The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Prologue Summary & Analysis

The author, journalist Rebecca Skloot, describes the tattered photo of an African American woman that she has on her wall from the late 1940s. The author warns us, however, that the woman in the photograph doesn’t know that she has a tumor growing inside her body that will “leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine.” The photo is labeled, “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane, or Helen Larson.” The author relates that this picture has been used hundreds of times by scientists and teachers, even though they don’t even know her name. Instead, they refer to her as HeLa, the code given to cells from her cervix that became the world’s first immortal human cell line.

Rebecca describes staring at this photo, wondering about Henrietta and her family, and contemplating how Henrietta would feel about cells from her cervix being “bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions” all over the world in the name of scientific progress. Rebecca recounts how these cells have gone to the moon, and have contributed to dozens of scientific advances. She explains that one scientists estimates that all the Henrietta cells ever grown would weigh more than 50 million metric tons, and that if they were ever wrapped end-to-end, they would go around the Earth over three times.

Rebecca remembers how she first learned about HeLa in 1988, thirty-seven years after Henrietta died. In a community college biology class at age 16, her professor, a man named Donald Defler, was teaching a lecture on cell reproduction.

The author also reminds us of basic biology: how there are about one hundred trillion cells in our bodies, “each so small that several thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence.” They make up our tissues, “muscle, bone, and blood,” which make up our organs. Every nucleus of every cell contains a complete copy of our entire genome, which in turn makes our body function, controlling when our cells divide and ensuring that our cells perform their proper functions. Through the voice of Defler, the author goes on, explaining the process of mitosis, by which a cell divides to create new cells.

A single malfunction in mitosis, however, can make cells start growing out of control. One enzyme misfiring, or one protein activating incorrectly will cause cancer. It is here that Defler introduces Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951 from a particularly aggressive case of cervical cancer. Defler goes on, telling the class that surgeons took samples of Henrietta’s cells before she died and put them in a petri dish. Although scientists had been attempting for decades to keep human cells alive in this way, they had been unsuccessful. Henrietta’s cancer cells, however, reproduced, becoming “the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.”

Defler explains that almost any cell culture lab in the world would possess millions, or even billions, of Henrietta’scells. Essentially, according to Defler, HeLa cells are one of the most important medical innovations of the last century. Defler ends the story by mentioning that Henrietta was a black woman, and then moves on with his lesson.

After class, Rebecca visits Defler’s office to ask him about Henrietta’sbackground, but he replies, “no one knows anything about her.” Rebecca goes to her textbook to look up “cell culture” and finds a passing reference to HeLa and Henrietta Lacks.

Rebecca graduates high school and starts a biology degree in college, learning about HeLa in many different subjects, and using the cells herself in experiments. No one, however, mentions Henrietta’s name. With the beginning of the Internet in the mid-nineties, the author searches for information about Henrietta, but most sites misidentify her as Helen Lane, and contain contradictory information about both her life and death. Rebecca finally finds several magazine articles about Henrietta. She describes different pictures of Henrietta’s family: of Henrietta’s sons, a grandchild, and of Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. The articles all say that researchers have experimented on the family’s cells, although the Lackses don’t seem to understand why.

As Rebecca continues through grad school, she remains intrigued by Henrietta Lacks. She tells the reader that this exploration would begin “a decade long adventure.” Rebecca describes the mistrust and obstacles that she faced, before turning her attention to Deborah, whom she calls “one of the strongest and most resilient women I’d ever known.”

The author details the many differences between herself and Deborah. Rebecca is white and from the Pacific Northwest, while Deborah “was a deeply religious black Christian from the South.” Faith is a huge part of Deborah’s life, but it makes Rebecca uncomfortable. Deborah grew up in a poor, dangerous neighborhood, while the author’s childhood was safe and almost entirely white. Rebecca believes in reason and science, while Deborah believes that “Henrietta’s spirit lived on in her cells.” The author ends her introduction by observing that the “Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race.” She emphasizes that the book isn’t just about Henrietta and HeLa, but also about the Lacks family.