The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Summary
Chapter 1: The first chapter of this book gives you the background information about how Henrietta came to find out
that she is sick. The very first sentence gives you the date (January 29, 1951), where, and who is involved. And by
the end of that page the reader has a pretty good idea of what is going to happen due to effective foreshadowing.
Chapter 2: In the second chapter of the book you, as a reader, are exposed to who Henrietta Lacks really is. We are
given the background to her childhood, what she did for a job, and who her best friend/future husband is. Along with
Henrietta’s background we were also given family history and Days past.
Chapter 3: The third chapter i personally feel relates and is better connected to the first chapter, continuing on the
events and outcomes of Henrietta's diagnosis. You are also introduced to a more personal side of Henrietta-intimate
if you will- this chapter really gives you the idea that Henrietta is not just a character on paper but also a real life
human. She becomes easier to relate to as opposed to just reading and memorizing.
Chapter 4: The fourth chapter I, personally, feel has a very significant role in the book. This is where HeLa is born,
where her cells are extracted from her cervix, and where the possible treatments start getting thrown around.
Without this chapter there would be no book.
Chapter 5: Chapter five starts off talking about Henrietta’s personal life and explaining how
much fun she had with her friends. The chapter takes a more serious turn when Henrietta has to
send Elsie away because she can’t care for her anymore. The treatments for the time being seem
to be working well but they are hurting Henrietta’s body. Henrietta learns she can no longer have
kids and is devastated and claims if she would have known that would happen she wouldn’t have
accepted treatment.
Chapter 6: This chapter focuses on Rebecca, the author, trying to get information about Henrietta
to write her book on. She gets some family numbers from a Doctor after much questioning about
her intentions. She gets in touch with Henrietta’s daughter and at first she is excited to talk about
her mother and help with the book. The next day she is unwilling to help and claims it’s from her
family telling her to ignore her. Rebecca then gets in touch with more family and they are
completely against helping
Chapter 7: Chapter seven starts off talking about Gey’s press conference about the HeLa cells
and him talking about how he thinks he can cure cancer with them. The chapter goes into detail
about how he goes to researchers giving them cells to help with research and showing them
techniques. Then Rebecca talks about how cell cultures started and how an old scientist kept a
chicken heart alive the same way the HeLa cells were. The fame of the chicken heart stories
increased the publicity for those types of works but also made people scared.
Chapter 8 "A Miserable Specimen": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca Skloot
describes how much pain Henrietta was going through. She was constantly going to Hopkins to
get checkups, which were not helping her. She had many tumors and was getting more and more
by the day. Her pain was so bad, she could not even walk. She ended up staying at the hospital,
but the treatments they were giving her were not helping any of her pain. Also, there were no
records of George Gey even visiting her earlier through her checkups. Gey's colleague said
otherwise and she said she remembered Gey telling Henrietta her cells would save lives.
Chapter 9 "Turner Station": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"2010, Rebecca Skloot
describes how she drove to Baltimore to meet up with Henrietta's son, Sonny. When Rebecca
arrived in Baltimore, Sonny would not answer calls or his pager. Rebecca ended up driving to
Turner Station to meet a lady named Courtney Speed, who had owned a grocery store and had
created the foundation devoted to building a Henrietta Lacks museum. When Rebecca met
Courtney, Courtney told her she could not say a word about Henrietta without the permission of
her family. The only thing Courtney showed Rebecca was a BBC documentary about Henrietta
and the HeLa cells. When Rebecca finally got a hold of Sonny, he told her he did not want to
meet her with no reasoning. She asked him to put her in touch with Henrietta's cousins from
Clover and all he did was laugh and wish her luck.
Chapter 10 "The Other Side of the Tracks": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010,
Rebecca Skloot describes her trip to Clover. She also describes all the buildings that were in
Clover. She said the buildings looked like someone had left for lunch decades earlier and never
returned. She explained how the dust was so thick over the walls and ceilings. When she arrived
to Main Street, she said there was a man sitting on the side of the street which eventually told
Rebecca where Lacks Town was. When she drove bt Lacks Town a man asked her if she was
lost. The man turned out to be Henrietta's first cousin Hector Henry. He told Rebecca a few
things about Henrietta and how she was a good hearted person. Hector, who was known as
"Cootie" said he thought the HeLa cells were man-made, human-made, or spirit-made because of
the fact they were still alive.
Chapter 11 "The Devil of Pain Itself": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca
Skloot states that by September Henrietta's body was entirely taken over by tumors. She was
receiving many blood transfusions because her kidneys were no longer filtering the toxins from
her blood. Henrietta's cousin Emmett heard that she needed blood and headed to Hopkins with 7
other guys. They said she went from weighing about 140 lbs to about 100 lbs. Emmett also said
that watching Henrietta's pain was like she was possessed by the devil of pain itself. Emmett and
the 7 guys decided to give blood which left her with 8 pints of blood in total. Henrietta told
Gladys she felt she was going to die that night and told her to tell her husband to take care of the
kids. Henrietta ended up dyeing that day which was October 4, 1951 at 12:15am.
Chapter 12 "The Storm" : In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca Skloot describes
how the word of Henrietta's death traveled so fast to the Gey lab. They asked if they could do an
autopsy. They could not collect any samples without the permission of Day, her husband. Day
said no, and they told him the tests they were going to run could help his children someday. That
made him changes his mind, so he said yes and signed the autopsy form. They believed the
reason she died was "terminal uremia," blood poisoning from the buildup of toxins normally
flushed out of the body in urine. The day of the funeral, when they were lowering her body a
huge storm came, which they believe was a sign that Henrietta tried telling them something.
