The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - English
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (US Midwest- Chicago, Great Lakes)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
The immortal life of Henrietta Lack by Rebecca Slot. There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met. It's left a ton and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles hands on hips, dress suit, neatly pressed lips painted deep red. It's the late 19 forties and she hasn't yet reached the age of 30. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her. A tumor that would leave her five Children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath a photo. A caption says her name is Henrietta Lack Helen Lane or Helen Larson. No one knows who took that picture, but it's appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks on blogs and laboratory walls. She's usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She's simply called hella. The code name given to the world's first immortal human cells, her cells cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lack. I spent years staring at that photo wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her Children. And what she'd think about cells from her cervix living on forever, bought, sold, packaged and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I've tried to imagine how she's feeling, knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine. The polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning gene mapping in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she like most of us would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were on her body. There's no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all hella cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons, an inconceivable number. Given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all hella cells ever grown end to end, they'd wrap around the earth at least three times spanning more than 350 million ft in her prime. Henrietta herself stood a bit over 5 ft tall. I first learned about hella cells and the woman behind them in 1988 37 years after her death when I was 16 and sitting in a community college biology class, my instructor Donald Deffer and Noam balding man paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle. But to me, they just looked like a neon colored mess of arrows, squares and circles with words I didn't understand like MP F, triggering a chain reaction of protein activations. I was a kid who failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology. So I was taking deer's class for high school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at 16 with words like mitosis and KS inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost.