Henrietta Lacks Chapter Summaries – Flashcards
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Chapter 1: The Exam
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Henrietta arrives at Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining about a knot in her womb after recently giving birth to Deborah. She went her because it was accepting during the Jim Crow period of time. Her doctor, Howard Jones, found out that she suffered from a lot of incurable diseases. Henrietta was 1/10 children. There was a huge mass on her cervix.
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Chapter 2: Clover
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Henrietta was born in Loretta Pleasant, Virginia, in 1920. In 1924, they moved to Clover and the family split up. She ended up with Tommy, her grandfather. They harvested tabacco and were very poor. Joe and Day fought over Henrietta. Her and Day gave birth to Lawrence, and then Elsie. She was fourteen, and married when she was 20. The bombing of pearl harbor gave black people jobs and health risk. They then moved to Maryland.
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Chapter 3: Diagnosis and Treatment
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Dr. Jones tells us that Henrietta has stage 1 cancer of the cervix. His boss, Richard TeLinde, says that 'carcinoma in situ' isn't an invasive cancer, but can still spread. Together, him and George Gey, the head of tissue culture research at Hopkins, tried to prove this theory by getting human cells, but the died really quickly. Meanwhile, Henrietta received her treatment from Dr. Jones, by him placing radium inside Henrietta's cervix and sewing it up. TeLinde took samples from her tumor and sent them to Gey's lab.
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Chapter 4: The Birth of HeLa
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Mary Kubicek, Gey's assisstant, wasn't excited when the cells arrived in her lab. Margaret, Gary's wife, kept them alive. Mary put them into the right tubes, and named it HeLa, after HEnrietta LAcks. Gey was a poor guy who worked to to earn a degree at UPitt. He is also reckless, and would capture cells splitting with a rigged camera on a clock. After two days in the hospital, Henrietta was released. She later returned. After two days, the cells that Gey was studying expanded uncontrollably.
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Chapter 5: Blackness be Spreadin All Inside
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Even though Henrietta lived in Turner Station, she would go back to Clover on weekends to work on tobacco fields. Skloot meets with Sadie. Sadie said that Henrietta liked to have fun and cared about her looks. Ethel didn't like Henrietta because her husband liked Henrietta more than her. Elsie went to the Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane when Henrietta couldn't take care of her. This devastated Henrietta. She broke the news to Sadie and Margaret, her cousins first. She started bleeding badly, she couldn't have anymore kids, and she became very sick. She claims that she felt like she was "burning" inside.
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Chapter 6: Lady's on the Phone
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Fast forward several decades: Skloot meets with Pattillo, who was one of Gey's students. He first tells her about African Americans and Science. Then he tells her the contact info for Deborah (Dale) Lacks. However, first he teaches Skloot how to talk to them. Her first call with Deborah goes well; she seems excited to talk about it. She can't call her back because the men in her family won't allow it. When she meets with Day, Dale's husband, he thinks that Skloot has Henrietta's cells, and tells her to get lost.
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Chapter 7: The Death and Life of Cell Culture
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Gey appeared on a TV show to explain new advances in the fight against cancer. He shows an example of Henrietta's cells as well as footage. Soon, Henrietta's cells were all around the world. They would grow, and people would pass them on to other labs. The media didn't get involved because it had happened before, and turned out to be a scam. Alexis Carrel claimed to have an immortal chicken heart. However, he was a supporter of Hitler and eugenics, and people listened to him, giving Hitler supporters. Heyflick proved him wrong and he was sent to jail and died.
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Chapter 8: A Miserable Specimen
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The cancer in Henrietta starts spreading, but the doctors can't see it. Doctor Jones tells her "benevolent deception", making it sound better than it really is. We don't know if she was treated well at John's Hopkins. a few weeks later, she was diagnosed with "inoperable cancer", and was sent home. Dr. Jones kept giving her treatments to ease the abdominal pain. Henrietta's body was full of toxins. When Gey visited, he told her that her cells made her immortal. She said she was happy of that.
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Chapter 9: Turner Station
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Skloot goes to Baltimore to meet with Sonny, Lawrence, Day, and Deborah. While she waits at the station, she reads an article about Henrietta. She tries to find her old house, but it isn't on a map anymore. The town was used in WW2. Not a lot of people live there anymore. She runs into a guy who plans to build a Henrietta Lacks Museum. He takes her to Courtney Speed. When she tells her why she is there, Speed freaks out, and asks questions. She is suspicious, but takes Skloot to a library to watch a documentary. Skloot realizes that she has to go to Clover, Virginia.
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Chapter 10: The Other Side of Tracks
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Skloot goes to Clover to look for Henrietta's grave, but when she arrives, the town looks abandoned. She meets "The Greeter", who her that Henrietta's house is on the other side of the tracks. She drives up Lacks Town Rd to be flagged down by Hector Henry (Cootie), a 70-year old who is Henrietta's cousin. He got the nickname when he got polio. Cootie only has a picture of her from an article and we learn that she was really nice. She took care of Cootie. Cootie thinks that Henrietta's disease was caused by a spirit.
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Chapter 11: The Devil of Pain Itself
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Henrietta was dying. She could no longer produce toxins. Emmet Lacks made her family donate blood. Earlier, Emmet drove Henrietta to see Elsie one last time. Emmet saw Henrietta and described her as "The Devil of Pain Itself". The cancer was too strong, so it couldn't be killed off. Henrietta told the Gladys to tell Day to take care of her children. She died on October 4, 1951, about a week after that conversation.
