HeLa is the cell line that comes from Henrietta Lacks. It is “immortal”—meaning that it can continue to regenerate indefinitely if given nutrients and space to grow. To scientists, HeLa represents essentially endless possibility; it has been used in countless advances and innovations over the past half-century, and continues to be one of the most frequently used cell lines in the world. To Henrietta’s descendants, however, it represents a legacy of exploitation and racism, in which scientists profited off of pieces of Henrietta’s body while her descendants remain impoverished. Rebecca Skloot examines both sides of this puzzle, noting the medical miracles that HeLa helped researchers to achieve, while also taking an in-depth look at the negative effects that it had on Henrietta’s descendants. Ultimately Skloot comes to the conclusion that HeLa does have a deeply complex legacy, but that we must learn from it in order to continue advances in medicine while also leaving behind the racist, classist, and sexist policies that led to its existence in the first place.
HeLa Quotes in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks quotes below all refer to the symbol of HeLa. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4
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Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intensity...They kept growing like nothing anyone had ever seen, doubling the numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, accumulating by the millions.
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Chapter 10
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Now I don’t know for sure if a spirit got Henrietta or if a doctor did it…but I do know that her cancer wasn’t no regular cancer, cause regular cancer don’t keep on growing after a person die.
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Chapter 12
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Mary’s gaze fell on Henrietta’s feet, and she gasped: Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish. “When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me later, “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.”
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Chapter 16
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It sound strange…but her cells done lived longer than her memory.
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Chapter 21
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Can you tell me what my mama’s cells really did?...I know they did something important, but nobody tells us nothing.
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John Hopkin didn’t give us no information about anything. That was the bad part. Not the sad part, but the bad part, cause I don’t know if they didn’t give us information because they was making money out of it or if they was just wanting to keep us in the dark about it. I think they made money out of it, cause they were selling her cells all over the world and shipping them for dollars.
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You know what is a myth?...Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn’t donate nothing. They took them and didn’t ask.
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Chapter 30
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Only people that can get any good from my mother cells is the people that got money, and whoever sellin them cells—they get rich off our mother and we got nothing…All those damn people didn’t deserve her help as far as I’m concerned.
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Chapter 31
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Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! I can’t say nothing bad about science, but I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.
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Chapter 35
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LORD, I KNOW you sent Miss Rebecca to help LIFT THE BURDEN of them CELLS…GIVE THEM TO HER!...LET HER CARRY THEM.
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Get the entire Henrietta Lacks LitChart as a printable PDF.
HeLa Symbol Timeline in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The timeline below shows where the symbol HeLa appears in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph
...teachers, even though they don’t even know her name. Instead, they refer to her as HeLa, the code given to cells from her cervix that became the world’s first immortal human...
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Rebecca remembers how she first learned about HeLa in 1988, thirty-seven years after Henrietta died. In a community college biology class at age...
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...in the world would possess millions, or even billions, of Henrietta’scells. Essentially, according to Defler, HeLa cells are one of the most important medical innovations of the last century. Defler ends...
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...goes to her textbook to look up “cell culture” and finds a passing reference to HeLa and Henrietta Lacks.
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Rebecca graduates high school and starts a biology degree in college, learning about HeLa in many different subjects, and using the cells herself in experiments. No one, however, mentions...
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...faith, science, journalism, and race.” She emphasizes that the book isn’t just about Henrietta and HeLa, but also about the Lacks family.
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Chapter 4: The Birth of HeLa
...tubes, and labels them with the first two letters of Henrietta’s first and last names: “HeLa.”
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Chapter 6: “Lady’s on the Phone”
...after Rebecca learned about Henrietta’s existence. Rebecca has found a collection of papers from “The HeLa Cancer Control Symposium” at Morehouse College, a distinguished and historically black college. A professor at...
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Pattillo informs Rebecca that he’s organizing the next HeLa conference. He mentions that Deborah Lacks lives in Baltimore, and that Day is still alive...
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...only time white people called Day was when they wanted something having to do with HeLa cells.” Eventually a woman answers the phone, and she connects Rebecca with a confused and...
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Chapter 7: The Death and Life of Cell Culture
...his culturing techniques, and when scientists visit his lab, Gey usually sends them home with HeLa cells.
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Although HeLa is spreading, Gey doesn’t mention Henrietta or her cells in the press, so the general...
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Chapter 12: The Storm
...can perform an autopsy to see if other cells in her body will grow like HeLa. Although there’s no law about taking cells from a living patient, the doctors at Hopkins...
