hello guys if you're anything like me and you have to do this college reading of the book the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot or if you're just interested in reading by yourself or if you saw the motion picture and now you like uh would like to know more about it and if you're anything like me i like to follow up with some kind of spoking out loud some kind of audiobook just to keep the pacing of the reading you know more interesting just to follow along with it then maybe this is for you i will try to do each chapter separately and so let's dive into it and to the prologue i'll just leave this image like white so you can just like put it on your corner and listen to it so here we go frolic the woman in the photograph there is a photo on my wall of a woman i've never met it's left corner torn and patched together with tape she looks straight into the camera and smiles hands on hips dress suit neatly pressed lips painted deep red it's the late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the age of 30. her light brown's skin is smooth her eyes still young and playful oblivious to the tumor growing inside her a tumor that will leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine beneath the photo a caption says her name is henrietta lux helen lane or helen lawson no one knows who took that picture but it appeared hundreds of times in magazines and signed textbooks on blogs and laboratory walls she's usually defined as helen lane but often she has no name at all she simply called hala the code name given to the world's first immortal human cells her cells cut from her cervix just months before she died her real name is henrietta lax i've spent two years staring at that photo wondering what kind of life she led what happened to her children and what she think about cells from her cervix living on forever bought sold packaged and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world i've tried to imagine how she would feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity but they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine the polio vaccine chemotherapy cloning gene mapping in vitro fertilization i'm pretty sure that she like most of us would be shocked to hear they're truly more of her cells growing in laboratories now that they were ever in her body there's no way of knowing exactly how many of henrietta's cells are alive today one scientist estimates that if you could pile all the halo cells ever grown onto a scale they would weight more than 50 million metric tons wow an inconceivable number given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing another scientist calculated if you could lay all the halo cells ever grown end to end they would wrap around the earth at least three times spending more than 300 million feet in her prime henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall i first learned about hala cells and the woman behind them in 1988 37 years after her death when i was 16 in city in a community college biology class my instructor donald tefla a gnomish balding man paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector he pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him there were schematics of the cell's repetition cycle but to me they just looked like a neon colored mess of arrows squares and circles with words i didn't understand like mpf triggering a chain reaction of protein activations i was a kid who failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up i transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology so i was taking the first class for high school credit which meant that i was sitting in a college sector hall at 16 with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around i was completely lost do we have to memorize everything on those diagrams one student yelled yes defleur said we had to memorize the diagrams and yes they would be on the test but that didn't matter right then what he wanted us to understand was the cells are amazing things there are about 100 trillion of them in our bodies each so small that several thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence they make up all our tissue muscles bone blood which in turn make up our organs under the microscope the cell looks a lot like a fried egg it has a white the citroplasm that is full of water and protein to keep it fed and a yolk the nucleus that holds all the genetic information that makes you you the cytoplasm buzzes like a new york city street it is scrammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part of the cell to another pumping water nutrients and oxygen in and out of the cell all the while little cytoplasmic factories work 24 7 cranking out sugars fats proteins and energy to keep the whole thing running and fed the nucleus feed the nucleus the nucleus is the brains of the operation inside every nucleus within each cell of your body there is identical copy of your entire genome that genome tells cells when to grow and divide and make sure they do their jobs whether that's controlling your heartbeat or helping your brain understand the words on this page teflor pays the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis the process of cell division makes it possible for embryos to grow into babies and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or replenishing blood we've lost it was beautiful he said like a perfectly choreographed dance all it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control he told us just one enzyme misfiring just one wrong protein activation and you could have cancer mitosis goes haywire which is how it is spreads we learned that by studying cancer cells in culture defler said he grinned and spun to face the board where he wrote was an enormous prince henrietta lacks henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer he told us but before she died a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in the petri dish scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades but they all eventually died henrietta's were different they reproduced an entire generation every 24 hours and they never stopped they became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory henrietta cells have now been living in outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it never said if we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers he told us we'd probably find millions if not billions of henrietta cells in small vials of on and ice her cells were part of her research into the genes that caused cancer and those that suppress it they helped develop drugs for treating herpes leukemia influenza hemophilia and parkinson's disease and they have been used to study lactose in digestion sexually transmitted diseases appendicitis human longevity mosquito mating and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers the chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision the scientists know they're every quirk like guinea pigs and mice henrietta cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse hail cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years defleur said then matter-of-factly almost as an afterthought he said she was a black woman he raised her name in one of fans in one fest swipe and blew the chalk from his hands class was over as the other students filed out of the room i sat thinking that's it that's all we get there has to be more to the story i followed deflate to his office where was she from i asked did she know how important her cells were did she have any children i wish i could tell you he said but no one knows anything about her after class i ran home and threw myself onto my bed with my biology textbook looked up the cell culture in the index and there she was a small parenthetical in culture cancer cells can go undivided indefinitely if they have a continual supply of nutrients and thus are said to be immortal a striking example is a cell line that has been reproduced in culture since 1951. cells of this line are called halal cells because the original source was a tumor removed from a woman named henrietta lacks that was it i looked up hella in my parents encyclopedia then my dictionary no henrietta as i graduated from high school and worked my way through college toward a biology degree halo cells were omnipresent i heard about them in history neurology pathology i used them experiments and how neighboring cells communicate but after mr deflared no one mentioned harrietta when i got to my first computer in the mid-90s and started using the internet i searched for information about her but found only confused snippets most sites said her name was helen lane some said she died in her 30s others said the 40s 50s or even 60s some said ovarian cancer killed her others said breast cervical cancer eventually i tracked down a few magazine articles about her from the seventies a boney quoted henrietta's husband saying all i remember is that she had this disease and right after she died they called me in the office wanting to get my permission to taken simple of some kind i decided not to let them chad said the family was angry angry that henrietta cells were being sold for 25 dollars of vial and angry their articles had been published about the cells without her knowledge their knowledge it said pounding in the back of their heads was an annoying feeling that science and the press had taken advantage of them the articles all run photos of henrietta's family her oldest son sitting at his dining room table in baltimore looking at genetics textbook her middle son in the military uniform smiling holding a baby but one picture stood out more than any other henrietta's daughter deborah lax is surrounded by family everyone smiley armors around each other eyes bright and excited except deborah she stands in the foreground looking alone almost as if someone pasted her into the photo after the fact she's 26 years old and beautiful with short brown hair like cat-like eyes but those eyes glare at the camera hard and serious the captions said the family had found out just a few months earlier that harriet cells were still alive yet at that point she had been dead for 25 years all the stories mentioned that scientists have begun doing research on harriet's children but the lackasas didn't seem to know what the what that research was for they said they were being tested to see if they had cancer that killed henrietta but according to the reporters scientists were studying the lax family to learn more about henrietta's cells the story quoted her son lawrence wanted to know the immortality of his mother's cells meant that he might live forever too but one member of the family remained voiceless henrietta's daughter deborah as i worked my way through graduate school studying writing i became fixated on the idea of someday telling henrietta's story at one point i even called directory assistants in baltimore looking for henrietta's husband david lux but he was enlisted i had the idea that i'd write a book that was a biography of both cells and the woman they came from someone's told her wife and mother i couldn't have i couldn't have imagined it then but that phone call would mark the beginning of a decade-long adventure through scientific laboratories hospitals and mental institutions with a cast of characters that would include noble reds grocery store clerks convicted felons and a professional con artist while trying to make sense of this history of cell culture and the complicated ethnical debate surrounding the use of human tissue in research i would be accused of conspiracy and slummed onto a wall both physically and metaphorically i would even eventually find myself on the receiving end of something that looked a lot like an exorcism i did eventually meet deborah who would turn out to be one of the strongest and most resilient women i've ever known we would form a deep personal bond and slowly without realizing i'd become a character in her story and she in mine deborah and i came from very different cultures i grew up white and agnostic in the pacific northwest my roots have new york jew and have midwestern protestant deborah was a deeply religious black christian from the south i tended to leave the room when religious came up in conversation because it made me so uncomfortable deborah's family tended towards preaching faith healings and sometimes voodoo she grew up in a black neighborhood that was one of the poorest and most dangerous in the country i grew up in a safe quiet middle class neighborhood in a predominantly white city and went to high school with a total of two black students i was a scientist who referred to all things supernatural as woo-woo stuff deborah believed henrietta's spirit lived on in herself controlling the life of anyone who crossed its path including me how else would you explain why your science teacher knew her real name when everyone else called her helen lane deborah would say she was trying to get your attention this thinking would apply to everything in my life when i married while writing this book it was because henrietta wanted someone to take care of me while i worked when i divorced it was because she decided he was getting in the way of the book when an editor who insisted i take the lax family out of the book was injured in a mysterious accident deborah said that's what happens when you piss henry atta off laka says challenged everything i thought i knew about ah the laches has challenged everything i thought i knew about faith science journalism race ultimately this book is the result it's not only the story of hella cells and harriet deluxe but of henrietta's family particularly deborah and their lifelong struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells and the science that made them possible and that is the conclusion of the prologue then we will see deborah's voice when people ask and seems like people always been asking to where i can't never get away from it yet we will not read that part