The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (22 page)

“A few years ago I voiced some suspicion about cell-line contamination,” Hsu said. “So I am happy about the paper by Dr. Gartler and am also sure he has made many people unhappy.”

He was right, and those people quickly began asking questions.

“How long did you keep them in your laboratory?” one scientist asked, suggesting that Gartler had contaminated the cells himself after they arrived in his lab.

“They were analyzed before being grown in my laboratory,” Gartler responded.

“They didn’t send them to you frozen?” the scientist asked, knowing that contamination could have occurred while they thawed.

Gartler said that didn’t matter—the cells didn’t have to be thawed to be tested.

Another scientist wanted to know if the similarity Gartler was seeing between cell lines was just the effect of spontaneous transformation making all cells act the same.

Eventually Robert Stevenson of the Cell Culture Collection Committee spoke up, saying, “It looks like more detective work is needed to see … whether we are going to have to start all over again to isolate some new human cell lines.”

Hsu stepped in and said, “I would like to give particular priority to those who initiated the cell lines, whom Dr. Gartler has attacked. If there is any defense, we would like to hear it.”

Harvard’s Robert Chang—whose widely used Chang Liver Cell line was listed as a HeLa contaminant on Gartler’s chart—glared from his seat. Chang had used those cells to discover enzymes and genes specific to liver cells. If Gartler was right and the cells were actually from Henrietta’s cervix, Chang’s liver research using them was worthless.

Leonard Hayflick had an especially personal connection with his cell line, WISH, which Gartler had listed as contaminated: he’d grown it using cells from the amniotic sac in which his unborn daughter had once floated. He asked Gartler whether it was possible to find G6PD-A in samples from white people.

“Caucasian subjects with G6PD-A have not been reported,” Gartler told him.

Later that day—in a talk chaired by George Gey—Hayflick delivered a paper, on the “facts and theories” of spontaneous transformation of cells in culture. Before beginning his talk, Hayflick stood at the podium and announced that, since WISH cells supposedly tested positive for a genetic marker found only in black people, he’d called his wife during the break to ask if he was, in fact, his daughter’s father. “She assured me that my worst fears were unfounded,” Hayflick said. The room erupted in laughter, and no one said anything else publicly about Gartler’s findings.

But a few people took Gartler seriously: before leaving the conference, Stevenson met several of the top cell culturists for lunch. He told them to go back to their labs after the conference and start testing cells for the G6PD-A genetic marker, to see how widespread this problem might be. Many of their cell lines tested positive, including the skin cells George Hyatt had transplanted onto a soldier’s arm years earlier. Since Hyatt had no HeLa cells in his lab at the time, the cells in his experiment must have been contaminated before they arrived. And though few realized it, the same thing was happening in laboratories around the world.

Still, many scientists refused to believe HeLa contamination was real. After the conference where Gartler dropped what became known as “the HeLa bomb,” most researchers kept right on working with the cells
he’d said were contaminated. But Stevenson and a few other scientists realized the potential scope of the HeLa contamination problem, so they began working to develop genetic tests that could specifically identify HeLa cells in culture instead of just testing for the presence of G6PD-A. And those genetic tests would eventually lead them to Henrietta’s family.

T
wo months after Sonny Lacks stood me up, I sat waiting for him again, this time in the lobby of the Baltimore Holiday Inn. It was New Year’s Day, and he was nearly two hours late. I figured he’d backed out again, so I started packing to leave. Then I heard a man’s voice yell, “So you’re Miss Rebecca!”

Suddenly, Sonny was standing beside me with a sweet and bashful gap-toothed grin that made him look like a fifty-year-old teenager. He laughed and patted me on the back.

“You just won’t give up, will you?” he said. “I got to tell you, only person I know more hardheaded than you is my sister Dale.” He grinned and straightened his black driving cap. “I tried to convince her to come meet you today, but she won’t listen.”

Sonny had a loud laugh and mischievous eyes that squinted nearly closed when he smiled. His face was warm and handsome, open to the world. He was thin, five foot nine at most, with a carefully manicured mustache. He reached for my bag.

“Okay then,” he said, “we best get this thing goin.”

I followed him to a Volvo he’d left unlocked and idling in the
parking lot next to the hotel. He’d borrowed it from one of his daughters. “Nobody wants to ride in my old raggedy van,” he said, easing the car into gear. “You ready to go see the Big Kahuna?”

“The Big Kahuna?”

“Yep,” he said, grinning. “Deborah says you got to talk to our brother Lawrence before anybody else talk to you. He’ll check you out, decide what’s what. If he say it’s okay, maybe then the rest of us will talk to you.”

We drove in silence for several blocks.

“Lawrence is the only one of us kids who remembers our mother,” Sonny said eventually. “Deborah and I don’t know nothing about her.” Then, without looking from the road, Sonny told me everything he knew about his mother.

“Everybody say she was real nice and cooked good,” he said. “Pretty too. Her cells have been blowed up in nuclear bombs. From her cells came all these different creations—medical miracles like polio vaccines, some cure for cancer and other things, even AIDS. She liked takin care of people, so it make sense what she did with them cells. I mean, people always say she was really just hospitality, you know, fixing everything up nice, make a good place, get up, cook breakfast for everybody, even if it’s twenty of them.”

He pulled into an empty alley behind a row of red brick town-houses and looked at me for the first time since we’d gotten in the car.

“This is where we take scientists and reporters wanting to know about our mother. It’s where the family gangs up on them,” he said, laughing. “But you seem nice, so I’ll do you a favor and not go get my brother Zakariyya this time.”

I got out of the car and Sonny drove away, yelling, “Good luck!” out the window.

