The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

Since the 2010 release of Rebecca Skloot’s New York Times bestselling non-fiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, many people both in and outside the scientific community are at least aware of the story of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells . The almost-mythical tale of the immortal HeLa cell line, taken from Henrietta Lacks’s cancer-ridden cervix and grown in culture for more than sixty years now, has evolved and spread throughout the scientific and popular imaginary , surfacing in accounts of the miraculous power and possibility of scientific research and debates surrounding medical ethics . While HeLa was used to develop the polio vaccine, continues to be of use in the research of AIDS, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease, and a host of other medical conditions, and even sent up in the first space missions to test the conditions of human cells in zero gravity, the cell line also carries with it the history of the woman in whom it originated, the history of slavery and racism in America, and the entanglement of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the sciences.

The immortal cells from her ultimately fatal cervical carcinoma were taken without her knowledge or consent by white doctors in the segregated ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital. It wasn’t until the 1970s that her family members found out that their wife and mother’s cells were alive in laboratories all around the world or that biotech companies had made millions of dollars selling vials of HeLa cells while most of the Lacks family lived in poverty and often couldn’t afford health insurance or medical care . In this story and much of the discussion it has prompted, I find an unsatisfactory engagement with the aforementioned entanglement of race, gender, class and sexuality. It is this intersectional assemblage that I will grapple with in this