The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot

Thoughts: I enjoyed this book. Rebecca Skloot weaves together the stories of Henrietta Lacks and her family, research done using her cells after her death, and Skloot’s own experiences tracking down information for the book. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks vividly illustrates the complicated ethics surrounding the HeLa cell line, which enabled enormous medical breakthroughs while spawning a large industry, and leading to breaches of privacy and unethical experiments.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Skloot, Rebecca. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Broadway Books.

• HeLa cells had several characteristics that made them useful for research:
  • 94: they could grow in suspension (floating in medium that was stirred) rather than on the surfaces of test tubes
  • 95: HeLa cells were ideal for testing polio vaccines, since the cells were more susceptible to polio infection than other cultured cells
  • 95: they could be shipped in the mail
• 96: the first factory for culturing human cells (specifically HeLa cells) was started at the Tuskegee Institute, chosen in part to provide opportunities to young black scientists.
• More characteristics of HeLa cells
  • 97: though they’re cancerous, they share many characteristics with normal human cells: produce proteins, communicate with each other, express and regulate genes, susceptible to infections
    • made them particularly well-suited for studying viruses
  • 98: they could be frozen, putting them in suspended animation
• 98-99: HeLa cells led to standardization within the field of tissue culture - scientists could now replicate studies by other scientists, using cells with identical DNA cultured in a standardized medium.
• 127-129: Starting in the mid-1950s, virologist Chester Southam injected HeLa cells into cancer patients and prisoners, and found that while the immune systems of healthy prisoners would fight off the cells, HeLa cells would grow in cancer patients’ bodies; in the case of one cancer patient, they metastasized far from the injection site.
• 131: to learn more about: the Nuremberg Code - 10-point code of ethics developed after it was discovered that Nazi doctors ran involuntary experiments on Jewish people.
• 152-157: in 1966, it was discovered that HeLa cells could travel, airborne, and infect other cell cultures. By this point, they had infected a majority of the most commonly-used cultures at the time, calling into doubt the results of much research.
• 203: selling one’s own medical samples is now a big business. e.g. “nearly two million Americans… currently sell their blood plasma, many of them on a regular basis”
• 217: most non-stem cells can only divide ~50 times before dying - known as the Hayflick Limit (after Leonard Hayflick), due to the degeneration of telomeres found at the ends of chromosomes. Human cancer cells (including HeLa) produce an enzyme called telomerase, which rebuilds telomeres
• 323: “as of 2005… the US government had issued patents relating to the use of about 20 percent of known human genes.” These patents limit the research can be done about those genes, regulate therapies and diagnostic tests related to them…