Your book documents, among other things, the speechlessness between white doctors and black patients. Has that changed in the meantime?
Skloot: Scientists are usually not very good at talking to non-scientists about their subject. The tension between white scientists and black patients only adds to the gap. There is long history of black people being used for medical experiments without their knowledge or consent. Hence this distrust. Even when black people have to be treated because they are sick, they fear the doctor. Medical professionals have become aware of this and are doing lot to regain the trust of their black patients.
What was the significance of poverty and lack of education in the relationship between the Lacks family and their doctors?
Skloot: The fact is that when I was writing I never really knew whether this was class or race problem. Poverty is usually the basic problem, including skin color, but never just skin color.
For example, when the scientists were producing the first mouse-human hybrid cell, Henrietta's daughter Deborah imagined this was being, half mouse, half her mother. No, it's all about cells, they told her. But what can someone do with it who doesn't even know what cell is?
At one point I was also scared. They describe how doctor experimentally injected Henrietta Lacks' cancer cells into the arms of cancer patients. With the result that they developed Henrietta's cancer and died faster.
Skloot: That was actually an incredible and bizarre chapter in the history of the HeLa cells. Cancer researcher Chester Southam injected HeLa cells into prisoners and cancer patients in the 1960s because he suspected that cancer was caused by single virus. The cancer patients developed uterine cancer growths wherever he injected them with HeLa. He wondered if it had happened because they were sick. And he began to inject Henrietta's cancer cells into healthy people - without them knowing anything about it. For me, the most amazing thing about the story was that he could do that for years. He's been to big, reputable hospitals in New York, and at some point he did that to every woman who entered the gynecology department there.
Your book documents, among other things, the speechlessness between white doctors and black patients. Has that changed in the meantime?
Skloot: Scientists are usually not very good at talking to non-scientists about their subject. The tension between white scientists and black patients only adds to the gap. There is long history of black people being used for medical experiments without their knowledge or consent. Hence this distrust. Even when black people have to be treated because they are sick, they fear the doctor. Medical professionals have become aware of this and are doing lot to regain the trust of their black patients.
What was the significance of poverty and lack of education in the relationship between the Lacks family and their doctors?
Skloot: The fact is that when I was writing I never really knew whether this was class or race problem. Poverty is usually the basic problem, including skin color, but never just skin color.
For example, when the scientists were producing the first mouse-human hybrid cell, Henrietta's daughter Deborah imagined this was being, half mouse, half her mother. No, it's all about cells, they told her. But what can someone do with it who doesn't even know what cell is?
At one point I was also scared. They describe how doctor experimentally injected Henrietta Lacks' cancer cells into the arms of cancer patients. With the result that they developed Henrietta's cancer and died faster.
Skloot: That was actually an incredible and bizarre chapter in the history of the HeLa cells. Cancer researcher Chester Southam injected HeLa cells into prisoners and cancer patients in the 1960s because he suspected that cancer was caused by single virus. The cancer patients developed uterine cancer growths wherever he injected them with HeLa. He wondered if it had happened because they were sick. And he began to inject Henrietta's cancer cells into healthy people - without them knowing anything about it. For me, the most amazing thing about the story was that he could do that for years. He's been to big, reputable hospitals in New York, and at some point he did that to every woman who entered the gynecology department there.Nobody asked him: Don't you think you should ask women before you infect them with cancer cells? Until the moment he started doing it in Jewish hospital in Brooklyn. Some Jewish doctors immediately took stand and said: It's like the Nazis. They brought it to the public, the media picked it up. Much of the US patient protection laws come from this time.
Rebecca Skloot: The Immortality of Henrietta Lacks. Irisiana-Verlag, 512 pages, hardback, 19.99 euros
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