This is such an emotional book to read. I find myself loving Henrietta as much as her family and friends. I just want to shake my head at how the doctors would not pay attention to the many times she said she felt the cancer was spreading inside her, before her body was filled with tumors that would prove to kill her. I realize there would have been no cure for Henrietta back then even had they found the tumors earlier. It was heart wrenching when Day was told to stop bringing her kids to see her.
What a shock it was to read ch 7 The Death and Life of Cell Culture: Back in 1912 Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon at the Rockefeller Institute, grew his "immortal chicken heart."
Scientists said Carrel's chicken-heart cells were one of the most important advances of the century... Carrel was a scientific messiah. Magazines called his culture medium "an elixir of youth" and claimed that bathing in it might make a person live forever. But Carrel wasn't interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were a way to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He'd later praise Hitler for the "energetic measures" he took in that direction.
Years after Carrel died awaiting trial for collaborating with the Nazis, scientist Leonard Hayflick grew suspicious of the chicken heart. No one had ever been able to replicate Carrel's work, and the cells can only divide a finite number of times before dying. Hayflick investigated them and concluded that the original chicken-heart cells had actually died soon after Carrel put them in culture, and that, intentionally or not, Carrel had been putting new cells in the culture dishes each time he "fed" them using an "embryo juice" he made from ground tissue. At least one of Carrel's former lab assistants verified Hayflick's suspicion. But no one could test the theory, because two years after Carrel's death, his assistant unceremoniously threw the famous chicken-heart cells in the trash.
Either way, by 1951, when Henrietta Lack's cells began growing in the Gey lab__ just five years after the widely publicized "death" of Carrel's chicken-heart__ the public image of immortal cells was tarnished. Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil. It wasn't something to be celebrated. In fact no one paid much attention to it at all.
I suppose you had all sorts of kooks like Carrel, looking for fame, fortune and ways to exterminate those they did not deem fit to live. I can see why people were skeptical. That's the thing with science, we can use it for good or evil. I often wonder why we have not been able to find cures for more cancers. I know I have read articles where to cure it would put pharmaceuticals, doctors, and hospitals out of business. I sure wouldn't want to think there is any truth in those theories.
