Her family buries her in an unmarked grave. The doctors at Hopkins pressure Day into allowing them to autopsy her in order to study her cells further. Meanwhile in September 1951, Henrietta is in agony, and she dies the next month. Still, though, the Lackses refuse to meet with Skloot. Rebecca travels to Baltimore, where the Lackses live, and encounters Courtney Speed, a local woman determined to publicize Henrietta’s story. Henrietta, meanwhile, gets worse and worse, until the doctors pronounce her tumor inoperable. Back in 1951, George Gey begins publicizing HeLa, and sending it to many different researchers around the world, but he does not make any financial profit from this. Rebecca begins calling Deborah every day, as well as two of her brothers, Lawrence and Sonny. We jump to 1999, when Rebecca begins attempting to contact the Lackses she is cautiously aided by Professor Roland Pattillo, an academic at Morehouse College who knows the Lackses, but fears that Rebecca is another white journalist out to exploit them. As her cells flourish, however, Henrietta continues to decline. Then Gey is given a sample of Henrietta’s cervical tissue by her doctors (and without her knowledge), and her cancer cells begin growing at an extraordinary rate. Doctors such as George Gey (who worked at Hopkins) were seeking to create a breed of human cells that could regenerate eternally-an immortal cell line-but were having no success. Rebecca explains more about cervical cancer research and treatments in the 1950s, before moving on to the practice of cell culturing, which was in its early stages at this time. The two first had a daughter named Elsie, who was mentally impaired, and who eventually died in an asylum called Crownsville. She then traces Henrietta’s lineage back to the town of Clover, VA, explaining how Henrietta met her husband (and cousin), Day. Skloot explains that Johns Hopkins was one of the best hospitals in the country, but that it subscribed to deeply racist practices when it came to treating African Americans. Rebecca narrates Henrietta’s first visits to Johns Hopkins hospital, where doctors first tell her she is fine, but eventually diagnose her with cervical cancer and treat her with radiation. Rebecca then introduces Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter, and a key figure in Rebecca’s quest. Rebecca explains that HeLa made possible some of the most important discoveries of the 21st century, but that we know little about the woman behind them. A journalist named Rebecca Skloot recounts learning about an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951 of cervical cancer, but whose cancerous cells became the first immortal human cell line, called HeLa.
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