say that his chicken heart cells would reach a greater volume than the solar system! Back in reality his original cells died many years before. With some investigation Leonard Hayflick found that Carrel was putting new cells into the culture when he was "feeding" them with "embryo juice". So his chicken heart cells were a joke, which turned the idea of tissue culture into a joke and racism, Nazis and all the other nonsense Carrel spread around. By the time Gey actually had legitimate cells no one cared.

HeLa Cells History


so this is sort of an overview of Henreitta and her story !

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Chapter 6: Lady's on the Phone

In this chapter Skloot starts to tell you about the journey it took her to write this book. She describes the way that the media and other reporters attacked Henrietta's family with questions about her cells. Not about her. Eleven years after Skloot's obsession about Henrietta and cells began she found a bunch of scientific papers from the "HeLa Cancer Control Symposium" which is in Atlanta. The symposium had been made n honor. Of Henrietta by a professor named Roland Patillo. Patillo was one of Gey's only black students and was Skloot's entrance into the craziness of Henrietta's life and the legacy of her cells. Skloot made contact with Patillo, who had connections to the Lack's family, and he grilled with questions about her intentions. Most people just wanted to know about the cells but Skloot wanted to know about Henrietta. So after a few days of questioning Patillo gave Skloot Henrietta's only living daughter's, Deborah, number. Deborah was excited by the idea of someone wanting to know about her mother because she wanted the same thing. The drama over the cells had caused the Lacks so much pain that Deborah had developed health issues from the stress. It wasn't an easy road for Skloot. After some conversation the family decided they didn't want her to talk to them about Henrietta and she ended up not hearing from Deborah for a year! She tried to contact David, Henrietta's husband, but he was uncooperative as well. The only thing Skloot was getting was hung up on.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Chapter 5: Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside

Henrietta had started her radium treatments and wasn't showing any of the side effects such as nausea, vomiting, weakness or anemia so things were looking good. Even her closest friends and family couldn't tell that something was wrong. She thought she would go back to Hopkins to get her radium treatments every month and no one would know. Her cousin Sadie tells the author about how Henrietta was the type of person to brighten any one's day and just a fun lively person to be around, even when she was sick. When Henrietta went back to Hopkins for her second radium treatment doctors were impressed with her progress. The tumor had shrunk and besides a little inflammation from the treatment her cervix was starting to look better. However, that didn't change the fact the she had to go back every weekday for a month for X-ray therapy. When she started going she told her family but at that point it didn't seem like there was anything to worry about. By the time her second radium treatment was over the tumor was gone and her cervix looked normal again. They thought she was cured and only continued treatment to make sure all the cancerous cells were gone. When she began her X-ray therapy they tattooed two black dots on her abdomen just over her uterus so they could be consistent with where they aimed the radiation into her skin. At first she responded well to the treatments but things weren't always good. Towards the end Henrietta found out that the treatments left her infertile, something her doctors failed to mention to her. She said if she had known she would have refused treatment but it was too late. After only three weeks of X-ray therapy Henrietta became infected with gonorrhea from her husband. To make matters worse it was superimposed on radiation reactions. As the weeks went on Henrietta's strength began to diminish. She was so tired and worn out to point that she almost collapsed on her way to her cousins home. The treatments had taken a toll on her mentally and physically, leaving the skin from her breasts to her pelvis a tar black. She said "It just feels like the blackness be spreadin all inside of me."

Friday, March 16, 2012

Chapter 4: The Birth of HeLa

In this chapter the author tells us about the process of how HeLa cells came about. The cells got the name because Gey and his team take the first two letters of the patients first and last name to put on the label for each cell sample. Soon after Mary, an assistant in Gey's lab, put Henrietta's normal cells in a chicken-blood culture they died. However, the cancer cells grew with intense speed. Within 24 hours the amount of Henrietta's cancer cells doubled. Gey thought he finally had immortal cells and he shared them with a few of his closest colleagues.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Chapter 3: Diagnosis and Treatment

