Part 20 (2/2)

”Hopkins say they gave them cells away,” Lawrence yelled, ”but they made millions! It's not fair! She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?”

Day had prostate cancer and asbestos-filled lungs. Sonny had a bad heart, and Deborah had arthritis, osteoporosis, nerve deafness, anxiety, and depression. With all that plus the whole family's high blood pressure and diabetes, the Lackses figured they pretty much supported the pharmaceutical industry, plus several doctors. But their insurance came and went. Some were covered through Medicare, others on and off by spouses, but they all went stretches with no coverage or money for treatment.

As the Lacks men talked about Hopkins and insurance, Bobbette snorted in disgust and walked to her recliner in the living room. ”My pressure's goin up and I'm not gonna die over this, you know?” The whole thing just wasn't worth getting riled up over, she said. But she couldn't help herself. ”Everybody knew black people were disappearing cause Hopkins was experimenting on them!” she yelled. ”I believe a lot of it was true.”

”Probably so,” Sonny said. ”A lot might a been myth too. You never know. But one thing we do know, them cells about my mother ain't no myth.”

Day thumped his cane again.

”You know what is a myth?” Bobbette snapped from the recliner. ”Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn't donate nothing. They took them and didn't ask.” She inhaled a deep breath to calm herself. ”What really would upset Henrietta is the fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything-we didn't know nothing about those cells and he didn't care. That just rubbed us the wrong way. I just kept asking everybody, 'Why didn't they say anything to the family?' They knew how to contact us! If Dr. Gey wasn't dead, I think I would have killed him myself.”

CHAPTER 22

”The Fame She So Richly Deserves”

One afternoon in the late spring of 1970, George Gey stood in his favorite waders on the bank of the Potomac River, where he and several other Hopkins researchers had been fis.h.i.+ng together every Wednesday for years. Suddenly Gey was so exhausted, he could hardly hold his fis.h.i.+ng rod. His buddies dragged him up the embankment to the white Jeep he'd bought using money from a cancer research award.

Soon after that fis.h.i.+ng trip, at the age of seventy-one, Gey learned he had the disease he'd spent his entire life trying to fight. And he had one of its most deadly forms: pancreatic cancer. If doctors didn't operate, Gey knew he would die within months. If they did, it might buy him a little time. Or it might not.

On August 8, 1970, around 6:00 a.m., Margaret called each member of the Gey lab's staff, including a postdoctoral student who'd just flown in on a red-eye from Europe.

”Come down to the lab as fast as you can,” she told them. ”There's going to be an emergency procedure this morning.” She didn't tell them what that procedure would be.

Before going into the operating room, George told his surgeons that he wanted them to take samples of his tumor, just as Dr. Wharton had done with Henrietta's tumor decades earlier. Gey gave his lab staff careful instructions for growing GeGe, a line of cancer cells taken from his pancreas. He hoped that his cells, like Henrietta's, would become immortal.

”Work all day and night if you have to,” he told his postdocs and a.s.sistants. ”Make this happen.”

Soon, with Gey anesthetized on the operating table, surgeons opened him up and found that the cancer was inoperable-growths covered his stomach, spleen, liver, and intestines. They worried that cutting into the cancer might kill him. Despite Gey's wishes, they sewed him up without taking any samples. When he awoke from anesthesia and found out there would be no GeGe line, he was furious. If this cancer was going to kill him, he wanted it to help advance science in the process.

As soon as he'd recovered enough from his surgery to travel, Gey began contacting cancer researchers around the country, asking who was doing research on pancreatic cancer and needed a patient to experiment on. He was flooded with replies-some from scientists he didn't know, others from friends and colleagues.

In the three months between his surgery and his death, Gey went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a week of treatments with an experimental j.a.panese drug that made him violently ill. His son, George Jr., who had just finished medical school, sat with Gey through the whole thing and made sure he had a freshly pressed suit each day. After leaving the Mayo Clinic, Gey spent several days in New York City at Sloan-Kettering for another study, and he underwent chemotherapy at Hopkins using a drug not yet approved for use in humans.

Gey was six and a half feet tall and about 215 pounds when he was diagnosed, but he withered quickly. He often doubled over from abdominal pain, he vomited constantly, and the treatments soon left him confined to a wheelchair. But he continued showing up at the lab and writing letters to his colleagues. At some point not long before his death, he told his former a.s.sistant Mary Kubicek that it was fine to release Henrietta's name if anyone asked, since it had been so many years. But Mary never told a soul.

George Gey died on November 8, 1970.

A few months after Gey's death, Howard Jones and several Hopkins colleagues-including Victor McKusick, a leading geneticist-decided to write an article about the history of the HeLa cell line as a tribute to Gey's career. Before writing the article, Jones pulled Henrietta's medical records to remind himself of the details of her case. When he saw the photographs of her biopsy, he immediately realized her tumor had been misdiagnosed. To be sure, he dug out the original biopsy sample, which had been stored on a shelf since 1951.

In December 1971, when Jones and his colleagues published their tribute to Gey in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, they reported that the original pathologist had ”misinterpreted” and ”mislabeled” Henrietta's cancer. Her tumor was invasive, but not an epidermoid carcinoma as originally diagnosed. Rather, the article said, it was ”a very aggressive adenocarcinoma of the cervix,” meaning it originated from glandular tissue in her cervix instead of epithelial tissue.

A misdiagnosis of this type was not uncommon at the time. In 1951, the same year Jones biopsied Henrietta's tumor, researchers from Columbia University reported that the two types of cancer were easily and often confused.

According to Howard Jones and other gynecologic oncologists I talked with, the correct diagnosis wouldn't have changed the way Henrietta's cancer was treated. By 1951, at least twelve studies had found that cervical adenocarcinomas and epidermoid carcinomas responded the same to radiation, which was the treatment of choice for both types.

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