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![]() ![]() It is not surprising they harboured such fears. Deborah, Henrietta's daughter, believed that her mother had been cloned, and that she was suffering the pains of all the diseases that her cells had helped to cure. That's where the mystery's at." Joe, Henrietta's youngest son, was born when she was already ill he served a long prison sentence for homicide and his lifelong delinquencies were attributed by the family to the poisoned environment of his mother's womb. A cousin explained to the author: "Nobody round here ever understood how she dead and that thing still living. When they were told, more than 20 years after her death, that her cells were still alive, they developed not just a sense that they were owed money but also a series of torturing misapprehensions. Henrietta's other children were brought up in cold, abusive circumstances, knowing little of their mother as a person, and nothing of her part in medical history. Her deaf daughter, Elsie, was institutionalised, and the recovery of the circumstances of the child's short life form a grim part of this narrative. ![]() She already had syphilis when her cancer was diagnosed. She and her husband moved to Baltimore in the hope of greater prosperity, but although she seems to have been a woman of pride and spirit, life dealt her a bad hand. Henrietta married her cousin and had her first child at 14. The family lived in a log cabin, former slave quarters, and tended the tobacco fields as their slave ancestors had done. Her mother died in giving birth to the last of ten children, and the family were split up, Henrietta going to her grandfather. Who was Henrietta Lacks? She was born in Virginia in 1920. But the woman who generated them, frequently misnamed, remained largely unknown, and her family benefited not at all from the unwitting donation of her money-spinning tissues. They have been employed in research into the polio vaccine, and into the effects of atomic warfare they were shot into space, used in AIDS research. Trillions of them are still alive, more than ever grew in Henrietta's living body. Because of them, thousands of experiments on live animals were not needed. They could be frozen, and their development paused and restarted. Cells were sent to laboratories through the world, bought and sold by research teams. In the years following Henrietta's death, the cell line, by laboratory convention known as HeLa, became an unparalleled research tool. Previously, researchers had found it frustratingly difficult to keep alive fragile human cell lines, but these cells were robust and multiplied at an astonishing rate. From this sample her cells were cultured. ![]() But she also left behind a slice of tissue, a piece excised from the cervical cancer that was her primary tumour. She left behind a husband and five children, the youngest only a baby. Towards the end she had been given only palliative treatment, but no one had explained this to her family, who still hoped she might be cured. Beloved by her family, a lively, open-hearted woman, Henrietta died in intractable pain, and at the autopsy her body's interior was pearled by tumours. No dead woman has done more for the living, and yet we can imagine her easily from her photograph, a vivacious woman who was only 31 years when she died in 1951 in a "coloured ward" in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Henrietta Lacks is a medical specimen of quite another kind. They have become objects, more stone than flesh: petrified, post-human. The thread of empathy has frayed and snapped. When we look at them, fascination and repulsion uneasily mixed, we bow our heads to their contribution to knowledge, but it is hard to locate their humanity. I n old-fashioned museums you can see the unconscious benefactors of mankind, trapped in glass cases: the freaks and monsters of their day, the anomalies, sometimes skeletonised and entire, sometimes cut into parts and labelled. ![]()
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