Quotations
1. "”Henrietta's cells have now been living outside her body for longer than they
ever lived inside it,"” Defler 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's cells in small vials on ice” (4).
-Significance of her cells, describes how rare/special they are
2. “For more than a year Henrietta had been telling her closest girlfriends
something didn’t feel right. One night after dinner, she sat on her bed with
her cousins Margaret and Sadie and told them, “”I got a knot inside me”” (14).
-Depicts how uninformed/uneducated Henrietta was
3. “The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients, most of them black
and unable to pay their medical bills. David drove Henrietta nearly twenty
miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only
major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the era of Jim
Crow-when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was
likely to send them away, even it meat they might die in the parking lot. Even
Hopkins, which did treat black patients, segregated them in colored wards
and had colored-only fountains” (15).
-Historical documentation about medicine at that time
4. “It was no surprise that she hadn’t come back all those times for follow-up.
For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country
where she didn’t speak the language….She, like most black patients, only
went to Hopkins when she thought she had no choice” (16).
-Proves that they were poor & uneducated, simile
5. “With Henrietta unconscious on the operating table in the center of the room,
her feet in stirrups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence Wharton, Jr., sat on a
stool between her legs. He peered inside Henrietta, dilated her cervix, and
prepared to treat her tumor. But first – though no one had told Henrietta that
TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor –
Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue
from Henrietta’s cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy
cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish” (33).
6. “The pubic didn’t learn about the Tuskegee study until the seventies, after
hundreds of men enrolled in it had already died. The news spread like pox
through black communities: doctors were doing research on black people,
lying to them, and watching them die. Rumors started circulating that the
doctors had actually injected the men with syphilis in order to study them”
(50).
-Prejudice in medicine
7. “There’s no indication that Henrietta questioned him; like most patients in
the 1950s, she deferred to anything her doctors said. This was a time when
““benevolent deception”” was common practice-doctors often withheld even
the most fundamental information from their patients, sometimes not giving
them any diagnosis at all. They believed it was best not to confuse or upset
patients with frightening terms they might not understand, like cancer.
Doctors knew best, and most patients didn’t question that” (63).
-Henrietta obeying her doctor as opposed to voicing concerns leading her to
be taken advantage of
8. “”Now he sayin John Hopkin killed my mother and them white doctors
experimented on her cause she was black”” (53).
-Deborah’s (Henrietta’s daughter) view on the situation
9. “This was 1951 in Baltimore, segregation was law, and it was understood
that black people didn’t question white people’s professional judgment” (64).
-Briefing the readers on the common responses to doctors or people in
power
10. “Though no law or code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before
taking tissue from a living patient, the law made it very clear that performing
an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without permission was illegal.
The way Day remembers it, someone from Hopkins called to tell him
Henrietta had died, and to ask permission for an autopsy, and Day said no. A
few hours later, when Day went to Hopkins….the doctors asked again about
the autopsy. They said they wanted to run tests that might help the children
someday. Day’s cousin said it wouldn’t hurt, so eventually day agreed and
signed an autopsy permission form” (90).
-Stating facts on the law regarding protocol with taking tissue
11. “”When I saw those toenails,”” Mary told me later, “”I nearly fainted. Oh jeez,
she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting
those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been
working withal this time and sending all over the world, they came from a
live woman. I’d never thought of it that way”” (91).
-Mary Gey’s response to seeing Henrietta’s body during the autopsy
12. “So many people knew Henrietta’s name, someone was bound to leak
it….Sure enough, on November 2, 1953, the Minneapolis Star became the first
publication to name the woman behind the HeLa cells. There was just one
thing-the reporter got her name wrong. HeLa, the story said, was “”from a
Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lakes”” (105).
-Proves the lack of concern with her name
13. “Berg didn’t explain how releasing Henrietta’s name to the public would have
protected the privacy or rights of her family. In fact, doing so would have
forever connected Henrietta and her family with the cells and any medical
information eventually derived from their DNA”” (107).
-Points out how the truth about Henrietta’s cells would have affected the
Lacks family
14. “Henrietta’s children grew up hungry. Every morning Ethel fed them each a
cold biscuit that had to last them until dinner. She put latches and bolts on
the refrigerator and cupboard doors to keep the children out between meals”
(111).
-Emotionally appealing, presenting the situation to prove that Henrietta’s
children suffered greatly from her loss
15. “A few minutes later, seemingly out of nowhere, he pointed to the dirt and
said, "”You know, white folks and black folds all buried over top of each other
in here. I guess old white granddaddy and his brothers was buried in here
too. Really no tellin who in this ground now."” Only thing he knew for sure,
he said, was that there was something beautiful about the idea of slaveowning white Lackses being buried under their black kin. "”They spending
eternity in the same place,"” he told me, laughing. "They must've worked out
their problems by now!" (122).
