WRITTEN IN A NEWSPAPER:

February 3rd, 2010
BIOTECHNOLOGY

The story behind our own story: Henrietta Lacks

She died anonymously despite being everywhere. Her cells were extracted from her body without her consent, yet today, they continue to reproduce in every lab worldwide. Although she remains anonymous, Henrietta Lacks is responsible for the most notable achievements of the last decades: polio vaccine, experiments on the moon, nuclear energy, and genetics.

In 1951 a 31 years old black woman, tired of working in the tobacco plantations, arrived at John Hopkins Hospital with a cervix tumor. Cancer, she was told. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, and shortly before she died,  doctors discovered in her cells a peculiarity: they were immortal. Once extracted from her body, her cells -called HeLa on her behalf- reproduced infinitely. The science community had never seen something like that. Thanks to this opportunity, scientific developments on various grounds were achieved: the polio vaccine, trips to the moon to observe the effect of gravity on humans, atomic energy developments, gene mappings, drugs for countless medical conditions and diseases, cosmetics, among hundreds and millions of developments. While the scientific community reproduced and commercialized HeLa cells among every lab beyond imagination, Henrietta´s children were unaware of what they had done with her mother´s cells. Ironically, while their mother saved the world´s medicine, they could not afford to see a doctor due to their lack of economic means.

This is the story that Rebecca Sloot brings to her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the last best seller in the USA. It is a book written after a decade of investigation, which through subtle writing, goes weaving different views, gathers information from relatives, doctors, journalists specialized on the subject, and unprecedented files about a woman that keeps saving millions of lives today. A story of a technological breakthrough and an explicit social drawback in a context of deep racial and gender inequality everyone should know.