Read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for Free Online Page A

Including Henrietta.
          O n February 5, 1951, after Jones got Henrietta’s biopsy report back from the lab, he called and told her it was malignant. Henrietta didn’t tell anyone what Jones said, and no one asked. She simply went on with her day as if nothing had happened, which was just like her—no sense upsetting anyone over something she could deal with herself.
    That night Henrietta told her husband, “Day, I need to go back to the doctor tomorrow. He wants to do some tests, give me some medicine.” The next morning she climbed from the Buick outside Hopkins again, telling Day and the children not to worry.
    “Ain’t nothin serious wrong,” she said. “Doctor’s gonna fix me right up.”
    Henrietta went straight to the admissions desk and told the receptionist she was there for her treatment. Then she signed a form with the words OPERATION PERMIT at the top of the page. It said:
    I hereby give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anaesthetic either local or general that they may deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of: ______________________________

    Henrietta printed her name in the blank space. A witness with illegible handwriting signed a line at the bottom of the form, and Henrietta signed another.
    Then she followed a nurse down a long hallway into the ward for colored women, where Howard Jones and several other white physicians ran more tests than she’d had in her entire life. They checked her urine, her blood, her lungs. They stuck tubes in her bladder and nose.
    On her second night at the hospital, the nurse on duty fed Henrietta an early dinner so her stomach would be empty the next morning, when a doctor put her under anesthetic for her first cancer treatment. Henrietta’s tumor was the invasive type, and like hospitals nationwide,Hopkins treated all invasive cervical carcinomas with radium, a white radioactive metal that glows an eerie blue.
    When radium was first discovered in the late 1800s, headlines nationwide hailed it as “a substitute for gas, electricity, and a positive cure for every disease.” Watchmakers added it to paint to make watch dials glow, and doctors administered it in powdered form to treat everything from seasickness to ear infections. But radium destroys any cells it encounters, and patients who’d taken it for trivial problems began dying. Radium causes mutations that can turn into cancer, and at high doses it can burn the skin off a person’s body. But it also kills cancer cells.
    Hopkins had been using radium to treat cervical cancer since the early 1900s, when a surgeon named Howard Kelly visited Marie and Pierre Curie, the couple in France who’d discovered radium and its ability to destroy cancer cells. Without realizing the danger of contact with radium, Kelly brought some back to the United States in his pockets and regularly traveled the world collecting more. By the 1940s, several studies—one of them conducted by Howard Jones, Henrietta’s physician—showed that radium was safer and more effective than surgery for treating invasive cervical cancer.
    The morning of Henrietta’s first treatment, a taxi driver picked up a doctor’s bag filled with thin glass tubes of radium from a clinic across town. The tubes were tucked into individual slots inside small canvas pouches hand-sewn by a local Baltimore woman. The pouches were called Brack plaques, after the Hopkins doctor who invented them and oversaw Henrietta’s radium treatment. He would later die of cancer, most likely caused by his regular exposure to radium, as would a resident who traveled with Kelly and also transported radium in his pockets.
    One nurse placed the Brack plaques on a stainless-steel tray. Another wheeled Henrietta into the small colored-only operating room on the second floor, with stainless-steel tables, huge glaring lights, and an all-white medical staff dressed in white gowns, hats, masks,