-Observation made by Henrietta’s son on prejudice
16. “”Lillian’s skin was real light, even lighter than mom’s,”” Gary explained.
“”She married a Puerto Rican somewhere in New York. Since she could pass,
she disowned her blackness-converted to Puerto Rican because she didn’t
want to be black no more”” (127).
-Discusses the difficulty in being African American at the time b/c of
prejudice
17. “He chose the Ohio prison because its inmates had cooperated in several
other studies without resistance, including one in which they’d been infected
with a potentially deadly disease called tularemia. Research on inmates
would come under scrutiny and start being heavily regulated about fifteen
years later, because they’d be considered a vulnerable population unable to
give informed consent…were being used for research of all kinds-from
testing chemical warfare agents to determining how X-raying testicles
affected sperm count”” (129).
-Example of how researchers operated
18. “Sixteen years earlier, on August 20, 1947, a U.S. –led war tribunal in
Nuremberg, Germany, had sentenced seven Nazi doctors to death by hanging.
Their crime was conducting unthinkable research on Jews without consentsewing siblings together to create Siamese twins, dissecting people alive to
study organ function”” (131).
-Another example of the research done & how unethical it was
19. “In response to the Southam situation, the NIH investigated all their grantee
institutions and found that only nine out of fifty-two had any policy in place
to protect the rights of research subjects. Only sixteen used consent forms”
(135).
-Describes how unfortunate the timing was
20. “’Do you have any friends or members of your family that can get you an
attorney?”” “”No. Can’t afford one.””
-Example of how poor her children were/how they ran into a lot of trouble
21. “”Can you tell me what my mama’s cells really did?”” he whispered. “” I know
they did something important, but nobody tells us nothing.”” When I asked if
he knew what a cell was, he stared at his feet as if I’d called on him in class
and he hadn’t done his homework. “”Kinda,”” he said. “”Not really”” (162).
-How uneducated/unintelligent her son was even as an adult
22. “Day clenched his three remaining teeth. “”I didn’t sign no papers,”” he said.
“’I just told them they could do a topsy. Nothin else. Them doctors never
said nothing about keeping her alive in no tubes or growin no cells”” (164).
-Henrietta’s husband’s response to being asked what the doctors had told
him
23. “Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking
advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and
death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told
tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in
white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect
black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets
eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Klu Klux Klan” (166).
-Example of the history of how African Americans were misled by lies
24. “” Hopkins say they gave them cells away,”” Lawrence yelled, “”but they made
millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her
family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we
get health insurance”” (168).
-Family’s feeling on not receiving any compensation for their mother’s cells
25. “Those guidelines had been implemented in 1966, in the aftermath of the
Southam trial, and then expanded to include a detailed definition of informed
consent in 1971. They were in the process f being codified into law when
Hsu called Day” (184).
-How many people could have been affected had the change in regulation had
been earlier
26. “”Just tell them I’m really grateful. They should be very proud of the mother
or the wife-I think that if they are angry, they probably didn’t realize how
famous the cells are now in the world. It’s unfortunate thing what happened,
they still should be very proud, their mother will never die as long as the
medical science is around, she will always be such a famous thing”” (189).
-Susan Hsu’s response to finding out that the cells were taken without
permission
27. “The Crownsville that Elsie died in was far worse than anything Deborah had
imagined. Patients arrived from a nearby institution packed in a train car. In
1955, the year Elsie died, the population of Crownsville was at a record high
of more than 2,700 patients, nearly 800 over maximum capacity. In 1948, the
only year figures were available, Cronwsville averaged 1 doctor for every 225
patients, and its death rate was far higher than its discharge rate” (275).
-Description of the hospital for the Negro Insane
28. “Christoph kept talking about cell division, but Deborah wasn't listening. She
stood mesmerized, watching one of her mother's cells divide in two, just as
they'd done when Henrietta was an embryo in her mother's womb. Deborah
and Zakariyya stared at the screen like they'd gone into a trance, mouths
open, cheeks sagging. It was the closest they'd come to seeing their mother
alive since they were babies” (265).
-Deborah & Zakariyya finally getting information about their mother & her
cells
29. “Then she knelt on the ground, next to the sunken strips of earth where she
imagined her mother and sister were buried. "”Take one of me and my sister
by her and my mother's grave,"” she said. “"It'll be the only picture in the
world with the three of us almost together”” (287).
-Deborah’s reaction to learning about her mother, emotional appeal in that it
proves that Henrietta was a mother
30. “As we left Crownsville, Deborah thanked Lurz for the information, saying,
"”I've been waiting for this a long, long time, Doc."” When he asked if she was
okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, "”Like I'm always telling my
brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You
got to remember, times was different"” (276).
-Significance of Henrietta to her family