Henrietta Lacks Case

Henrietta Lacks was thirty years old and found a ‘knot’ on her cervix, which led to her going to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy. Some of the tissue was removed from her tumor and sent to George Gey’s lab to be grown in test tubes. Gey was in charge of the Tissue Culture Department at Hopkins and had been researching and experimenting to attempt to make cells to divide so they could have an unlimited supply of cells to experiment on. Henrietta nor her family knew about the tissue sample and neither Gey or Hopkins informed them. They never informed them, even though the cells began to grow rapidly and the scientific world had realized

Their main focus was Henrietta, whose cells were growing just as rapid in her body as in the lab. She went through radiation and x-ray therapy, but later died at the age of thirty one, leaving behind her husband and five children. Her husband David, known as Day allowed his cousin and wife, Ethel and Galen, to move in to help him with the children. However, they were abusive to the children. Joe and Deborah were abused the worst. Joe was beaten and isolated from the family and Deborah was sexually molested by Galen. Lawrence, the oldest brother, moved in with his girlfriend she wanted to take in his younger siblings, but by that time, the siblings’ lives had changed for the bad. Joe grew up and become to be violent and ended up in jail for murdering a man who threatened him. Deborah grew up to be in an abusive marriage at a very young age. Deborah and the rest of the Lacks siblings learned about Henrietta’s cells by accident when a researcher from the National Cancer Institute visited a friend of Bobette. They called Henrietta’s cells HeLa cells. He told Bobette about HeLa and she told the family that part of Henrietta was still alive. HeLa cells were very prolific that they begun contaminating other cell lines all over the world. The Lacks family had no understanding of what HeLa cells were, where they came from, or what it meant when they were told Henrietta’s cells were ‘immortal’. Skloot works with