The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Black tobacco farmer whose cells, taken without her knowledge, became one of the most important tools in medicine.

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Welcome to our summary of Rebecca Skloot’s groundbreaking work, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This powerful piece of narrative nonfiction weaves together science, biography, and investigative journalism to tell the unforgettable story of a poor Black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine. Skloot masterfully explores the collision between medical ethics, race, and family legacy, uncovering the human story behind the immortal HeLa cell line that revolutionized science, all while its donor remained virtually unknown for decades.
Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph
There is a photograph. A woman, leaning against a stone wall, hands on her hips, a confident smile playing on her lips. She is beautiful. But for decades, her name was a secret, known only to her family and a handful of scientists. To the world, she was simply HeLa, the first two letters of her first and last names. She was a biological entity, a line item in a laboratory ledger, a string of data on a computer screen. Her cells, harvested from a malignant tumor in her cervix, were the first human cells ever grown in a lab, and they were, for all intents and purposes, immortal. They have been shot into space, blasted with atomic bombs, used to develop the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization. They became the foundation of modern medicine, a multi-billion-dollar industry built on a biological miracle. But the miracle had a source. The cells came from a woman. A poor, black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, a mother of five who died in agony at the age of thirty-one in the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Her name was Henrietta Lacks. This is the story of her life, her death, and the immortality that followed—an immortality that saved millions but ravaged the family she left behind. It is a story about the collision of scientific progress and personal tragedy, of medical ethics and racial injustice, and of a family’s desperate struggle to know the woman from whom they came. It is a story that forces science to look in the mirror and see the human being staring back, asking questions about who owns the pieces of our bodies and who benefits from the march of discovery.
Part I: Life (1920–1951)
Before she was a scientific revolution, Henrietta Lacks was Loretta Pleasant, born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1920. But no one ever called her Loretta. After her mother, Eliza, died giving birth to her tenth child, Henrietta’s father, Johnny Pleasant, found himself unable to manage the large brood alone. He took his children back to the family’s roots, to the tiny, blink-and-you-miss-it town of Clover, Virginia, where the land was red with clay and green with tobacco. There, in a four-room log cabin that had once been slave quarters—the “home-place”—Johnny doled out his children among relatives. Henrietta, just a small girl, landed with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks. It was in that same cabin that she found her cousin and future husband, David “Day” Lacks. They were children together, working the fields from sunup to sundown, their hands stained with the sticky, sweet tar of tobacco leaves, their futures seemingly mapped out by the seasons of the harvest. Henrietta was vibrant, her cousins said. The kind of woman who would walk into a room and make it hers. She was beautiful and generous, loved to dance the jitterbug, loved to cook huge pots of spaghetti for anyone who was hungry, and always kept her nails painted a deep, bold red. In 1941, she married Day, and soon after, they joined the great migration of Southern blacks seeking opportunity in the North. They landed in Turner Station, a booming African American community on the outskirts of Baltimore, nestled in the shadow of the colossal Sparrows Point steel mill, where the sky glowed orange at night from the blast furnaces. For a time, life was good. Day worked at the mill, and Henrietta raised their children: Lawrence; the delicate Elsie, who suffered from epilepsy; David Jr. (Sonny); Deborah; and finally Joseph (later Zakariyya). But something was wrong. After the birth of Joseph, Henrietta told her cousins, 'I got a knot on my womb.' She felt it was different from her pregnancies, a deep-seated wrongness. The local doctor sent her to the only major hospital in the area that would treat black patients: Johns Hopkins. In 1951, Johns Hopkins was a temple of medicine, but for a poor black woman, it was an intimidating, alien world. The “colored” ward was a different universe from the white one, and it operated under an unspoken rule: as a public charity hospital, treatment was a form of payment for a patient's contribution to research. It was there that her physician, Dr. Howard Jones, found a malignant tumor on her cervix, unlike any he had ever seen. He described it as a glistening, purple mass, the color of grape jelly, that bled at the slightest touch. The diagnosis was terminal: an aggressive cervical adenocarcinoma. The standard of care at the time was brutal. Doctors stitched tiny pouches filled with radium, a highly radioactive element, directly to her cervix. The radiation burned inside her, charring her skin black and leaving her in constant, searing pain, though she largely hid her agony from her family. She was told it would cure her; she was not told it would leave her infertile. During one of these treatments, a surgeon, without her knowledge and certainly without her consent, sliced two small pieces of tissue from her cervix—one from the tumor, one from healthy tissue. It was a routine practice. He handed the samples to a lab assistant, who carried them down the hall to the laboratory of Dr. George Gey, a renowned and obsessive cell biologist on a quest. Aided by his meticulous wife and lab partner, Margaret, Gey had been trying for decades to achieve what many scientists considered the holy grail of biology: to grow a human cell line that could live and replicate indefinitely outside the body. He wanted an immortal cell line. Every sample he’d ever received, cultured in his custom-designed roller-tube drums, had died within days. But Henrietta’s cells were different. While her body, ravaged by the radium and the cancer that was spreading like wildfire, began to fail, her cells, in Gey’s nutrient-rich culture medium, thrived. They doubled their numbers every twenty-four hours, a microscopic engine of unstoppable life. They were aggressive, robust, and seemingly eternal. Henrietta Lacks died on October 4, 1951, at the age of thirty-one. The autopsy revealed that the cancer had metastasized everywhere, forming tumors on nearly every organ in her body. Her family buried her in an unmarked grave in Clover, Virginia, believing her story had come to an end. They had no idea that a part of her was, in a way the world had never seen, still very much alive.
