The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Chapter 24 Summary & Analysis

The Lackses know nothing about HeLa contamination until they meet Michal Rogers, the Rolling Stone reporter. During his initial research, he gets Henrietta’sname from Walter Nelson-Rees. Soon after, Rogers is sitting in the same Baltimore hotel in which Rebecca will later find herself. Years later, he recounts to Rebecca how he got into a car accident on the way. Deborah claims that Henrietta was acting from the grave, warning Rogers to leave.

Rogers tries to interview the Lackses about Henrietta, but instead they begin to ask him questions of their own. They ask Rogers what it means for them that Henrietta’s cells are stronger than normal—whether they will live longer than normal people when they get sick, or whether they’ll die of cancer. Rogers tries to explain that the cells won’t affect them at all, but he doesn’t know if the Lackses believe him.

At this point in time, only Deborah is upset about HeLa. This changes when the brothers learn from Rogers’article that researchers and scientists are making money off of the cells. They become certain that George Gey and Johns Hopkins stole Henrietta’s cells for profit. Rebecca reveals that George Gey never made money off of HeLa. In the present day, however, biotech companies sell HeLa products for anywhere from $100 to $10,000. Seventeen thousand patents have involved HeLa cells. The American Type Culture Collection sells HeLa cells at $256 per vial.

Infuriated, Lawrence and Sonny begin making handouts about what the medical establishment owes to the Lacks family and giving them out to customers at Lawrence’s store. Deborah, meanwhile, doesn’t want to fight Hopkins; instead, she is trying to educate herself about HeLa. As she painstakingly reads science textbooks, she also keeps diary entries, where she expresses despair and frustration about the terrible things that she believes happened to Henrietta.

March 1976, when Mike Rogers’s article is published, is the first time that the general population learns about Henrietta’s identity, let alone that she was black. Many different magazines, some of them with a largely black readership, begin publishing articles about Henrietta.

On the scientific side of things, Victor McKusick and Susan Hsu publish their research on the Lacks family, creating a map of Henrietta’s DNA that will identify HeLa cells in culture. In the present day, Rebecca explains, a scientist would never connect a person’s identity with their genetic information, because of all the things that can be deduced from DNA.

Meanwhile Deborah still thinks she is waiting to learn if she has cancer, while Sonny and Lawrence are trying to strategize ways to get money from Hopkins. Rebecca then introduces the story of John Moore, a man who sued for the profits made off of his harvested tissues.