All I knew about Sonny’s brothers was that they were angry and one of them had murdered someone—I wasn’t sure which one, or why. A few months earlier, when Deborah gave me Lawrence’s phone number and swore she’d never talk to me, she’d said, “Brother gets mad when white folks come askin about our mother.”

As I walked through a narrow, half-cement yard from the alley to Lawrence’s house, a wisp of smoke seeped through the screen door of his kitchen, where static blared from a small television on a folding table. I knocked, then waited. Nothing. I stuck my head into the kitchen, where fat pork chops sat burning on the stove. I yelled hello. Still nothing.

I took a deep breath and walked inside. As I closed the door be hind me, Lawrence appeared, seeming bigger than two of me, his 275-pound, six-foot frame spanning the width of the narrow kitchen, one hand on the counter, the other on the opposite wall.

“Well hello there, Miss Rebecca,” he said, giving me a once-over. “You wanna taste the meat I cooked?”

It had been a decade or so since I’d eaten pork, but suddenly that seemed irrelevant. “How could I resist?” I said.

A sweet grin spread across Lawrence’s face. He was sixty-four, but aside from his gray curls, he seemed decades younger, with smooth hazelnut-brown skin and youthful brown eyes. He hiked up his baggy blue jeans, wiped his hands on his grease-stained T-shirt, and clapped.

“Okay then,” he said, “that’s good. That’s real good. I’m gonna fry you up some eggs too. You’re too damn skinny.”

While he cooked, Lawrence talked about life down in the country. “When older folks went to town to sell tobacco, they’d come back with a piece of bologna for us kids to share. And sometimes if we were good, they’d let us sop up the bacon grease with a piece of bread.” His memory for detail was impressive. He drew pictures of the horse-drawn wagon Day had made out of two-by-fours. He showed me, with string and napkins, how he tied tobacco into bundles for drying when he was a child.

But when I asked about his mother, Lawrence fell silent. Eventually he said, “She was pretty.” Then he went back to talking about tobacco. I asked about Henrietta again and he said, “My father and his friends used to race horses up and down Lacks Town road.” We went
in circles like this until he sighed and told me he didn’t remember his mother. In fact, he said, he didn’t remember most of his teen years.

“I blacked it out of my mind because of the sadness and hurting,” he told me. And he had no intention of unblocking it.

“The only memory I have about my mother is her being strict,” he told me. He remembered her making him hand-wash diapers in the sink; he’d hang them to dry, then she’d dump them back in the water, saying they weren’t clean enough. But the only times she whipped him were for swimming off the pier in Turner Station. “She’d make me go fetch a switch to get a beatin with, then send me back out sayin get a bigger one, then a bigger one, then she’d wrap all them together and haul off on my tail.”

As he talked, the kitchen filled with smoke again—we’d both forgotten he was cooking. Lawrence shooed me from the kitchen table into the living room, where he sat me in front of a plastic Christmas place mat with a plate of fried eggs and a chunk of charred pork the size of my hand, only thicker. Then he collapsed into a wooden chair beside me, put his elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor in silence while I ate.

“You’re writing a book about my mama,” he said finally.

I nodded as I chewed.

“Her cells growin big as the world, cover round the whole earth,” he said, his eyes tearing as he waved his arms in the air, making a planet around him. “That’s kinda weird … They just steady growin and growin, steady fightin off whatever they fightin off.”

He leaned forward in his chair, his face inches from mine, and whispered, “You know what I heard? I heard by the year 2050, babies will be injected with serum made from my mama’s cells so they can live to eight hundred years old.” He gave me a smile like,
I bet your mama can’t top that
. “They’re going to get rid of disease,” he said. “They’re a miracle.”

Lawrence fell back in his chair and stared into his lap, his smile collapsing. After a long quiet moment, he turned and looked into my eyes.

“Can you tell me what my mama’s cells really did?” he whispered. “I know they did something important, but nobody tells us nothing,”

When I asked if he knew what a cell was, he stared at his feet as if I’d called on him in class and he hadn’t done his homework.

“Kinda,” he said. “Not really.”

I tore a piece of paper from my notebook, drew a big circle with a small black dot inside, and explained what a cell was, then told him some of the things HeLa had done for science, and how far cell culture had come since.

“Scientists can even grow corneas now,” I told him, reaching into my bag for an article I’d clipped from a newspaper. I handed it to him and told him that, using culturing techniques HeLa helped develop, scientists could now take a sample of someone’s cornea, grow it in culture, then transplant it into someone else’s eye to help treat blindness.

“Imagine that,” Lawrence said, shaking his head. “It’s a miracle!”

Suddenly, Sonny threw open the screen door, yelling, “Miss Rebecca still alive in here?” He leaned in the doorway between the kitchen and living room.

“Looks like you passed the test,” he said, pointing at my half-empty plate.

“Miss Rebecca telling me about our mother cells,” Lawrence said. “She told me fascinating stuff. Did you know our mother cells gonna be used to make Stevie Wonder see?”

“Oh, well, actually, it’s not
her
cells being put into people’s eyes,” I said, stammering. “Scientists are using technology her cells helped develop to grow
other
people’s corneas.”

“That’s a miracle,” Sonny said. “I didn’t know about that, but the other day President Clinton said the polio vaccine is one of the most important things that happened in the twentieth century, and her cells involved with that too.”

“That’s a miracle,” Lawrence said.

“So is this,” Sonny said, slowly spreading his arms and stepping
aside to reveal his eighty-four-year-old father, Day, teetering on unsteady legs behind him.

Day hadn’t left the house in nearly a week because of a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Now he stood in the doorway in faded jeans, a flannel shirt, and blue plastic flip-flops, even though it was January. He was thin and frail, barely able to hold himself upright. His light brown face had grown tough with age, cracked but soft, like a pair of well-worn work boots. His silver hair was covered with a black driving cap identical to Sonny’s.