Part II: Death (1951–1999)
In George Gey’s lab, the cells from Henrietta Lacks—which he code-named “HeLa” to protect her identity—were a miracle. They grew with a ferocity that was almost monstrous. While other cells were delicate, demanding, and mortal, HeLa cells were the biological equivalent of weeds: they grew anywhere, in almost any condition. They were so powerful they could travel through the air on dust particles or hitch a ride on an unwashed hand, contaminating other, weaker cell cultures in labs down the hall. Gey knew he had something revolutionary. He began sharing HeLa cells freely with any scientist who asked, sending them out in glass vials, packed in ice. This was before the age of bio-patents and corporate science; it was a time of open, collaborative research. The cells traveled the globe. Soon, the demand was so high that a HeLa factory was established at the Tuskegee Institute—a deeply ironic location, given its role in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study where black men were left untreated for decades. HeLa cells became the scientific workhorse of the 20th century. Jonas Salk used them to test his polio vaccine, an undertaking that required millions of cells to be cultured weekly. They allowed for the discovery that humans have 46 chromosomes, not 48. They were the first cells to be cloned, the first to be sent into space to see how human tissue would react to zero gravity. Scientists exposed them to toxins, radiation, and infections, leading to breakthroughs in cancer research, gene mapping, and understanding viruses like HIV and HPV—the very virus that likely caused Henrietta’s cancer in the first place. A multi-billion-dollar industry bloomed from those two small tissue samples, with corporations selling HeLa cells by the vial. They were a product, a tool, their human origin story all but forgotten. Back in Turner Station, the Lacks family knew none of this. They grieved for Henrietta and struggled to get by. Day, now a widower with five children, could barely cope. Elsie, their eldest daughter, her epilepsy worsening, was sent to the Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane, a place of unimaginable horrors. She died there alone at fifteen, after years of neglect and abuse, a victim of brutal medical experiments like pneumoencephalography, where holes were drilled into her skull to drain spinal fluid and pump in air. The other children were left in the care of an abusive cousin, Ethel, whose cruelty left deep and lasting scars, particularly on young Joseph. They grew up in poverty, haunted by the ghost of a mother they barely remembered. Then, in the early 1970s, more than two decades after Henrietta’s death, the scientific world stumbled upon a problem. The “HeLa bomb” had exploded. The cells were so aggressive that they had contaminated countless other cell lines around the world, rendering years of research invalid. To sort out the mess, scientists needed genetic markers from Henrietta’s family to create a map of her DNA. A researcher called Day Lacks. The conversation was a catastrophe of misunderstanding. The scientist, trying to explain the need for a blood draw, used words like “immortal cells” and “cell culture.” The family, with little formal education and a deep-seated, historically justified distrust of white doctors, heard something entirely different. Alive? They thought Henrietta was still being experimented on, a medical zombie locked in a basement at Johns Hopkins. Or that she had been cloned. The concept of immortal cells was so foreign, so beyond their frame of reference, that it sounded like science fiction, a cruel joke. For Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, the news was a bombshell that would define the rest of her life. She had been a baby when her mother died. Now, she learned, a piece of her mother was alive, being bought and sold, while she and her brothers couldn't even afford to see a doctor. The injustice was staggering. The world was benefiting from her mother’s biological legacy, corporations were profiting, but her family, Henrietta’s own flesh and blood, received nothing and couldn’t afford health insurance. The weight of this knowledge, combined with the grief for a mother she never knew and the dark, unspoken secret of what happened to her sister, Elsie, created a storm of anxiety and confusion that would churn inside Deborah for decades.