Chapter 13 "The HeLa Factory": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010 Rebecca Skloot
describes that after the death of Henrietta; the factory began producing trillions of HeLa cells per
week to stop polio, which was epidemic in 1951. In 1952, the National Foundation for Infantile
Paralysis (NFIP) would test people to see if the vaccine made their blood immune. This was
expensive so the NFIP made March of Dimes and raised $50 million in donations each year.
They tested HeLa cells by trying to infect them with the polio-virus. The cells were susceptible
to the virus so they began shipping them all over the world. They called the vaccine the "Salk
vaccine." They began testing these cells with other viruses and began freezing the cells as well.
Chapter 14 "Helen Lane": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca Skloot describes
how the Minneapolis Star released a paper on November 2, 1953 with the name of a woman who
was behind the HeLa cells. Bad thing was, they said the name of the woman was Henrietta
Lakes. Roland H. Berg, a press officer at the NFIP said he wanted to write a more detailed article
about the HeLa cells. They decided they would do it, except saying the woman's name was often
Helen Lane, and sometimes Helen Larson, but never Henrietta Lacks. They did not want the
family to know her cells were still alive because it would have protected the privacy of rights of
her family.
Chapter 15 "Too Young to Remember": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca
Skloot describes how once Henrietta dies, Day really could not watch the kids because he was
working two jobs. Ethel, the lady that always wanted to be with Day, eventually moved into
Day's house with her husband Galen. She started sleeping with Day rumors said. She moved in
to help Day with the kids since he was always working, but she and Galen were evil people.
Ethel was constantly beating the kids for no reason to the point where they would bleed or were
put in the hospital. Lawrence, Henrietta's oldest son, married a lady named Bobbette Cooper and
they took the kids in. The abuse stopped for the boys, but not for Deborah. She was getting
molested by Galen at the age of 10. When she turned 13, she wanted to get married because she
thought that was the only way it would stop Galen from touching her. Bobbette told Galen and
Ethel that if they ever touched the kids, she would kill them. Towards the end, Deborah asked
Lawrence what happened to her sister and her mother, but he really did not tell her much. She
went and asked her father and all he could say was "she died when you was too young to
remember."
Chapter 16 "Spending Eternity in the Same Place"” In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010,
Rebecca Skloot continues her visit with "Cootie", who eventually sends her to go see Henrietta's
cousin Cliff. Cliff knew a lot more about Henrietta since he grew up with her as if he was her
brother. Cliff starts telling Rebecca a story about slavery and how there was both white and black
Lackses. Cliff took Rebecca to the cemetery but since they were not very rich, they labeled the
graves with marked index card-sized metal plate that were held by sticks. The cemetery got
cleaned out with a bulldozer, so many of the graves were unnamed, including Henrietta's.
Chapter 17 "Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable" : In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca
Skloot describes that a virologist named Chester Southam wanted to know if humans could get cancer
from the HeLa cells since Henrietta had cancer. He started testing his theory by injecting a syringe with
saline solution mixed with the HeLa cells into the forearms of patients who already had cancer. There
forearms started growing huge nodules and Southam removed the tumors and they began to grow back.
He then wanted to test healthy patients to see how they would react to the injections. He wrote a letter
to get volunteers and prisoners agreed to be in his research, but they had no clue they were being
injected with cancer. They began to say what Southam was doing was illegal because he was not telling
the volunteers they were being injected with cancer. He got one year probation on his medical license.
After his probation, he was elected president of the American Association for Cancer Research. His case
was one of the largest research oversight changes in history of experimentation on humans, leaving him
at number 17 of 100 on unethical studies.
Chapter 18 "Strangest Hybrid": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca Skloot describes how
scientists began joking about the cells saying they could survive on drains, doorknobs, etc. George Hyatt,
a Navy doctor, smeared the cells on a wounded volunteer officer's arm but they were cancerous, so he
never tried transplanting skin cells after that. They were concerned on why normal cells stopped growing
and why cancer cells would not stop growing. Two British scientists, Henry Harris and John Watkins, took
cell sex a step further. They created human-animal hybrids, including the HeLa-mouse hybrid.
Newspapers began going crazy and the people said they were "horrendous" and should stick to their
fungi and yeast experiments.
Chapter 19 "The Most Critical Time on This Earth is now": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010,
Rebecca Skloot describes how Henrietta's kids are doing and what they are now doing with their life.
Deborah ended up getting pregnant at the age of 16 by "Cheetah." Lawrence opened a convenient store
and later worked at a railroad. Sonny graduated from high school and joined the air force. As for Joe, he
changed his name to Zakariyya when he got locked up in prison for killing Ivy. Also, Deborah began to
say that Cheetah was beginning to abuse her after she married him and had a second child at the age of
18. She stood up to him and tortured him as well, but he continued beating her. Deborah wanted to kill
him, but Bobbette made her change her mind and Deborah took the kids and went to hide at her father’s
house.
Chapter 20 "The HeLa Bomb": In "Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 2010, Rebecca Skloot describes how
a geneticist named Stanley Gartler gave a speech on a "technical problem" he found in their field. He
tested 18 genetic markers and they all contained Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase-A (G6PD-A),
which was present in black Americans. Gartler told the audience that the HeLa cells were contaminants.
He wanted to know if Caucasians had G6PD-A, but they had not been reported. Many scientists refused
that HeLa contamination was real and wanted to identify HeLa cells culture instead of G6PD-A. They
believed the genetic tests would lead them to Henrietta's family.