Read Online The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot - Free Book Online

record, one of her doctors wrote, “Told she could not have any more children.Says if she had been told so before, she would not have gone through with treatment.” But by the time she found out, it was too late.
    Then, three weeks after starting X-ray therapy, she began burning inside, and her urine came out feeling like broken glass. Day said he’d been having a funny discharge, and that she must have given him that sickness she kept going to Hopkins to treat.
    “I would rather imagine that it is the other way around,” Jones wrote in Henrietta’s chart after examining her. “But at any rate, this patient now has … acute Gonorrhea superimposed on radiation reaction.”
    Soon, however, Day’s running around was the least of Henrietta’s worries. That short walk to Margaret’s started feeling longer and longer, and all Henrietta wanted to do when she got there was sleep. One day she almost collapsed a few blocks from Hopkins, and it took her nearly an hour to make the walk. After that, she started taking cabs.
    One afternoon, as Henrietta lay on the couch, she lifted her shirt to show Margaret and Sadie what the treatments had done to her. Sadie gasped: The skin from Henrietta’s breasts to her pelvis was charred a deep black from the radiation. The rest of her body was its natural shade—more the color of fawn than coal.
    “Hennie,” she whispered, “they burnt you black as tar.”
    Henrietta just nodded and said, “Lord, it just feels like that blackness be spreadin all inside me.”



6
“Lady’s on the Phone”

    E leven years after learning about Henrietta in Defler’s classroom—on my twenty-seventh birthday—I stumbled on a collection of scientific papers from something called “The HeLa Cancer Control Symposium” at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, one of the oldest historically black colleges in the country. The symposium had been organized in Henrietta’s honor by Roland Pattillo, a professor of gynecology at Morehouse who’d been one of George Gey’s only African-American students.
    When I called Roland Pattillo to see what he knew about Henrietta, I told him I was writing a book about her.
    “Oh you are?” he said, laughing a slow, rumbling laugh that said,
Oh child, you have no idea what you’re getting into
. “Henrietta’s family won’t talk to you. They’ve had a terrible time with the HeLa cells.”
    “You know her family?” I said. “Can you put me in touch with them?
    “I do have the ability to put you in touch with them, but you need to answer a few questions, starting with ‘Why should I?’ “
    For the next hour, Pattillo grilled me about my intentions. As I told him about the history of my HeLa obsession, he grumbled and sighed, letting out occasional
mmmmmms
and
wellllllls
.
    Eventually he said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you
are
white.”
    “Is it that obvious?”
    “Yes,” he said. “What do you know about African-Americans and science?”
    I told him about the Tuskegee syphilis study like I was giving an oral report in history class: It started in the thirties, when U.S. Department of Public Health researchers at the Tuskegee Institute decided to study how syphilis killed, from infection to death. They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them. The research subjects didn’t ask questions. They were poor and uneducated, and the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty-dollar burial stipends for their families when the men died. The researchers chose black subjects because they, like many whites at the time, believed black people were “a notoriously syphilis-soaked race.”
    The public 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