Part III: Immortality (2000 & Beyond)
This is where I entered the story. As a graduate student, I first heard the name HeLa in a biology class. The professor said the cells came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, but that’s all he knew. A question took root in my mind and wouldn’t let go: Who was she? Finding the answer took more than a decade. For years, the Lacks family had been hounded by reporters and scientists, people who took what they wanted—be it a blood sample or a quote—and then disappeared. They were protective, wary, and tired. Building trust was a slow, delicate process of showing up, listening, and being told ‘no’ more times than I can count. The gateway to the family was Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah. She was a woman driven by a desperate, all-consuming need to understand. Who was my mother? she would ask, her voice trembling with a lifetime of unanswered questions. What did she smell like? Did she love to dance? And what happened to my sister, Elsie? Deborah’s quest became my own. Together, we embarked on a journey into the past. We drove to Clover, to the old home-house and the overgrown, unmarked grave. We dug through medical records, uncovering the horrifying truth of Elsie’s life and death at Crownsville. I found a photograph of Elsie in her medical file, her face contorted in a scream, her head shaved. When Deborah saw it, she collapsed in grief, the confirmation of a lifetime of nightmares. Deborah’s faith was her anchor, but it was constantly tested by the bizarre science of her mother’s second life. ‘The Bible say the Lord can do anything,’ she’d tell me, ‘but I ain’t sure he meant this.’ She struggled to reconcile the spiritual immortality she believed in with the biological immortality of HeLa, driven by an enzyme called telomerase. She came to call the cells her mother’s ‘spirit body.’ The journey was fraught. Deborah was hounded by an anxiety so severe it caused hives to erupt all over her body and, at one point, a stroke. Her brother Zakariyya, his life derailed by the abuse he suffered after his mother’s death, was a cauldron of rage. He directed much of that anger at the world, and sometimes, at me, believing that science had stolen his mother from him. The pivotal moment, the point where the two halves of this story—the science and the family—finally collided, came in a lab at Johns Hopkins. I arranged for Deborah and Zakariyya to meet with a cancer researcher named Christoph Lengauer. He was a kind, patient man who understood that what he was about to do was more than a scientific demonstration; it was a spiritual encounter. He led Deborah to a microscope. ‘There,’ he said, pointing to a screen displaying a live image from the lens. ‘That’s your mother.’ On the screen, the HeLa cells, stained with a fluorescent dye, glowed a spectral green. They were pulsing, moving, dividing. Alive. For the first time in her life, Deborah was looking at a living piece of her mother. She reached out and touched the warm monitor. ‘She’s beautiful,’ she whispered, tears streaming down her face. In that moment, something shifted. The cells were no longer just a source of confusion and pain; they were a tangible connection to the mother she had lost. She saw the good they had done, the lives they had saved. For Zakariyya, holding a vial of the cells, the anger began to soften, replaced by a quiet awe. The story of Henrietta Lacks, once published, sparked a global conversation. It laid bare the issues of informed consent, tissue ownership, and medical racism. The courts had previously ruled, in the 1990 case of John Moore v. Regents of the University of California, that once tissue is removed from your body, you no longer have property rights to it. But Henrietta’s story challenged the ethics, if not the legality, of that precedent. In 2013, the story took another turn. A German lab sequenced and published Henrietta’s full genome online without the family’s consent—a profound violation of their genetic privacy, exposing them to potential discrimination. In response, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, worked with the Lacks family to forge a landmark agreement. For the first time, researchers wanting to use Henrietta’s genomic data would have to apply for access, and two members of the Lacks family would sit on the committee that approved or denied those requests. It wasn't financial justice, but it was a form of control, a seat at the scientific table. It was recognition. It was a say in their mother’s legacy, something they had been denied for more than sixty years.
Epilogue: The Legacy in the Blood
The story of Henrietta Lacks is a story with no simple heroes or villains. Dr. George Gey wasn’t a monster; he was a scientist driven by a desire to conquer disease, operating under the ethical norms of his time. Years later, when he was dying of the same aggressive cancer that killed Henrietta, he refused to let his colleagues culture his own tumor, a sign of his own evolving perspective on the matter. But the system he worked in was built on a foundation of racial injustice that viewed people like Henrietta Lacks as raw material for progress, not as partners in it. Her story forces us to confront the price of medical advancement and ask who bears the cost. It has become a cornerstone of education in bioethics, leading to substantive changes in regulations like the U.S. federal “Common Rule,” which governs research on human subjects and now places greater emphasis on transparent, understandable informed consent. The legacy of HeLa is twofold. There is the scientific legacy, an immortal line of cells that has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of human biology and saved an unquantifiable number of lives. Then there is the human legacy, a story of a family’s intergenerational trauma and their long fight to reclaim the narrative of their mother and grandmother. In the wake of the book, I established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to provide financial assistance for education and healthcare to the Lacks family and others who have made contributions to science without their consent. Deborah Lacks died of a heart attack not long before the book was published. But she had found what she was looking for. She learned about her mother’s smile, her red nail polish, her love of dance. She learned the horrifying truth about her sister, Elsie, and ensured she would not be forgotten by history. And in a darkened lab, she finally met her mother’s ‘spirit body,’ those glowing, eternal cells. Her son said she died at peace, her mission accomplished. Henrietta Lacks's body lies in an unmarked grave in Clover, but her cells live on in labs around the world. Her story, once buried in history, is now as immortal as her cells, a permanent part of our scientific and ethical conscience, a powerful reminder that behind every sample, every data point, and every medical miracle, there is always a human being.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks leaves an indelible mark by giving a name and history to the woman behind the HeLa cells. The narrative’s resolution arrives as Skloot takes Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, to a lab to see her mother’s living cells, a profoundly moving moment that provides a sense of closure. Ultimately, the Lacks family receives recognition for Henrietta’s contribution but no financial compensation from the multi-billion-dollar industry her cells created. The book’s lasting importance is its unflinching examination of bioethics, informed consent, and the racial inequities embedded in medical history, forcing a conversation that continues to shape scientific practice today. We hope this summary was insightful. Please like and subscribe for more content like this, and we'll see you in our next episode.