summary of the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot written by alyssa burnett and quick read narrated by blake farha introduction when you first hear the title the immortal life of henrietta lacks it sounds a bit like an e.l cunningsburg novel in the vein of stories like from the mixed up files of mrs basil e frankweiler but although the latter is a spunky story for elementary school students the story of henrietta lacks is darker and more significant rather than featuring exciting adventures rebecca skloot's research tells the story of an impoverished woman whose cells were harvested without her consent and although she never received a penny of the profits that were generated from the sale of her own body parts henrietta lacks cells funded a multi-million dollar scientific enterprise today no one knows for sure where henrietta is buried her body lies somewhere in an unmarked grave but her cells have lived on in notoriety while rich white men continue to profit from her body and over the course of this summary we'll learn how that could happen and why chapter 1 henrietta's story when henrietta lacks was born on august 1 1920 her name was loretta pleasant despite the author's extensive background research with henrietta's friends and family no one was able to tell her when loretta became henrietta however they speculated that the name change might have had something to do with her tumultuous childhood henrietta was one of ten children when she arrived in the world she had eight older siblings four years later in 1924 her mother died while giving birth to her 10th child left alone to be a single parent henrietta's short-tempered and disabled father didn't feel up to the task of raising 10 children on his own so he decided to put his children in the care of his and his late wife's relatives unfortunately however no one relative felt capable of the task either so the 10 pleasant siblings were separated and split up between various assorted relatives who lived in clover virginia henrietta wound up with her grandfather an older man named tommy lax tommy was already raising another grandchild a nine-year-old boy named david lax who everyone called day in the deep south of virginia words were often drawn out the word ranch sounded more like ranch while the name david was elongated to such an extent that it sounded more like day henrietta was four when she went to live with her grandfather and day and the two quickly became inseparable although they didn't know it yet their childhood friendship would eventually blossom into romantic love and the two would marry in the 1920s it wasn't uncommon for people to marry their distant cousins and so the two would think nothing of it when their feelings for each other began to change henrietta and day would stay together for the rest of henrietta's life but although henrietta's story began in 1920 it would get especially interesting in 1951 when henrietta first noticed the tumor that would eventually take her life like her mother henrietta went on to have a big family although she had five children rather than ten in fact it was her fifth pregnancy that would partially trigger her awareness of the tumor not long after giving birth to her fourth child a daughter named deborah henrietta began to experience an unusual amount of pain during sex although she had a relatively low sex drive and little interest in sexual activity for her own pleasure she regularly engaged in intercourse with dave for his sake but even if sex wasn't her favorite thing in the world henrietta still knew that it didn't usually hurt so when she began to experience sharp pains in her vagina during intercourse henrietta confided in her cousins sadie and margaret although her cousins initially dismissed her pain suggesting that she might be pregnant again henrietta knew that they were wrong she already knew that she was pregnant again and she instinctively understood that her baby was not the source of her pain this pain had begun long before her pregnancy and it continued to linger even as her pregnancy progressed normally henrietta was afraid to pursue medical treatment for fear that it might harm her unborn child so she said nothing else about the pain but when she was alone in her bathtub she performed quiet examinations on her own body gently inserting a finger inside herself henrietta found a solid lump deep inside her cervix a few weeks later when she was five months pregnant she experienced unexpected vaginal bleeding henrietta knew this was cause for concern so she told day to take her to the doctor but when the doctor was unable to provide her with more information about the lump he referred her to a specialist today this would be a relatively routine and unsurprising occurrence most of us would not think twice about being referred to a specialist in fact most women probably have a gynecologist that they see on a regular basis but in the 1950s this wasn't the case for black women like henrietta lacks in the 1950s jim crow was still the law of the land and as black historian van r newkirk ii observes there are some painful truths about racism and health care that we have to understand before we can even begin to process henrietta's healthcare experience newkirk writes segregation is baked into the way people and institutions discuss healthcare at its most basic levels racial differences in almost every health outcome from infant mortality to life expectancy are obvious and pronounced especially between white people and black people perhaps because of the sheer size of the evidence of health disparities all sides of health policy debates acknowledge their existence a consensus that has yet to be achieved in debates about education or criminal justice yet segregation in health care is rarely discussed in those terms and its importance in shaping the larger narrative of race in america is often ignored like other forms of segregation health care segregation was originally a function of explicitly racist black codes and jim crow laws many hospitals clinics and doctors offices were totally segregated by race and many more maintained separate wings or staff that could never intermingle under threat of law the deficit of trained black medical professionals itself caused by a number of factors including education segregation meant that no matter where black people received health care services they would find their care to be sub-par compared to that of whites while there were some deaths that were directly attributable to being denied emergency service most of the damage was done in establishing the same cumulative health disparities that plagued black people today as a societal fate the descendants of enslaved people lived much more dangerous and unhealthy lives than their white counterparts in disease-ridden and degraded environments within the confines of a segregated healthcare system these factors became poor health outcomes that shaped black america as if they were its genetic material these harsh truths meant that being referred to johns hopkins gynecology department was an unprecedented occurrence in the life of a woman like henrietta although johns hopkins was one of the few hospitals that would treat black patients they still maintained racist standards such as segregated bathrooms drinking fountains and even waiting rooms unsurprisingly the medical realm was foreign to henrietta so when the doctor diagnosed her with advanced carcinoma of the cervix what she understood was that she simply had cancer she did not tell her family however she returned to the hospital the next day for radiation treatment on her cervix having told her family that the doctor simply wanted to run more tests the medical team who treated henrietta did not tell her that they carved two large pieces of cervical tissue from her body one sample from her tumor the other from the healthy part of her cervix these samples were labeled hey la biopsy of cervical tissue they did not tell henrietta that a man named dr george gay was on a mission to create the first immortal cells from human tissue they did not tell her that her cells would be going straight into his collection or that her tissue would be subjected to experiments in his lab when henrietta's cancer took her life on october 4th 1951 she had no idea that her cells would ultimately be used to save lives chapter 2 henrietta's immortal cells in the 1950s medical professionals had a theory they believed that if they could grow cancerous cells outside of the human body they could identify cancer's root cause and cure it ultimately saving thousands of lives to that end doctors like george gay were in desperate search of cells that could successfully reproduce outside the body and fuel his research he believed that he was investigating a treatment that would make the world a better place and because he treated black patients for free he saw nothing wrong with using their bodies as free human guinea pigs so he sampled tissue from the body of every black patient he treated without ever asking their consent in the hopes that their bodies would give him the answer he wanted unfortunately however none of the cells he had harvested were capable of surviving outside the body until that is he found henrietta's cells when gay and his team of researchers examined the sample of henrietta's cells they found that her cells were both alive and reproducing although it was too late for this information to help henrietta they learned that her cells were unique and that they were responsible for the rapid onset of her cancer because her cells divided at twice the usual rate her cancer had spread more aggressively knowing this might have helped them save henrietta's life but no one was particularly interested in her cells or in her life while henrietta was still alive now however gay referred to the halo samples as the immortal cells and he lost no time in sharing his findings with labs across america who could benefit from the rapidly reproducing tissue it wasn't long before researchers discovered that halo cells could be used in a variety of clinical trials to help develop many different treatments in addition to their potential for helping scientists understand cancer the halo cells were also critical in the development of the polio vaccine and because they were a widely influential medical marvel the halo cells spread from lab to lab all across the world bringing doctors together as they used the immortal cells to understand and cure a host of malicious diseases eventually a haila factory was created a special lab solely devoted to the mass production and growth of the haela cells but even though her cells were at the heart of a revolution in the medical community no one remembered the real woman who gave her name to the halo cells no one bothered to ask what hey law stood for and no one knew henrietta lacks name chapter 3 henrietta's legacy the author herself first noticed this disparity in a scientific conference when the researcher giving the presentation on the halo cells told his audience about the marvel of the cells but offered nothing about the person they had come from as an afterthought her teacher said that he believed the sample had come from a black woman but he didn't know her name or where she was from or how the cells had been obtained so in 1999 the author launched an investigation of her own in a quest to identify the woman behind hey la persistent and arduous inquiries finally put her in touch with henrietta's family and gave her hala's real name the information also prompted her to make the trek to clover virginia to learn more about who henrietta lacks was her search revealed that henrietta's family had limited knowledge about what happened to her and that they were extremely reluctant to discuss it her interviews with henrietta's family also helped her to understand that many black people are distrustful of the medical community thanks to years of medical abuse and ethical violations historian dan royals expounds on this concept by affirming that this world of medical racism is often shorthanded to a single word tuskegee for 40 years the united states public health service working with the tuskegee institute in alabama tracked the progression of untreated syphilis in poor black men even after effective treatments for the disease became available an appalling ethical violation that cost black people their lives news coverage in 1972 drew attention to the study and the resulting public pressure brought it to an end but the tuskegee study was just one of the more recent and well-known episodes in the centuries-long history of medical neglect abuse and exploitation of black americans for example j marion sims the father of modern gynecology developed his technique for repairing vaginal fistulae by experimenting on enslaved women without anesthesia in his autobiography he recalled operating one woman lucy whose quote unquote agony was extreme another named anarcha endured 30 such operations at sims hands the medical abuse of black people in the name of medicine continued even after their death medical colleges paid enslavers and grave robbers alike for bodies of the black dead which were then used to teach cadres of young doctors about human anatomy this practice continued after the end of the civil war and stories of night doctors who murdered black southerners ran rampant amid the larger climate of post-bellum racial terrorism given this long and sordid history one can easily understand why henrietta's family was not surprised to hear that she had essentially been used as a guinea pig they were also understandably outraged at the violation of her body and the anonymity that shrouded the halo cells that's why the author has worked to tell henrietta's story she believes that by raising awareness we can call out the individuals in the medical profession who feel justified in playing god with their patients we can make these ethical violations illegal and we can ensure henrietta gets a fraction of the justice she deserves by telling her story to the world final summary the cells of henrietta lacks most commonly known through their abbreviation heila are a medical marvel the halo cells have been instrumental in life-saving cancer research in the development of the polio vaccine and in many other vital treatments that have saved countless lives but although we know a great deal about the halo cells and the work of the researchers who used them few people know about the woman the cells came from henrietta lacks died from cervical cancer in 1951. her cells were harvested from her body without her consent neither she nor her family was informed that a sample had been taken from her and the medical community has never offered henrietta's family an apology or credit with regard to her cells by telling henrietta's story the author hopes to shed light on this injustice and end ethical violations in science and medicine this has been a summary of the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot written by alyssa burnett and quick read narrated by blake farha the end this audiobook summary was brought to you by quick read we hope you enjoyed this audiobook summary if you want more audiobook summaries like this download our app in the app store or google play and get access to thousands of other free book and audio book summaries listen to them while working out or commuting to work and get the key insights of books in minutes instead of hours go to quickread.com app and download our app for free today