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

and gloves.
    With Henrietta unconscious on the operating table in the center of the room, her feet in stirrups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., sat on a stool between her legs. He peered inside Henrietta, dilated her cervix, and prepared to treat her tumor. But first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish.
    Wharton slipped a tube filled with radium inside Henrietta’s cervix, and sewed it in place. He sewed a plaque filled with radium to the outer surface of her cervix and packed another plaque against it. He slid several rolls of gauze inside her vagina to help keep the radium in place, then threaded a catheter into her bladder so she could urinate without disturbing the treatment.
    When Wharton finished, a nurse wheeled Henrietta back into the ward, and Wharton wrote in her chart, “The patient tolerated the procedure well and left the operating room in good condition.” On a separate page he wrote, “Henrietta Lacks … Biopsy of cervical tissue … Tissue given to Dr. George Gey.”
    A resident took the dish with the samples to Gey’s lab, as he’d done many times before. Gey still got excited at moments like this, but everyone else in his lab saw Henrietta’s sample as something tedious—the latest of what felt like countless samples that scientists and lab technicians had been trying and failing to grow for years. They were sure Henrietta’s cells would die just like all the others.



4
The Birth of HeLa

    G ey’s twenty-one-year-old assistant, Mary Kubicek, sat eating a tuna-salad sandwich at a long stone culture bench that doubled as a break table. She and Margaret and the other women in the Gey lab spent countless hours there, all in nearly identical cat-eye-glasses with fat dark frames and thick lenses, their hair pulled back in tight buns.
    At first glance, the room could have been an industrial kitchen. There were gallon-sized tin coffee cans full of utensils and glassware; powdered creamer, sugar, spoons, and soda bottles on the table; huge metal freezers lining one wall; and deep sinks Gey made by hand using stones he collected from a nearby quarry. But the teapot sat next to a Bunsen burner, and the freezers were filled with blood, placentas, tumor samples, and dead mice (plus at least one duck Gey kept frozen in the lab for more than twenty years after a hunting trip, since it wouldn’t fit in his freezer at home). Gey had lined one wall with cages full of squealing rabbits, rats, and guinea pigs; on one side of the table where Mary sat eating her lunch, he’d built shelves holding cages full of mice, their bodies filled with tumors. Mary always stared at themwhile she ate, just as she was doing when Gey walked into the lab carrying the pieces of Henrietta’s cervix.
    “I’m putting a new sample in your cubicle,” he told her.
    Mary pretended not to notice.
Not again
, she thought, and kept eating her sandwich.
It can wait till I’m done
.
    Mary knew she shouldn’t wait—every moment those cells sat in the dish made it more likely they’d die. But she was tired of cell culture, tired of meticulously cutting away dead tissue like gristle from a steak, tired of having cells die after hours of work.
    Why bother?
she thought.
          G ey hired Mary for her hands. She was fresh out of college with a physiology degree when her adviser sent her for an interview. Gey asked Mary to pick up a pen from the table and write a few sentences. Now pick up that knife, he said. Cut this piece of paper. Twirl this pipette.
    Mary didn’t realize until months later that he’d been studying her hands, checking their dexterity and strength to see how they’d stand up to hours of delicate cutting, scraping,