What Rebecca's Reading
- 'Serpent-Handling' West Virginia Pastor Dies From Snake Bite A “serpent-handling” West Virginia pastor died after his rattlesnake bit him during a church ritual, just as the man had apparently watched a snake kill his father years before.
- A Dispute Over Who Owns a Twitter Account Goes to Court How much is a tweet worth? And how much does a Twitter follower cost?
- A dollar badly spent: New facts on processed food in school lunches In a collaboration between The New York Times and the Investigative Fund, reporter Lucy Komisar delved into the billion-dollar business of the national school lunch program and found some unsettling news.
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April 5, 2010
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks FAQ#1: How did Skloot learn about HeLa cells?
I mentioned a while ago that I’ll be posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog.
I thought I’d start the FAQs with one of the most commonly asked questions: How did you learn about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, and why did they grab you the way they did? Here is the answer, which I also posted about over on Powells.com’s book blog this last week as part of a little guest blogging stint:
I first learned about Henrietta Lacks in the late 80s, when I was 16 and sitting in a basic biology class at Portland Community College
(PCC). My teacher, Donald Defler, mentioned HeLa cells, saying they
were one of the most important tools in medicine, then almost as an
aside, he said, “They came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, and she
was black.” That was the moment I became obsessed with Henrietta. I
went up to Defler after class and started asking questions about
whether her family knew about the cells (they didn’t) and what her race
had to do with them being alive, but he stopped me, saying no one knew
anything else about Henrietta, just her name and her race.
Defler, being the good biology teacher he was, suggested I do some
research to see if I could find any information about Henrietta Lacks.
“Write up a little summary of what you find and I’ll give you some
extra credit,” he told me. Several months ago, when I got the
pre-publication proofs of my book, I called Defler and (much to his
surprise) told him about how that moment in his biology class more than
20 years ago had started me on a path that ended with The Immortal Life. I sent him an advance copy and said, Here’s my extra credit summary, Mr. Defler…it’s a few decades late, but I
have a good excuse: the information was really hard to find …
The scene of me learning about Henrietta Lacks for the first time in
my PCC classroom is in the prologue of the book (which you can read
online here). But what’s not in the prologue is the backstory behind why Henrietta’s story grabbed me.
The year I learned about Henrietta Lacks was the same year
my father got sick with a mysterious illness no one was able to
diagnose. He’d gone from being my very active and athletic dad to being
a man who had problems thinking, and he spent all of his time lying in
our living room because he couldn’t walk. It turned out that a virus
had caused brain damage, and he eventually enrolled in an experimental
drug study (he’s since written several books
about his experience living with brain damage). Since my father was too
sick to operate a car, I drove him to and from the hospital several
times a week and sat with him while he got treatments. I spent much of
my 16th year sitting in a hospital watching my father and other
patients be used as research subjects. In the midst
of that, when Defler mentioned that Henrietta’s cells had been growing
in labs decades after her death, the first questions I asked were, Did she have any kids? How did they feel about her cells being used in research? I think I asked those questions in part because I was wrestling with the emotions associated with watching my father’s
experience as a research subject.
3 Responses to “Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks FAQ#1: How did Skloot learn about HeLa cells?”

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation
The Henrietta Lacks Foundation strives to provide financial assistance to needy individuals who have made important contributions to scientific research without their knowledge or consent.
Rebecca,
I want to tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed your book. It was a eye-openning and riveting account. I cannot stop talking about and recommending this book to everyone I meet. Thank you for your tenacity and technical skill in writing this book. My husband and I fought (not literally) to read the book at the same time.
Wendy Bodner
Keith, actually *reading* books works much better than just smashing your fists and face against a keyboard in a fugue of ignorance. And it’s HENRIETTA Lacks. The name only appears 13 times in this post alone. You would know this if you’d actually read it.
Cell culture scientists had been working tirelessly for decades in the attempt to establish an immortal cell line. Countless human cell samples were cultured and failed. Success owes not to Helen Lacks but to the years of 16 hour days put in by teams of scientists who work for the love of knowledge and the good it can bring.