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Chapter 13: The HeLa Factory
...Henrietta’s death, researchers begin to plan for a massive operation that will produce trillions of HeLa cells in order to help cure polio. At the end of 1951, the world is...
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...funded, and cell culturists have wanted to produce cells on an industrial scale for years. HeLa is the perfect resource for Gey to offer to the NFIP.
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Rebecca explains the difference between HeLa and other human cells. Most cells in culture grow in a single layer on their...
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...NFIP advisory committee named William Scherer try infecting Henrietta’s cells with polio. As it happens, HeLa is in fact more susceptible to the virus than most cultured cells—in other words, it...
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...new way to ship them. On Memorial Day, Gey tests a new way for the HeLa cells to travel, putting them in tubes with culture medium and packing them in a...
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The NFIP hears about HeLa and contracts William Scherer to create a HeLa Distribution Center at the Tuskegee Institute, “one...
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HeLa helps scientists to prove that the Salk vaccine works, and the New York Times runs...
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Soon HeLa cells are available for sale, and any scientist can buy them for ten dollars. Although...
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...comments, is “perfect.” Scientists in the early fifties were just beginning to research viruses, and HeLa helps them to study how different types of viruses infect cells and reproduce. HeLa essentially...
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HeLa also brings about standardization within the field of tissue culture. Before HeLa, different researchers used...
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Scientists also use HeLa to advance their research in cellular cloning. Rebecca explains that HeLa did not grow from...
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The cloning advances developed using HeLa lead directly to the ability to isolate stem cells, clone entire animals, and use in...
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...this point, a biotech company called Microbiological Associates gets involved. Its owners decide to use HeLa cells to create “the first industrial-scale, for-profit cell distribution center, creating a “Cell Factory,” located...
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...growing all different kinds of cells for research purposes. But none grow as fast as HeLa.
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During the Cold War, researchers use HeLa to study the effects of radiation, and to see what will happen to cells at...
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George Gey himself uses HeLa to study hemorrhagic fever, and to see if the cells will cause cancer in rats....
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Many of George Gey’scolleagues feel that he should publish research papers on HeLa so that he can be credited for his innovation, but he always claims to be...
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...to grow as a field, George Gey becomes tired of the “the widespread fixation on HeLa,” complaining to a friend and colleague, Charles Pomerat, that scientists are using HeLa for research...
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Chapter 14: Helen Lane
...an NFIP press officer, contacts Gey saying that he wants to write an article about HeLa. Gey replies that he will not allow him to publish Henrietta’sname. Berg fires back that...
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Chapter 16: “Spending Eternity in the Same Place”
...of other diseases. He then speaks directly to the ground, calling out, “They named them HeLa! And they are still living!”
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Chapter 17: Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable
As HeLa spreads, a well-respected virologist named Chester Southam becomes worried that the cancer cells may infect...
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...dangerous. In June 1956, helped by his colleague Alice Moore, Southam begins injecting prisoners with HeLa. The tumors grow in the prisoners’ arms, and the press begins writing stories about their...
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Southam eventually injects HeLa and other cancer cells into more than 600 patients. When he does so, he says...
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...a cancer researcher named Bertil Björklund who has given himself and his patients injections of HeLa cells. In punishment, he has been expelled from his laboratory. Hyman hopes that Southam may...
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Chapter 18: “Strangest Hybrid”
By the 1960s, HeLa is everywhere. Russian and American scientists have even grown them in space, in order to...
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...cultured cells—even different cells—begin behaving in exactly the same way. Scientist Lewis Coriell speculates that HeLa is contaminating other cells. At this time, scientists are finding it fairly easy to culture...
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The group contacts George Gey for a sample of the original HeLa culture. Gey, however, has kept no original HeLa for himself, and must contact Scherer for...
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In 1965, two British scientists—Henry Harris and John Watkins—combine HeLa with mouse cells. They also fuse HeLa with chicken cells that can no longer reproduce,...
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Chapter 20: The HeLa Bomb
...that is present only in a small minority of black Americans. Gartler speculates that since HeLa is from an African American, HeLa may have contaminated all of the cell lines.
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...their cultures safe from bacterial and viral contamination. They did not realize, however, how easily HeLa could contaminate other cells. As it turns out, HeLa can ride dust particles, latch onto...
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Scientists are not pleased by Gartler’s findings. HeLa has been growing for fifteen years. Researchers have been using cells to study different tissue...
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...like normal cells becoming cancerous was in fact other cell cultures being taken over by HeLa.
