The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (21 page)

After that, Joe waited. He knew he was going to plead guilty—he just wanted to get on with it. After five months awaiting trial in a cell, Joe wrote this letter to the criminal court judge:

Finally, on April 6, 1971—seven months after Ivy’s death—Joe stood in a courtroom and pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree, with Sonny watching nearby. The judge warned Joe repeatedly that a guilty plea meant waiving his right to a trial, his right to testify, and his right to appeal her ruling. As the judge spoke, he said “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am.” He told her the alcohol had made him do it and that he hadn’t meant to kill Ivy.

“I tried to hit on top of his shoulder, and he panicked and turned and caught it in the chest,” Joe said. “I was trying to wound him so I wouldn’t let him hurt me. … He told me he was going to kill me that Saturday night me and him got into the argument. I just hope you see I was trying to protect my life. I was not really wanting any trouble out of no one at all.”

But Ivy’s fourteen-year-old neighbor, who’d seen the whole thing, said Joe had walked right up and stabbed Ivy in the chest, then tried to stab him again in the back as he staggered away.

When Joe stepped from the stand, his court-appointed lawyer approached the judge to make this final point:

Without knowing anything about Joe’s life or the abuse he experienced as a child, his lawyer said, “He feels it more necessary to protect himself than the average individual. And possibly, this sets him off, where it would not set off the average person.”

“Do people call you Crazy Joe?” the judge asked.

“There was a few friends that called me that,” Joe said.

“Do you know why they call you that?”

“No ma’am,” he said.

The judge accepted Joe’s guilty plea, but asked to see medical and psychiatric reports before deciding his sentence. Those records are sealed, but whatever they contained led her to give him a sentence of only fifteen years out of a possible thirty. The state sent Joe to the Mary land Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, a medium-security prison about seventy-five miles west of Baltimore.

In the beginning, Joe spent his time in prison much as he’d spent it in the military: in the hole for insubordination and fighting. But eventually he stopped fighting and focused his energy inward. Joe found Islam and began spending all his time studying the Koran in his cell. Soon he changed his name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman.

Meanwhile, on the outside, things were looking pretty good for the other Lacks brothers. Sonny had just been honorably discharged from the Air Force, and Lawrence had a good job working for the railroad. But things weren’t so good for Deborah. By the time Zakariyya ended up in prison, Deborah had married Cheetah in a blue chiffon dress in Bobbette and Lawrence’s living room. She was eighteen. When Deborah and Cheetah first met, he threw a bowling ball at her on the sidewalk in front of her house. She thought he was playing, but things
only got worse after they married. Soon after their second child, LaTonya, was born, Cheetah fell into drugs and started beating Deborah when he was high. Then he started running the streets, disappearing with other women for nights on end, and coming back only to sell drugs out of the house while Deborah’s children sat and watched.

One day, as Deborah stood at the sink doing dishes, her hands covered in soap bubbles, Cheetah ran into the kitchen yelling something about her sleeping around on him. Then he smacked her.

“Don’t do that again,” Deborah said, standing stone-still, her hands still in the dishwater.

Cheetah grabbed a plate from the drying rack and broke it across the side of her face.

“Don’t put your hand back on me no more!” Deborah screamed, her hand shooting out of the dishwater, gripping a serrated steak knife.

Cheetah raised his arm to hit her again, but he was clumsy from the drugs and booze. Deborah blocked him with her empty hand and pinned him against the wall. She stuck the tip of the knife into his chest just deep enough to break the skin, then dragged it down past his navel as Cheetah screamed, calling her crazy.

He left her alone for a few days after that, but eventually came home drunk and high and started beating her again. As Cheetah kicked her one night in the living room, Deborah yelled, “Why you always have to be arguing and fussing with me?” When he didn’t answer, Deborah decided right then she wanted him dead. He turned and staggered toward the stairs of their apartment, still yelling, and Deborah pushed him hard as she could. He tumbled to the bottom, where he lay bleeding. Deborah stared at him from the top of the stairs, feeling nothing—no fear, no emotion. When he moved, she walked down the steps and dragged him through their basement onto the sidewalk outside. It was the middle of winter and snowing. Deborah dropped him on the ground in front of the house without a coat, slammed the door, and went upstairs to sleep.

The next morning she woke up hoping he’d frozen to death, but instead he was sitting on their front stoop, bruised and cold.

“I feel like some guys jumped me and beat me up,” he told her.

She let him in the house and got him washed and fed, all the while thinking what a damn fool he was. While Cheetah slept it off, Deborah called Bobbette, saying, “This is it, he gonna die tonight.”

“What are you talking about?” Bobbette asked.

“I got the monkey wrench,” Deborah said. “I’m gonna splatter his brains all over the wall. I’m sick of it.”

