She went straight to the waiting room of the gynecology clinic, a wide-open space, empty but for rows of long, straight-backed benches that looked like church pews. No one in Henrietta's family ever saw a Hopkins doctor without visiting the Jesus statue, laying flowers at his feet, saying a prayer, and rubbing his big toe for good luck.
In the next building, under an elegant domed copper roof, a ten-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus stood, arms spread wide, holding court over what was once the main entrance of Hopkins. A few minutes earlier she'd jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head, and scurried into the hospital, past the "colored" bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use. He was parked under a towering oak tree outside Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his children-two still in diapers-waiting for their mother, Henrietta.
On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old Buick, watching the rain fall. Though those cells have done wonders for science, Henrietta-whose legacy involves the birth of bioethics and the grim history of experimentation on African-Americans-is all but forgotten. But her cells are still among the most widely used in labs worldwide-bought and sold by the billions. Today, nearly 60 years after Henrietta's death, her body lies in an unmarked grave in Clover, Virginia. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all the HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons-the equivalent of at least 100 Empire State Buildings. There's no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta's cells are alive today. Since 2001 alone, five Nobel Prizes have been awarded for research involving HeLa cells. They became the first immortal human cell line ever grown in culture and one of the most important tools in medicine: Research on HeLa was vital to the development of the polio vaccine, as well as drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease it helped uncover the secrets of cancer and the effects of the atom bomb, and led to important advances like cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping. A scientist put that sample into a test tube, and, though Henrietta died eight months later, her cells-known worldwide as HeLa-are still alive today. He took a small tissue sample without her knowledge or consent. In 1951, at the age of 30, Henrietta Lacks, the descendant of freed slaves, was diagnosed with cervical cancer-a strangely aggressive type, unlike any her doctor had ever seen. In an excerpt from her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot tells her story.
But today, Henrietta is all but forgotten. Those cells led to breakthroughs in everything from Parkinson's to polio. When Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cancer in 1951, doctors took her cells and grew them in test tubes.
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