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...labs and test for the genetic marker. They find that even labs that never housed HeLa cells have experienced contamination, not realizing that this phenomenon is occurring worldwide. Most scientists, however,...
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Chapter 21: Night Doctors
...of cell culture, and shows him articles about scientists growing corneas using technology developed from HeLa.
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Sonny comes back, and Lawrence tells him that Rebecca’s been explaining HeLa’s legacy. The brothers are exhilarated by a speech thatPresident Clintonhas given about the importance of...
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Chapter 22: “The Fame She So Richly Deserves”
...doctors, including a geneticist named Victor McKusick, start writing an article about the history of HeLa in order to pay homage to Gey. They write that HeLa has ensured immortality for...
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Chapter 23: “It’s Alive”
...project that will lead to the Human Genome Project. As they discuss how to stop HeLa contamination, they realize that if they find genetic markers specific to Henrietta, they will be...
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...Along with her letter, she encloses a copy of the article about George Gey and HeLa written by McKusick and Howard Jones, but no one in the family remembers ever seeing...
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...shows Deborah a picture of Henrietta in the textbook, and shows her a paragraph about HeLa.
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Chapter 24: “Least They Can Do”
The Lackses know nothing about HeLa contamination until they meet Michal Rogers, the Rolling Stone reporter. During his initial research, he...
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At this point in time, only Deborah is upset about HeLa. This changes when the brothers learn from Rogers’article that researchers and scientists are making money...
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...Deborah, meanwhile, doesn’t want to fight Hopkins; instead, she is trying to educate herself about HeLa. As she painstakingly reads science textbooks, she also keeps diary entries, where she expresses despair...
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...their research on the Lacks family, creating a map of Henrietta’s DNA that will identify HeLa cells in culture. In the present day, Rebecca explains, a scientist would never connect a...
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Chapter 25: “Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?”
...his suit, saying that the fact that no one has sued for ownership of the HeLa line shows that patients don’t mind when doctors employ their cells for commercial uses. Moore...
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Chapter 27: The Secret of Immortality
...an STI called Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), some strains of which may cause cervical cancer. HeLa tests positive for a strain called HPV-18. Rebecca explains that there are over one hundred...
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Rebecca recalls that every decade has made innovations due to HeLa. In the eighties, a molecular biologist named Richard Axel alters HeLa cells in order to...
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Two other scientists begin to theorize that HeLa cells may no longer be human, arguing that they have gone through millions and billions...
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Researchers begin to wonder whether HeLa cells may indeed contain clues about immortal life. Rebecca explains that normal human cells cannot...
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Chapter 28: After London
...Gey. Finally, in October 1996 at the Morehouse School of Medicine, Pattillo organizes the first HeLa Cancer Control Symposium. Researchers present papers about “cancer in minorities,” and Pattillo calls for Atlanta...
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...reaches Courtney Speed, who has just founded the Turner Station Heritage Committee. After learning about HeLa, Speed, along with a sociologist named Barbara Wyche, begins agitating for recognition for Henrietta. They...
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...named Ross Jones eventually replies, and asserts that Hopkins never profited in any way from HeLa.
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Chapter 29: A Village of Henriettas
...Hopkins cancer researcher named Christoph Lengauer. Having heard about Rebecca’s research, and having worked with HeLa for years, Lengauer has expressed remorse about the fate of the Lackses.
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Lengauer has been working with HeLa for his entire career. As a student, he helped develop a technique to artificially color...
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...by how beautiful the chromosomes look, and expresses a desire to learn more about what HeLa helped to create. Rebecca invites Deborah to Lengauer’s lab, but Deborah says that she’s not...
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Chapter 31: Hela, Goddess of Death
Rebecca recounts the many different things that “HeLa” denotes, including a Marvel comic book character who is “a seven-foot-tall, half-black, half-white goddess.” Deborah...
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Chapter 32: “All That’s My Mother”
...mid-thirties, Christoph takes the group down to the freezer room to show them where the HeLa cells are stored. He shows them a chamber stacked with thousands of HeLa vials, and...
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The group moves on to an incubator where HeLa cells are growing. Using a microscope, Christoph allows Deborah and Zakariyya to look at their...
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Chapter 36: Heavenly Bodies
...out loud, telling her that Henrietta was chosen to do the Lord’s work, and that HeLa is her “spiritual body.” For the first time, Rebecca understands why the Lackses believe that...
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Chapter 38: The Long Road to Clover
...in the world.” She also wondered if she would one day “come back as some HeLa cells like my mother, that way we can do good together out there in the...
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