“Don’t do it, Dale,” Bobbette said. “Look where it got Zakariyya—he’s in jail. You kill that man, then what about your children? Now get that monkey wrench outta there.”

The next day, after Cheetah left for work, a moving van pulled up to the house. Deborah took the children and everything they owned, then hid at her father’s house until she could find her own apartment. As Deborah worked two jobs and struggled to settle into her new life as a single mother, she had no idea she was about to get news that would be harder to handle than anything Cheetah had done.

I
n September 1966, a geneticist named Stanley Gartler walked up to the podium at a hotel in Bedford, Pennsylvania. There, in front of George Gey and the other giants of cell culture, Gartler announced that he’d found a “technical problem” in their field.

He was at the Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture with more than seven hundred other scientists. They’d come from biotech companies and academia; they’d traveled from New York, England, the Netherlands, Alaska, Japan, and everywhere between to discuss the future of cell culture. The room buzzed with excitement as everyone talked about cell cloning and hybrids, mapping human genes, and using cultures to cure cancer.

Few there had heard of Stanley Gartler, but that was about to change. Gartler leaned into the microphone and told the audience that, in the process of looking for new genetic markers for his research, he’d found that eighteen of the most commonly used cell cultures had one thing in common: they all contained a rare genetic marker called glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase-A (G6PD-A), which was present
almost exclusively in black Americans. And even among them it was fairly rare.

“I have not been able to ascertain the supposed racial origin of all eighteen lines,” Gartler told the audience. “It is known, however, that at least some of these are from Caucasians, and that at least one, HeLa, is from a Negro.” He knew this, because a few months earlier, he’d written George Gey:

When Gey responded that HeLa cells had come from “a colored woman,” Gartler knew he’d found the source of the problem.

“It seems to me the simplest explanation,” he told the audience, “is that they are all HeLa cell contaminants.”

Scientists knew they had to keep their cultures free from bacterial and viral contamination, and they knew it was possible for cells to contaminate one another if they got mixed up in culture. But when it came to HeLa, they had no idea what they were up against. It turned out Henrietta’s cells could float through the air on dust particles. They could travel from one culture to the next on unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers’ coats and shoes, or through ventilation systems. And they were strong: if just
one
HeLa cell landed in a culture dish, it took over, consuming all the media and filling all the space.

Gartler’s findings did not go over well. In the fifteen years since George Gey had first grown HeLa, the number of published articles involving cell culture had more than tripled each year. Scientists had spent millions of dollars conducting research on those cells to study the behavior of each tissue type, comparing one to another, testing the unique responses of different cell types to specific drugs, chemicals, or
environments. If all those cells were in fact HeLa, it would mean that millions of dollars had been wasted, and researchers who’d found that various cells behaved differently in culture could have some explaining to do.

Years later, Robert Stevenson, who became president of the American Type Culture Collection, described Gartler’s talk to me this way: “He showed up at that meeting with no background or anything else in cell culture and proceeded to drop a turd in the punch bowl.”

Stevenson and other members of the Cell Culture Collection Committee sat stunned in the audience as Gartler pointed to a chart on the wall listing the eighteen cell lines that had been contaminated by HeLa, along with the names of the people or places he’d gotten them from. At least six of the contaminated lines came from the ATCC. HeLa had penetrated Fort Knox.

At that point, the ATCC’s collection had grown to dozens of different types of cells, all guaranteed to be free from viral and bacterial contamination, and tested to ensure that they hadn’t been contaminated with cells from another species. But there was no test to see if one human cell had contaminated another. And, to the naked eye, most cells growing in culture look the same.

Now Gartler was essentially telling the audience that all those years researchers thought they were creating a library of human tissues, they’d probably just been growing and regrowing HeLa. He pointed out that a few years earlier, when scientists started taking protective measures against cross-species contamination—such as working under sterile hoods—it had suddenly become harder to grow new cell lines. And in fact, “very few [new human cell lines] have been reported since.” Not only that, he said, but there had been no new examples of “so-called spontaneous transformed human cell cultures” since.

Everyone in the audience knew what that meant. On top of saying they’d possibly wasted more than a decade and millions of research dollars, Gartler was also suggesting that spontaneous transformation—one of the most celebrated prospects for finding a cure for cancer—might
not exist. Normal cells didn’t spontaneously become cancerous, he said; they were simply taken over by HeLa.

Gartler concluded his talk by saying, “Where the investigator has assumed a specific tissue of origin of the cell line, i.e., liver … or bone marrow, the work is open to serious question, and in my opinion would be best discarded.”

The room sat silent, dumbfounded, until T. C. Hsu, the chair of Gartler’s conference session, spoke. Hsu was the University of Texas geneticist whose earlier work with HeLa and other cells had made it possible to discover the correct number of human chromosomes.