Henrietta Lacks’ “Immortal” Cells: An Interview with the Author

The woman behind the commodified “HeLa” cancer cell line…

In her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tells the story of the woman Henrietta Lacks behind the infamous and widely used HeLa cells. In the interview for The Smithsonian, Skloot describes the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family and surfaces the ongoing tension between scientific progress and patient privacy. Hearing the voice of the author/journalist behind the story provides another layer of complexity and understanding. The part of the interview that I found most interesting was when the interviewer asked how Rebecca gained the trust of Henrietta’s family. Here was a young privileged white woman looking into (with the best intentions) the life of a poor Black woman. I can imagine that the power dynamics must have been tricky to navigate; it is no surprise that it took over a year of persistence on the part of Rebecca to finally reach the family. I suppose I’m bringing this up because it is so rare that we talk about social class and race in the context of science, where context does not play a main role. In fact, scientific research is so often about isolation and removing all “outside factors” to have a tightly controlled experiment. This interview, in multiple ways, forces us to look at race, class, and privilege in the eye.

Here’s a particularly powerful excerpt from the interview:

For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind. For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies—they’re just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation.

-Rebecca Skloot