Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920, the eighth of ten children. Henrietta's mother died in 1924, when Henrietta was just four. Her father moved the family to Clover, Virginia and split them up between several relatives. Henrietta went to live with Tommy Lacks, his grandfather, in a four-room cabin, which they affectionately called "home-house." Henrietta shared a bed with her cousin David "Day" Lacks, whom she married. She had five children: Lawrence, Lucile (called "Elsie"), David ("Sonny"), Deborah, and Joe (who later changed his name to Zakariyya). Shortly after Deborah's birth, Henrietta complained of pain in her womb. Her family urged her to see a doctor, but she did not heed their advice. Henrietta hated doctors and only visited them as a last resort. After Joe was born, Henrietta felt a lump next to her cervix. It was cancer. Later, scientists learned that her cancer was caused by the HPV virus. Her doctors took samples of healthy and cancerous cervical tissue to study. These samples gave birth to the HeLa line of immortal cells. Henrietta never gave consent for the samples to be collected, and she died without learning of their existence.

Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot is a freelance science writer and editor best known for this book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot first became interested in the HeLa line of cells in high school, when she enrolled in a biology class at Portland Community College to fulfill her science requirements. Years later, while studying toward her MFA in nonfiction writing, Skloot began research for a book about Henrietta and HeLa cells. She spent the next ten years gathering information, conducting interviews with Henrietta's family and becoming friends with Henrietta's daughter Deborah. In 2010, the book was published to great acclaim and became a big bestseller.

Deborah Lacks

Deborah Lacks is Henrietta's second daughter. Following her mother's death, Deborah lived with her father and siblings under Ethel and Galen's care. Ethel tortured Deborah, and Galen sexually abused her, once even punching her in the face when he saw her with another boy. After Lawrence took the children away from Ethel, Deborah grew angry about the abuse and started fighting back against her abusers. Deborah got pregnant at sixteen, but this complication didn't stop her from getting her high school diploma. A few years later, she married her boyfriend Cheetah and had a second child. Unfortunately, Cheetah became addicted to drugs and started abusing Deborah. Deborah fought back, once even planning to kill Cheetah. Instead, she divorced him and took the children, working two jobs to support her family.

Deborah was the first Lacks Skloot was able to reach. After their initial phone conversation, however, Deborah became worried and refused to grant her more interviews for another year. Eventually, Deborah opened up again, giving Skloot permission to write her book on two conditions. First, she had to get Henrietta's name right. Second, she had to tell Elsie's story. From then on, Deborah was involved in Skloot's research, which sometimes took a toll on her. She found the research stressful, and she suffered many stress-related illnesses, including hives and very erratic behavior. She was alternately forthcoming and suspicious of Skloot. She accompanied Skloot on the trip to Crownville to learn about Elsie's life. This upset Deborah, and she broke out into hives before fighting with Skloot, throwing the journalist against a wall. A visit to her cousin Gary the Disciple calmed Deborah down. Later in life, the stress abated. Deborah moved into an assisted living facility and worked full-time for her daughter. She died just days after Skloot called to inform her that the book was finished.

David "Day" Lacks

Henrietta's cousin David was always called Day. Day shared a room—and a bed—with Henrietta at Tommy Lacks's home-house. Eventually, Day and Henrietta began a sexual relationship. Their first child, Lawrence, was born when Henrietta was just fourteen. Together, they had five children. Day worked two or more jobs to support his family. When Henrietta was diagnosed, he couldn't take any time off work to pick her up from her daily radiation treatments. Like all the Lackses, he believed Henrietta's doctors were trying to cure her, not just ease the pain. After her death, he felt compelled by a doctor to sign a form giving consent for a partial autopsy, in which doctors harvested cells from her corpse. Day harbored resentment about this until his death. He felt that doctors had tricked him into signing away his and Henrietta's rights. Day was especially irritated about other people making a profit off of the HeLa cells. He died before Skloot finished the book.

Lawrence Lacks

Lawrence is Henrietta's oldest child, born when she was just fourteen years old. As the eldest child, Lawrence felt responsible for his younger siblings, and after his mother's death in 1951, he dropped out of school to help take care of the kids. At sixteen, he obtained a voter registration card that said he was eighteen, which got him into pool halls but also got him drafted. While Lawrence was off fighting in the Vietnam War, Henrietta's cousin Ethel and Ethel's husband Galen moved in with Day to help care for the children. When he returned from the war, he moved into his own house, and he didn't learn about Ethel's abuse until years later. After marrying, he and his wife Bobbette took care of his younger siblings. Lawrence owned a store, where his family members would later hand out a number of fliers about the injustice of doctors stealing Henrietta's cells. Lawrence was angry about people other than the Lackses making a profit off the HeLa cells. Eventually, though, he grew tired of talking about the cells.

