Following the standard for the day, Lacks’s first treatment involved Lawrence Wharton Jr., the surgeon on duty, taking tubes of radium, putting those tubes in little pouches, sometimes called Brack plaques, and then sewing those pouches to the inside of her cervix. Lacks received numerous tests at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in preparation for her first cancer treatment. Skloot remarks in her book that Lacks did not tell her family of her diagnosis because she was determined to deal with her diagnosis herself and not cause anyone to worry. Lacks kept her diagnosis private, only telling her husband that she needed to go to the doctor for medicine. In 1951, doctors diagnosed Lacks with cervical cancer at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. The Johns Hopkins Hospital was the only hospital in Lacks’s area that would treat Lacks, though she received her care in what Skloot refers to as the colored ward of the hospital. Lacks decided to go to The Johns Hopkins Hospital only when she thought there were no other options for her. According to Skloot, prior to any hospital visits, everyone in Lacks’s family would visit the local Jesus statue, lay flowers at the statue’s feet, say a prayer, and rub the statue’s big toe for good luck. The cervix is the lowermost part of the uterus in the human female reproductive system and connects the vagina to the uterus. In January 1951, according to Skloot, Lacks continued to feel a knot inside her and, combined with her atypical vaginal bleeding and a lump on her cervix that persisted months after giving birth, she decided to seek medical attention. After Lacks became pregnant with Joseph, Elsie was too big for Lacks to handle alone, according to Skloot, and the doctors recommended sending Elsie away to the Hospital for the Negro Insane, which was later renamed the Crownsville State Hospital in Crownsville, Maryland. A week after telling her cousins about feeling a knot, Lacks became pregnant with her fifth child. Lacks’s daughter Lucile, called Elsie, had developmental disabilities.Īccording to Skloot, around 1950, Lacks mentioned to her female cousins that she felt as though a knot was inside of her, though she did not seek medical attention. Both Lacks and her husband were Catholic, and together, they had five children, Lawrence, Lucile, David Jr., Deborah, and Joseph.
After their marriage in 1941, the couple moved to Turner Station in Maryland, so Lacks’s husband could work for Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point. According to Skloot, Lacks's cousins encouraged Lacks and her husband to follow them to Bethlehem Steel to escape the poverty that came with being tobacco farmers. On 10 April 1941, at age twenty, Lacks married her cousin Day Lacks. Though her cousin stopped attending school in the fourth grade, Lacks continued until sixth grade.
Lacks was raised by her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, who was simultaneously raising his other grandchild, Lacks’s first cousin David Lacks, or Day. According to Skloot, that is because Lacks’s father did not have the patience for raising children. There, Lacks’s father divided his children to be raised among relatives. Following her mother’s death in 1924, her father and his ten children moved to Clover, Virginia, where their relatives lived and their ancestors had worked as slaves. Lacks’s mother died giving birth to her tenth child when Lacks was four years old.
Lacks was born on 1 August 1920 to Eliza Pleasant and John Randall Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia. Lacks’s HeLa cell line has contributed to numerous biomedical research advancements and discoveries and her story has prompted legal and ethical debates over the rights that an individual has to their genetic material and tissue.
#The immortal life of henrietta lacks part 3 movie#
Science writer Rebecca Skloot chronicled Lacks’s life in her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which became a movie in 2017. Lacks’s cancer cells enabled scientists to study human cells outside of the human body, though that was controversial since she did not voluntarily donate her cells for such research. An immortal cell line is an atypical cluster of cells that continuously multiply on their own outside of the organism from which they came, often due to a mutation. Those cells went on to become the first immortal human cell line, which the researchers named HeLa. Henrietta Lacks, born Loretta Pleasant, had terminal cervical cancer in 1951, and was diagnosed at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where researchers collected and stored her cancer cells.
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