When Henrietta went to John Hopkins they took a biopsy, a sample of living tissue, from the lump in her cervix. A few days after she left the results came back that she had "Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, stage 1", which is really just a fancy way of saying she has cervical cancer. All cancers start out from one cell that goes wrong- the cancer type is categorized by the type of cell it originated from. Cervical cancers are often called carcinomas, which grow from the epithelial cells that line and protect the cervix. At the time Henrietta came in Howard Jones, the gynecologist who saw her, and Richard Wesley TeLinde, one of the best cervical cancer experts in the country and an amazing surgeon, were in a debate about the two types of cancer and how to treat them most effectively. The two types of cervical cancers are invasive and noninvasive or carcinoma in situ. Invasive cervical cancer penetrates the surface of the cervix while noninvasive types grow in a type of layered sheet across the surface of the cervix. By 1951 most doctors believed that noninvasive cervical carcinoma wasn't deadly and thought it couldn't spread. They generally treated invasive cervical cancer aggressively and didn't treat noninvasive cervical cancer at all but later studies showed that 62% of patients with noninvasive types ended up developing invasive types when left untreated. TeLinde believed that noninvasive cervical cancer was really just an early stage of invasive cancer. Soon after a researcher named George Papanicolaou found a test, now called a Pap smear, to find precancerous cells in the cervix doctors thought that cervical cancer would be almost entirely preventable. This was a time when 15,000 women a year died from it! Unfortunately that wasn't the case, most doctors couldn't read the results of the Pap smears correctly and ended up diagnosing their patients incorrectly, causing many of them to die. This is where TeLinde comes in. He wanted to document what WASN'T cervical cancer by having doctors double check the smears with biopsies. What he needed was cell samples. So TeLinde began to take samples from patients who went to the public ward, they thought that it was okay because most if the patients from those wards were treated for free so using them for research was a type of payment. After he took the samples he would send them to George Gey, who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow immortal human cells- cells that continuously kept dividing and growing. Jones called Henrietta in for treatment and told her about her condition. When she went to the hospital they gave her a surgery where a plaque filled with radium* was sewed to the outer surface of her cervix; however, before he put in the plaque he took two tissue samples. Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., the surgeon on duty, took two dime sized samples from her cervix without her knowledge, one from the cancer and one from the healthy tissue nearby. These samples were sent to Gey's lab and would change the lives of millions. * radium was discovered in France by Marie and Pierre Curie who found that it destroyed cancerous cells. they didn't know, however, that too much exposure to radium could kill OTHER cells, cause cancer from mutations and literally burn your skin off. one doctor named Howard Kelly, who traveled the world collecting radium and carrying it in his pockets, died of cancer- probably from his regular exposure to it. although it isn't the best thing to be around regularly, radium was proven to be the safer treatment for invasive cervical cancers when compared to surgery.

Chapter 2: Clover

In this chapter it backtracks to Henrietta's life as a child. She was born in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1, 1920 and her mother was Loretta Pleasant. Henrietta had 8 other siblings and during her mothers pregnancy with her tenth child she died. Her father wasn't really the type of man who had the patience to raise children so after her mother passed he sent his children away to his family in Clover, Virginia. The siblings were all split up; Henrietta ended up living with her grandparents. There she met her cousin, and future husband, David Pleasant. She and all of her cousins worked the tobacco farms that their family owned to earn enough money during crop season to feed the family for the year. Eventually Henrietta and David, also called Day, started having children and got married in April of 1941. Soon after, their cousin Fred came back to visit from Baltimore where he worked at a steel company in Sparrow's Point. He convinced Day to come with him and earn enough to move Henrietta and the children there. Finally, when Fred was drafted overseas he gave Day all the money he had saved and Henrietta and her two children left Clover to start a new life.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Part One- Chapter 1: The Exam

Henrietta Lacks was the mother of five children, all babies were born to full term. About a few weeks after her fourth pregnancy she began to confide in her cousins that something was wrong. She'd say that there was a lump in her womb. At first she thought that it could have been from her pregnancy or the sexually transmitted diseases her husband often gave her from being with other women, until one day after her fifth pregnancy she began bleeding. It wasn't part of her normal menstrual cycle and she got worried. She made an appointment and her doctor sent her to John Hopkins hospital to get checked out by the gynecologist there. Although she wasn't thrilled to go, this was the time of Jim Crow and hospitals such as these were still segregated, she felt as though she had no other choice. Howard Jones, the gynecologist on duty that day, went over her records and found a lump exactly where she said it would be. He was surprised to find that her pregnancies went to full term; it meant one of two things. Either they over looked the tumor or it was growing at a rapid rate.

Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph

In this first little tidbit of the book the author, Rebecca Skloot, goes on to tell us about Henreitta and her cells. Most people have no idea who Henreitta even is, all they know is that her cells have done amazing things. If you laid all of the HeLa cells ever grown down end-to-end they could wrap around EARTH at least three times! Skloot also goes on to tell us how she became interested in Henreitta's story and how the Lacks family has affected her own. All in all from just reading these seven pages it is clear to see that this book is going to be good. The next chapters will begin to unravel the story of Henreitta Lacks, her family and her cells.