“Within the DNA in that picture is all the genetic information that made Henrietta Henrietta,” Cristoph told them. “Was your mother tall or short?”
“Short.”
“And she had dark hair, right?”
We all nodded.
“Well, all that information came from her DNA,” he said. “So did her cancer — it came from a DNA mistake.”
Deborah’s face fell. She’d heard many times that she’d inherited some of the DNA inside those cells from her mother. She didn’t want to hear that her mother’s cancer was in that DNA too.
“Those mistakes can happen when you get exposed to chemicals or radiation,” Cristoph said. “But in your mother’s case, the mistake was caused by HPV, the genital warts virus. The good news for you is that children don’t inherit those kinds of changes in DNA from their parents – they just come from being exposed to the virus.”
“So we don’t have the thing that made her cells grow forever?” Deborah asked. Cristoph shook his head. “Now you tell me after all these years!” Deborah yelled. “Thank God, cause I was wonderin!”
She pointed at a cell on the screen that looked longer than the others. “This one is cancer, right? And the rest are her normal ones?”
“Actually, HeLa is all cancer,” Cristoph said.
“Wait a minute,” she said, “you mean none of our mother regular cells still livin? Just her cancer cells?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh! See, and all this time I thought my mother regular cells still livin!” [pp. 264-265]
Such a simple explanation — but it came in 2001, 50 years after the cells were harvested, and 28 years after Lacks family members were first contacted about the HeLa cells. Those 28 years were filled with ongoing worry, suspicion, and fear — even notions that Henrietta’s clones were walking the streets somewhere in the world — that could all have been potentially avoided with the simple explanation that Dr Lengauer gave Deborah and Zakariyya that day. Why can it take so long for conversations like this one to occur?
Note: see Rebecca Skloot’s photos from the day she described in this chapter, in her Flickr stream:
- “Christoph Lengauer Explaining HeLa Cells to Henrietta’s son Zakariyya for the first time, 2001″
- “Deborah Lacks and her brother Zakariyya, seeing their mother’s cells for the first time, 2001″
- “Deborah Lacks and her brother Zakariyya, seeing their mother’s cells for the first time, with scientist Christoph Lengauer, 2001″
- “Deborah Lacks looking at her mother’s cells on a monitor with scientist Christoph Lengauer, 2001″ [photo 1] [photo 2]
- “Deborah Looking at Her Mother’s Cells Through a Microscope for the First time, 2001″
- “Zakariyya seeing his mother’s cells for the first time”
- “Deborah Lacks With a Print Out of HeLa Cells in Christoph Lengauer’s lab”
Tags: HeLa, OC/OB 2010, Skloot