Lucile "Elsie" Lacks

Elsie Lacks was born epileptic and mentally handicapped. Henrietta and Day raised her for as long as they could, but eventually, caring for Elsie became too hard and Henrietta had her committed to a facility called Crownville. Little is known of Elsie's life in the Crownville facility. Henrietta visited her for the last time not long before her death, and after that, there's a gap where the records were lost. When Deborah and Skloot visited Crownville, they found a small file on Elsie, which included a photo of a terrified Elsie with a pair of white hands around her neck. At the time of Elsie's death, Crownville was a terrible place to live. Patients were overcrowded, forced to share beds or sleep on the floor, and sometimes the only bathroom facilities were grates in the middle of the room. Elsie's final years were hard and sad, and this knowledge upsets Deborah. She's glad she knows, however, because at least now people will remember Elsie and tell her story.

David "Sonny" Lacks

Henrietta's second son was named after his father, but young David always went by "Sonny." After Henrietta's death, Sonny and his siblings lived with Day, who worked two jobs in order to support his family. Sonny wasn't abused as much as his little brother Joe and seemed well-adjusted enough. He earned his high school diploma and joined the Air Force. He later became involved in drugs and was arrested for drug-related crimes. Eventually, he had to undergo a quintuple bypass for his heart. Before his surgery, Sonny's surgeon thanked him for his mother's contribution to science. He was later issued a $125,000 hospital bill.

Joe Lacks (Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman)

Henrietta's youngest son Joe was whipped, overworked, and starved by Ethel after Henrietta's death. Joe struggled with emotional problems, and his favorite past time as a boy was sitting on the roof of his father's house and shooting his BB gun at passersby. Joe later joined the army, but he got into so many fights in the service that he was kicked out. After his return to Clover, Virginia, Joe continued creating new enemies, including a kid named Ivy. One night, Joe stabbed Ivy and killed him. In jail, Joe was originally placed in solitary confinement because of his violent tendencies. Eventually, Joe calmed down and converted to Islam, changing his name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman. He still wrestled with his anger, however, and after his release, he struggled to find work. He signed up to be a subject in medical experiments at Johns Hopkins. His hearing loss and partial blindness led him to an assisted living facility, where Skloot first met him. Zakariyya and Deborah were the only Lackses to tour Christoph Lengauer's lab at Johns Hopkins. He was grateful for the opportunity.

Howard Jones

Howard Jones was Henrietta's gynecologist at Johns Hopkins. Jones confirmed that the lump Henrietta found near her cervix was a tumor.

Richard Lesley TeLinde

Richard Lesley TeLinde was Howard Jones's boss at Johns Hopkins. TeLinde and Jones conspired to gather cells from Henrietta in hopes of conducting medical research. He enlisted George Gey to grow the HeLa cells necessary for his experiments.

George Gey

George Gey was a visionary scientist in charge of tissue cultures at Johns Hopkins. TeLinde enlisted Gey's help in comparing healthy and cancerous cervical cells. Gey dreamed of creating an immortal line of cells, but thus far, his lab hadn't had any luck keeping the cells alive. When Henrietta's cervix cell samples arrived, his technicians had low expectations; but everyone was thrilled when the cells continued to divide. Gey succeeded: he created HeLa, the first and most important immortal line of cells in science. Aware of the potential of these cells, Gey shared them widely, freely, never turning a profit for himself. In 1970, at the age of seventy-one, Gey discovered he had pancreatic cancer. He wanted his surgeons to take cell so he could grow his own cells like HeLa. Unfortuantely, his tumor was already inoperable and the surgeons didn't take any samples. Gey spent the next three months undergoing experimental cancer treatments. He died that same year.

Margaret Gey

Margaret was trained as a surgical nurse prior to marrying George Gey. Margaret insisted that Gey use proper sterilization techniques in the lab. This proved essential to successfully growing HeLa cells. Margaret also developed the medium in which cells were grown: a combination of the plasma of chickens, puree of calf fetuses, special salts, and blood from human umbilical cords.

Mary Kubicek

Mary Kubicek was Gey's assistant in the lab at Johns Hopkins. Skloot notes that Kubicek was eating a sandwich when Henrietta Lacks's cells arrived. Kubicek took the time to finish her sandwich before sterilizing her equipment and getting to work. Later, Mary assisted with Henrietta's autopsy. She had never seen a dead body before and felt sick. For the first time, she understood that the cells she grew in the lab came from a real person.

Ethel and Galen

Ethel was Henrietta's cousin who raised Henrietta's children in the years after her death. For reasons unspecified, Ethel despised Henrietta so much that she decided to torture her innocent kids. Lawrence, the eldest child, was fighting in Vietnam War and didn't know about the abuse until well after he returned. Joe, the youngest child, got the worst of the abuse. Ethel whipped him the most of all the children and often locked him up without food and water. She made the children work all the time and took them to Clover, Virginia in the summer to work on the tobacco plantation, where she refused to feed them during the day. Ethel's husband Galen sexually abused Deborah for years, once punching her in the face out of jealousy when he saw her with a boy. Eventually, Lawrence learned about the abuse and took the children from Ethel. He and his wife Bobbette raised Sonny, Deborah, and Joe.

