The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2010

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Chapters 26-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Immortality”

Chapter 26 Summary

This chapter covers 1980-1985. The Lacks family members continue with their daily lives. After several years of struggling as a single mother, Deborah gets married again to mechanic James Pullum, who has also just started working as a preacher. Deborah’s son Alfred, now in his late teens, has become a drug addict who regularly gets in trouble with the law. Sonny, too, has been imprisoned for drug dealing, while Zakariyya has been released from prison several years early, though he still struggles with anger. He cannot hold down a job and survives by volunteering for paid medical research, though his change of name means that his identity as Henrietta Lacks’ son remains unknown.

In 1985, Deborah comes across a copy of a book about HeLa contamination, Michael Gold’s A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman’s Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused. The book publishes details from Henrietta’s medical records, along with a photo of her. No one had asked for the family’s permission, and no one knows how Gold had access to the records or the photo. Most devastating of all for Deborah is the detailed information about the pain Henrietta suffered during her final days.

Chapter 27 Summary

This chapter provides further information about the research that has used HeLa cells. In 1984, Harald zur Hausen, a German virologist, used HeLa to prove his belief that cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). Henrietta herself was infected with multiple copies of HPV-18.

Chapter 28 Summary

In 1996, Adam Curtis, a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) producer, begins making a television documentary about Henrietta. Deborah has high hopes that her mother’s story will finally be told and that she herself will find some closure. In the same year, Roland Pattillo organizes the first annual HeLa Cancer Control Symposium at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. The Lacks family is invited to attend, and Deborah takes to the podium to talk about her mother and the family’s experiences. Simultaneously, Courtney Speed, a resident of Turner Station, and Barbara Wyche, a sociologist, start a foundation to build a Henrietta Lacks museum.

Shortly afterwards, “Dr. Sir Lord” Keenan Kester Cofield, contacts Deborah and tells her she should copyright her mother’s name and sue John Hopkins for medical malpractice, as well as a percentage of the profits made from HeLa. Deborah and her brothers are delighted to accept Cofield’s help until Richard Kidwell, one of Hopkins’ attorneys, becomes suspicious and exposes Cofield as a conman. Deborah, having fallen for Cofield’s scam, is overwhelmed, and her health begins to suffer; she breaks out in hives and comes close to a stroke.

Chapters 26-28 Analysis

Again, we see total disregard for the Lacks family by journalists and members of the scientific community. When Skloot interviews Gold, he is dismissive and does not express any regret:

When I called Michael Gold years later, he didn’t remember who’d given him [Henrietta’s] records […] When I asked Gold whether he tried to speak to the Lacks family, he said, ‘I think I wrote some letters and made some calls, but the addresses and phone numbers never seemed to be current. And to be honest, the family wasn’t really my focus’ (210).

By the 1990s, as the story of Henrietta and her family becomes internationally well known, things begin to change, and the Lacks family members begin to meet people who are sympathetic to the way they have been treated. It is also at this point that the two strands of the story meet and the narrative stops going back and forth in time. As Skloot has told us earlier in Chapter 6, it was when she came across the papers from Pattillo’s first annual HeLa Cancer Control Symposium that her research began (though she had been fascinated by Henrietta for a decade before this, since hearing her name mentioned in a college class).

However, despite the sympathy and positive treatment that the family is beginning to receive, another challenge arises in the form of “Dr. Sir Lord” Keenan Kester Cofield. Though Hopkins’ attorney takes charge of the situation, and gives the family all the support they need, it is evident that Deborah has had too many negative experiences and now finds it extremely difficult to trust anyone. It is just at this point that Skloot first contacts Deborah, which explains why she must work so hard to gain her trust.