![]() Elsie suffered from congenital syphilis and couldn't hear or speak. Deborah still had to fight off Galen and ultimately found herself in an abusive marriage at a young age.ĭuring her teenage years, Deborah learned about the existence of an older sister, Elsie, who was institutionalized and died at Crownsville Hospital for the N**** Insane. Joe grew up to be violent and unstable, and spent years in prison for murdering a guy who had threatened him. When oldest brother Lawrence moved in with his girlfriend Bobbette, she insisted that they take in his younger siblings. Deborah and Joe suffered the most: Joe was beaten and isolated from the rest of the family, while Deborah was sexually molested by Galen. But both Ethel and Galen were abusive to the children, and they all suffered horrendously at the hands of their relatives. Her husband, David ("Day") Lacks allowed a cousin and his wife to move into their house to take care of the children. ![]() She died at the age of 31, leaving behind a husband and five young children. She had rounds of radiation and x-ray therapy, but Henrietta didn't survive her disease. ![]() They had to focus on Henrietta, whose cancer cells spread as rapidly through her body as they did in the lab. Maybe it wouldn't have meant anything to the Lacks family, who were poor, uneducated and extremely wary of the medical community. They didn't inform them even after the cells began to grow amazingly fast and Gey and the rest of the scientific world realized they'd just made a gigantic breakthrough in medical technology. Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample-and neither Gey nor Hopkins ever informed them. Gey was the head of the tissue culture department at Hopkins and he'd been trying for years to get cells to divide continuously and infinitely in the lab so that the scientific community could have an inexhaustible supply of human cells to experiment on. In the process, some of the tissue was removed from her tumor and sent down to George Gey's lab at Hopkins to be cultured, or grown, in test tubes. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy. Thirty year-Henrietta Lacks sought help in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for what she called a "knot" on her cervix. Skloot quickly learns that the Lacks family has been badly treated by both media and the scientific community, and that she'll have to earn their trust before they'll allow her to tell their story. It turns out that the Lacks family is very hostile to the idea of speaking to yet another reporter about their wife and mother's famous cells. But she doesn't realize how much backstory and emotional baggage exists until she starts contacting the family and people connected with them. Because there isn't much information about Henrietta and her family, Skloot wants to tell their story. Science writer Rebecca Skloot has always been obsessed with Henrietta Lacks, the African-American woman whose cancer cells were harvested and used to create an immortal cell line for scientific experimentation. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Summary
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