Margaret

Henrietta's cousin Margaret lived near Johns Hopkins. After daily radiation treatments, a weakened Henrietta went to Margaret's apartment to wait for her ride. Often, Henrietta was so tired afterward that she didn't have the strength to talk to her cousin and just slept instead.

Tommy Lacks

Tommy Lacks was Henrietta's grandfather, with whom she lived after her mother's death. Tommy Lacks owned a small four-room cabin that once housed slaves in Clover, Virginia. This cabin was called "home-house."

Cheetah

Cheetah was Deborah Lacks's abusive first husband. His drug addiction often caused him to be violent. Deborah, who had long since learned to defend himself, always fought back and at one point even planned to kill Cheetah. Instead, she left him and remarried.

Hector "Cootie" Henry

Cootie contracted polio as a child, at a time when iron lungs were only available to White patients. A sympathetic doctor lied about Cootie's race, using Cootie's light skin to pass him off as White so that he could be treated. Polio left Cootie with slight paralysis, but he survived. He lived in Lacks Town for most of his life. When Rebecca Skloot decided to visit Lacks Town, Cootie happened to flag her down and ask if she was lost. Cootie sent Skloot to talk to another of Henrietta's cousins, Cliff.

Gary the Disciple

Gary the Disciple is the son of Henrietta's sister Gladys. In his youth, he was wild and spent his time drinking and womanizing. Heart problems put an end to that, and Gary decided to devote the rest of his life to God. Deborah takes Skloot to see Gladys and Gary the day after visiting Crownville. Gary understands how upset Deborah is and conducts a kind of spiritual cleansing ceremony. A line from one of his hymns sticks in Skloot's mind, and she comes back to see him despite professing to be an atheist. They sit and read the Bible together. Skloot doesn't believe in God, but she finds it strangely comforting to talk with Gary the Disciple.

Roland Pattillo

Roland Pattillo is a Black gynecology professor and the organizer of The HeLa Cancer Control Symposium. He was the one who gave Skloot Deborah's phone number.

Stanley Gartler

Prior to a genetics conference in Philadelphia in 1966, Stanley Gartler was virtually unknown in the field. At the conference, he announced that he had found a genetic marker called G6PD-A in a wide variety of cells, which proved that these cells did not come from separate genetic lines and were, in fact, HeLa cells (or samples contaminated by HeLa cells). This shook the field of genetics.

Chester Southam

In the mid-1950s, Southam began to fear that HeLa cells could infect researchers with cancer. He began conducting a series of experiments on unsuspecting patients, injecting cancer cells into their bodies, often without informing them ahead of time. This was not illegal at the time, and Southam's colleagues approved of his tactics. Three Jewish doctors objected, however, drawing comparisons to Nazis who conducted horrific experiments on Holocaust victims. The Jewish doctors suggested that Southam and the others follow the Nuremberg Code, which set guidelines for doctors and scientists conducting research. When the Jewish doctors resigned in protest of Southam's work, the media heard about it, and it became a scandal. The National Institute of Health laid down strict guidelines for doctors to follow. From then on, doctors would have to obtain informed consent if they wanted a cell sample. Unfortunately, it was too late for Henrietta Lacks and her family.

Alexis Carrel

Alexis Carrel was a Nobel Prize–winning surgeon known for his research on suturing blood vessels. In 1912, Carrel began growing a piece of chicken heart tissue in his lab with the goal of eventually growing organs for transplant. Carrel didn't realize that by feeding the chicken heart tissue, he was adding new cells to the culture, artificially prolonging the tissue's life. He believed he had managed to create an immortal line of cells, but he was wrong. He was also a vicious racist. He believed that organ transplants should only be available to well-educated White people. His beliefs turned public opinion against him. Today, Carrel's work is best known for inspiring the cult horror film The Blob, which is about an immortal chicken heart that grows out of control.

John Moore

John Moore was a wealthy Seattleite diagnosed with leukemia in the 1980s. Prior to a surgery to remove his spleen, Moore signed a form that gave the hospital the right to cremate his spleen—but he didn't realize that they were going to harvest cells from it first. For years after, he continued to travel back and forth from Seattle to Los Angeles for follow-up appointments. When he balked at all the travel, his doctor, David Golde, offered to pay for it, plus lodging. Moore grew suspicious and learned that his doctor had not only harvested his cancerous spleen cells but also patented them as the Mo line of cells. Moore's cells were special because he had a rare virus, which produced special proteins in his spleen. Moore found out that the commercial line of Mo cells was worth $3 billion. In 1984, Moore filed a lawsuit in a bid to get some of that money. He lost the suit, however. The court ruled Golde's "inventive effort" (of turning the cells into an immortal line) transformed the cells enough so that Moore had no claim on them. This happened around the same time that the Lacks family learned about the HeLa cells being sold for profit.