Summary

Chapter 23: “It’s Alive”… 1973-1974

Bobbette Lacks was having lunch with her friend Gardenia whose brother-in-law was in town. He worked at the National Cancer Institute. When he realized that Bobbette’s last name was Lacks, he told Bobbette that he’d been working with the cells for years in his lab. He had read that the cells belonged to a Henrietta Lacks. Bobbette said that Henrietta Lacks was her mother-in-law’s name but that they cells couldn’t belong to her because she’d been dead for twenty years. The man asked if Henrietta had cervical cancer. Bobbette was surprised that he knew that. He told her that the cells were her mother-in-laws because the cells belonged to a black woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in the fifties. He explained that he often ordered the HeLa cells from...