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Chapter 12: The Storm
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(Begin part 2) Gey now needed Day's permission to study Henrietta's cells. At first Day didn't want to, until Hopkins told him that they would help his children, when he accepted. Mary collected samples from the corpse. She realized that Henrietta was a person when she saw her toe-nail polish. After the autopsy, the body was sent back to Clover, where it was buried. At the funeral, a huge storm hit, and another Lacks cousin died.
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Chapter 13: The HeLa Factory
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A factory was built to harvest HeLa cells to help Dr. Jonas Salk test his vaccine. In 1952, he said he had a vaccine for polio. However he needed cells, so he switched from monkey cells to HeLa cells. The March of Dimes gave out money to find a cure for polio. The production of HeLa cells was headed by six black scientists. Soon, the cells went to labs other than polio labs. They shipped them by freezing them. This was the first step towards cell cloning. They lead to the discovery of humans having 46 chromosomes. Other cell lines were cultured, but HeLa was the best. This caused Gey to fall behind. He thought that he had made a mistake. Now people wanted to know the woman where all of the cells came from.
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Chapter 14: Helen Lane
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Henrietta's first mention in the media was pronounced Henrietta Lakes. Nobody would own up to the mistake. When Gey was contacted by the media, he would only answer questions about the cells, not the woman. There were articles published about HeLa cells. It said that the cells were taken from her after her death. Gey didn't fix the mistake. Henrietta's identity was mistaken until the 70's because of this. She was known as Helen Lane.
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Chapter 15: Too Young to Remember
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After the funeral, the younger Lacks children catch tuberculosis. Joe dies of an illness. Lawrence went to fight in Korea. Ethel and Galen moved in to cover the kids while Day worked. Ethel hated Henrietta, and took it out on her kids. She would beat Joe, making him bad, and he turned into a criminal. Lawrence went to Bobbette, who was nicer. Deborah was sexually abused by Galen. So she ran to Bobbette, who had a fight with Ethel and Galen. She found out that she had an older sister named Elsie, and she only knew of Henrietta's name.
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Chapter 16: Spending Eternity in the Same Place
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Cootie tells Skloot that nobody has talked about Henrietta after her death. He tells her to visit Cliff, her cousin. She goes to Cliff, and he takes her to Henrietta's burial place and old house. Skloot finds some artifacts in the house, like a shoe. Cliff shows her Henrietta's mother's grave which is a little stone. Henrietta was buried somewhere near her mother, but there was no stone. Poverty and discrimination was everywhere in Clover. Skloot visits Carlton and Ruby Lacks, descendants of the slave-owners of Henrietta and Day. They deny being apart of the Lacks family.
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Chapter 17: Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable
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Chester Southam wondered if HeLa affected the scientists who were handling them. He tested this by infecting a sick women with Henrietta's cells (without her consent). He did this with several other patients and was able to remove the cancer in all but four. In those, it returned and metastasized. Now he needed healthy patients to inject, so he got some from Ohio State. Healthy immune systems fought off the disease. These ideas of his were also those of the Nazis. Southam wasn't the only one though, there were a lot of other people doing it as well.
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Chapter 18: Strangest Hybrid
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HeLa cells were brought into space. This was to determine what happens to human cells in space. Back on earth, they were either dying or becoming cancerous. A Navy doctor named Hyatt accidentally injected them into a patients arm and gave him cancer. Now, cells were contaminated with something. Sike! All of the cells' labels got mixed up, so they had to go back and redo them all. Cell fusion or cell sex is when the genetic material of two cells combine. People started combining HeLa cells with other cells to create hybrid cells. Scientists were also able to track genes by seeing which chromosomes disappeared from the hybrids.
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Chapter 19: The Most Critical Time on this Earth is Now
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Deb got pregnant at 16. Bobbette told her to stay in school. Joe ended up in solitary confinement due to his beatings. He was kicked out of the military. Ivy, a guy, beat up Joe, so Joe stabbed him. He ran back to Clover, but then turned himself in. He got a sentence for 15 years. He later converted to Islam. Deb married Alfred, who beat her. She later fought back, and then moved out of the house.
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Chapter 20: The HeLa Bomb
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Stanely Carter told his audience at the Conference of Cell Tissue and Organ Culture that all cell cultures are contaminated by HeLA. He discovered this when he was running an experiment with all of the cell cultures and found they contained a marker to black americans. HeLa could also float on dust particles. Once these cells landed, they colonized everything. This means that scientists were studying the wrong stuff. Six of the contaminated lines came from ATCC. Once HeLa was removed, cells wouldn't grow. Skin cell culture was contaminated with HeLa cells. Stevenson's test brought back Henrietta's family
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Prologue
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Skloot tells us a quick summary about how Henrietta Lacks' cancerous cells where made into HeLa cells, the first immortal cell line. She then tells us how she got interested in biology class at community college. She gets curious and goes on a 10 year journey to find out about Henrietta. Along the way, she bonds with Henrietta's daughter, Deborah.
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Deborah's Voice
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Deborah explains being one of five daughters of Henrietta. She doesn't know much because nobody had time to explain it to her. She is also angry that people are manufacturing and celling HeLa cells. She is mad about people making $ off of her families cells when they are making nothing and are still poor
