The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (13 page)

T
here was no obituary for Henrietta Lacks, but word of her death reached the Gey lab quickly. As Henrietta’s body cooled in the “colored” freezer, Gey asked her doctors if they’d do an autopsy. Tissue culturists around the world had been trying to create a library of immortal cells like Henrietta’s, and Gey wanted samples from as many organs in her body as possible, to see if they’d grow like HeLa. But to get those samples after her death, someone would have to ask Henrietta’s husband for permission.

Though no law or code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient, the law made it very clear that performing an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without permission was illegal.

The way Day remembers it, someone from Hopkins called to tell him Henrietta had died, and to ask permission for an autopsy, and Day said no. A few hours later, when Day went to Hopkins with a cousin to see Henrietta’s body and sign some papers, the doctors asked again about the autopsy. They said they wanted to run tests that
might help his children someday. Day’s cousin said it wouldn’t hurt, so eventually Day agreed and signed an autopsy permission form.

Soon Henrietta’s body lay on a stainless-steel table in the cavernous basement morgue, and Gey’s assistant, Mary, stood in the doorway breathing fast, feeling like she might faint. She’d never seen a dead body. Now there she was with a corpse, a stack of petridishes, and the pathologist, Dr. Wilbur, who stood hunched over the autopsy table. Henrietta’s arms were extended, as if she were reaching above her head. Mary walked toward the table, whispering to herself,
You’re not going to make a fool of yourself and pass out
.

She stepped around one of Henrietta’s arms and took her place beside Wilbur, her hip in Henrietta’s armpit. He said hello, Mary said hello back. Then they were silent. Day wanted Henrietta to be presentable for the funeral, so he’d only given permission for a partial autopsy, which meant no incision into her chest and no removal of her limbs or head. Mary opened the dishes one by one, holding them out to collect samples as Wilbur cut them from Henrietta’s body: bladder, bowel, uterus, kidney, vagina, ovary, appendix, liver, heart, lungs. After dropping each sample into a petridish, Wilbur put bits of Henrietta’s tumor-covered cervix into containers filled with formal dehyde to save them for future use.

The official cause of Henrietta’s death was terminal uremia: blood poisoning from the buildup of toxins normally flushed out of the body in urine. The tumors had completely blocked her urethra, leaving her doctors unable to pass a catheter into her bladder to empty it. 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.

Mary stood beside Wilbur, waiting as he sewed Henrietta’s abdomen closed. She wanted to run out of the morgue and back to the lab, but instead, she stared at Henrietta’s arms and legs—anything to avoid looking into her lifeless eyes. Then Mary’s gaze fell on Henrietta’s feet, and she gasped: Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish.

“When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me years later, “I nearly
fainted. I thought,
Oh jeez, she’s a real person
. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.”

     
A
few days later, Henrietta’s body made the long, winding train ride from Baltimore to Clover in a plain pine box, which was all Day could afford. It was raining when the local undertaker met Henrietta’s coffin at the Clover depot and slid it into the back of a rusted truck. He rolled through downtown Clover, past the hardware store where Henrietta used to watch old white men play checkers, and onto Lacks Town Road, turning just before The Shack, where she’d danced only a few months earlier. As the undertaker drove into Lacks Town, cousins filed onto porches to watch Henrietta pass, their hands on hips or clutching children as they shook their heads and whispered to the Lord.

Cootie shuffled into his yard, looked straight into the falling rain, and yelled, “Sweet Jesus, let that poor woman rest, you hear me? She had enough!”

Amens echoed from a nearby porch.

A quarter-mile down the road, Gladys and Sadie sat on the broken wooden steps of the home-house, a long pink dress draped across their laps and a basket at their feet filled with makeup, curlers, red nail polish, and the two pennies they’d rest on Henrietta’s eyes to keep them closed for the viewing. They watched silently as the undertaker inched through the field between the road and the house, his tires sinking into puddles of red mud.

Cliff and Fred stood in the graveyard behind the house, their over alls drenched and heavy with rain. They’d spent most of the day thrusting shovels into the rocky cemetery ground, digging a grave for Henrietta. They dug in one spot, then another, moving each time their shovels hit the coffins of unknown relatives buried with no markers.
Eventually they found an empty spot for Henrietta near her mother’s tombstone.

When Cliff and Fred heard the undertaker’s truck, they walked toward the home-house to help unload Henrietta. When they got her into the hallway, they opened the pine box, and Sadie began to cry. What got her most wasn’t the sight of Henrietta’s lifeless body, it was her toenails: Henrietta would rather have died than let her polish get all chipped like that.

“Lord,” Sadie said. “Hennie must a hurt somethin worse than death.”

For several days, Henrietta’s corpse lay in the hallway of the home-house, doors propped open at each end to let in the cool wet breeze that would keep her body fresh. Family and neighbors waded through the field to pay respects, and all the while, the rain kept coming.

The morning of Henrietta’s funeral, Day walked through the mud with Deborah, Joe, Sonny, and Lawrence. But not Elsie. She was still in Crownsville and didn’t even know her mother had died.

The Lacks cousins don’t remember much about the service—they figure there were some words, probably a song or two. But they all remember what happened next. As Cliff and Fred lowered Henrietta’s coffin into her grave and began covering her with handfuls of dirt, the sky turned black as strap molasses. The rain fell thick and fast. Then came long rumbling thunder, screams from the babies, and a blast of wind so strong it tore the metal roof off the barn below the cemetery and sent it flying through the air above Henrietta’s grave, its long metal slopes flapping like the wings of a giant silver bird. The wind caused fires that burned tobacco fields. It ripped trees from the ground, blew power lines out for miles, and tore one Lacks cousin’s wooden cabin clear out of the ground, threw him from the living room into his garden, then landed on top of him, killing him instantly.

Years later, when Henrietta’s cousin Peter looked back on that day, he just shook his bald head and laughed: “Hennie never was what you’d call a beatin-around-the-bush woman,” he said. “We shoulda knew she was tryin to tell us somethin with that storm.”

N
ot long after Henrietta’s death, planning began for a HeLa factory—a massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio.

By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio epidemic in history. Schools closed, parents panicked, and the public grew desperate for a vaccine. In February 1952, Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh announced that he’d developed the world’s first polio vaccine, but he couldn’t begin offering it to children until he’d tested it on a large scale to prove it was safe and effective. And doing that would require culturing cells on an enormous, industrial scale, which no one had done before.

The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)—a charity created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d himself been paralyzed by polio—began organizing the largest field trial ever conducted to test the polio vaccine. Salk would inoculate 2 million children and the NFIP would test their blood to see if they’d become immune. But doing this would require millions of neutralization tests,
which involved mixing blood serum from newly vaccinated children with live poliovirus and cells in culture. If the vaccine worked, the serum from a vaccinated child’s blood would block the poliovirus and protect the cells. If it didn’t work, the virus would infect the cells, causing damage scientists could see using a microscope.

The trouble was, at that point, the cells used in neutralization tests came from monkeys, which were killed in the process. This was a problem, not because of concern for animal welfare—which wasn’t the issue then that it is today—but because monkeys were expensive. Doing millions of neutralization tests using monkey cells would cost millions of dollars. So the NFIP went into overdrive looking for a cultured cell that could grow on a massive scale and would be cheaper than using monkeys.

The NFIP turned to Gey and a few other cell culture experts for help, and Gey recognized the opportunity as a gold mine for the field. The NFIP’s March of Dimes was bringing in an average of $ 50 million in donations each year, and its director wanted to give much of that money to cell culturists so they could find a way to mass-produce cells, which they’d been wanting to do for years anyway.

The timing was perfect: by chance, soon after the NFIP contacted Gey for help, he realized that Henrietta’s cells grew unlike any human cells he’d seen.

Most cells in culture grew in a single layer in a clot on a glass surface, which meant they ran out of space quickly. Increasing their numbers was labor-intensive: scientists had to repeatedly scrape the cells from one tube and split them into new ones to give them more space. HeLa cells, it turned out, weren’t picky—they didn’t need a glass surface in order to grow. They could grow floating in a culture medium that was constantly stirred by a magnetic device, an important technique Gey developed, now called growing in suspension. This meant that HeLa cells weren’t limited by space in the same way other cells were; they could simply divide until they ran out of culture medium. The bigger the vat of medium, the more the cells grew. This discovery meant that if HeLa was susceptible to poliovirus, which not all cells
were, it would solve the mass-production problem and make it possible to test the vaccine without millions of monkey cells.

So in April 1952, Gey and one of his colleagues from the NFIP advisory committee—William Scherer, a young postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota—tried infecting Henrietta’s cells with poliovirus. Within days they found that HeLa was, in fact,
more
susceptible to the virus than any cultured cells had ever been. When they realized this, they knew they’d found exactly what the NFIP was looking for.

They also knew that, before mass-producing any cells, they’d need to find a new way to ship them. Gey’s air freight shipping system worked fine for sending a few cells to colleagues here and there, but it was too expensive for shipping on a massive scale. And growing cells by the billions wouldn’t help anyone if they couldn’t get those cells where they needed to go. So they began experimenting.

On Memorial Day 1952, Gey gathered a handful of tubes containing HeLa cells and enough media for them to survive for a few days, and packed them into a tin lined with cork and filled with ice to prevent overheating. Then he typed up careful instructions for feeding and handling, and sent Mary to the post office to ship them to Scherer in Minnesota. Every post office in Baltimore was closed for the holiday except the main branch downtown. Mary had to take several trolleys to get there, but she made it. And so did the cells: When the package arrived in Minneapolis about four days later, Scherer put the cells in an incubator and they began to grow. It was the first time live cells had ever been successfully shipped in the mail.