Chapter 17: Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable

So HeLa cells were everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, but no one really knew if they were dangerous. I mean they are cancer cells so if other people are around them could they get cancer too? Researchers were eating lunch at lab tables next to them and vaccines were made with little bits of HeLa in it but it was found that rats injected with HeLa got cancer. That's a problem, right? Chester Southam, a well-respected cancer researcher, wanted to find out. He started to test his theory that cancer was caused by immune system deficiencies by injecting his cancer patients with HeLa cells and periodically checked out the site to see what would happen. Of course he did this WITHOUT patient consent, he said he was simply checking their immune systems. Within hours their arms grew red and swollen and about 5 days later hard nodules began to form. He removed some of the nodules to verify that they were cancerous but left some to see if they would go away on their own, and some did but they always grew back. That wasn't enough though. Southam wanted to check out the same thing on healthy patients since his were already compromised by their own cancers. He put in an ad at the Ohio State Penitentiary looking for 25 volunteers. He got 150. By June 1956 he started injecting prisoners with HeLa cells. He gave them multiple injections and the hard nodules grew just like they had with the cancer patients but unlike his first patients, the men completely fought off the cancer. With each injection the men's immunity to the cancer grew greater and the nodules went away faster. Even though his trials weren't necessarily harming his patients he wasn't giving them the proper information. None of them knew what they were being injected with but Southam wasn't legally obligated to tell them. The first time informed consent was mentioned in court wasn't until 1957. However, when news got out that he wasn't telling his patients that he was injecting them with cancer cells some compared him to the Nazis and the Nuremberg Trials. All in all, his work was one of the main reasons why medical trials have such strict guidelines and formalities today.

just a picture(:

check out this cool picture of some of Henrietta's cells!

Chapter 16: Spending Eternity in the Same Place

In this chapter Rebecca talks to Henrietta's cousin Cliff, here's she learns about a lot of the Lackeses family history. He showed her the family cemetery and told her about the white family members as well. He told her that since they were spending eternity in the same place they must have worked out their problems; they were all buried in the Lacks family cemetery. Rebecca also talked to Carlton and Ruby Lacks, two white Lacks cousins, who denied having any relation to the black Lacks and said they just adopted their last name because their family were their salve holders. Rebecca talked to Henrietta's cousin Gladys as well and she said that there is no question that they are kin. She then told Rebecca about Henrietta's sister Lillian, perhaps the only living sibling Henrietta still had, and how she thought people were trying to kill her since whites were asking questions about Henrietta and the family. It was evident that race was still a big issue in Clover.

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.

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.