The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Read Free Book Online Page B

suspenders. He moved boulders around his yard on weekends, ate twelve ears of corn in one sitting, and kept barrels full of oysters in his garage so he could shuck and eat them anytime he wanted. He had the body of a retired linebacker, six feet four inches tall and 215 pounds, his back unnaturally stiff and upright from having his spine fused so he’d stop throwing it out. When his basement wine-making factory exploded on a Sunday, sending a flood of sparkling burgundy through his garage and into the street, Gey just washed the wine into a storm drain, waving at his neighbors as they walked to church.
    Gey was a reckless visionary—spontaneous, quick to start dozens of projects at once, filling the lab and his basement at home with half-built machines, partial discoveries, and piles of junkyard scraps only he could imagine using in a lab. Whenever an idea hit him, he sat wherever he was—at his desk, kitchen table, a bar, or behind the wheel of his car—gnawing on his ever-present cigar and scribbling diagrams on napkins or the backs of torn-off bottle labels. That’s how he came up with the roller-tube culturing technique, his most important invention.
    It involved a large wooden roller drum, a cylinder with holes for special test tubes called roller tubes. The drum, which Gey called the “whirligig,” turned like a cement mixer twenty-four hours a day, rotating so slowly it made only two full turns an hour, sometimes less. For Gey, the rotation was crucial: he believed that culture medium needed to be in constant motion, like blood and fluids in the body, which flow around cells, transporting waste and nutrients.
    When Mary finally finished cutting the samples of Henrietta’scervix and dropping them in dozens of roller tubes, she walked into the incubator room, slid the tubes one at a time into the drum, and turned it on. Then she watched as Gey’s machine began churning slowly.
          H enrietta spent the next two days in the hospital, recovering from her first radium treatment. Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing on her stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder, fingers into her vagina and anus, needles into her veins. They wrote notes in her chart saying, “30 year-old colored female lying quietly in no evident distress,” and “Patient feels quite well tonight. Morale is good and she is ready to go home.”
    Before Henrietta left the hospital, a doctor put her feet in the stirrups again and removed the radium. He sent her home with instructions to call the clinic if she had problems, and to come back for a second dose of radium in two and a half weeks.
    Meanwhile, each morning after putting Henrietta’s cells in culture, Mary started her days with the usual sterilization drill. She peered into the tubes, laughing to herself and thinking,
Nothing’s happening. Big surprise
. Then, two days after Henrietta went home from the hospital, Mary saw what looked like little rings of fried egg white around the clots at the bottoms of each tube. The cells were growing, but Mary didn’t think much of it—other cells had survived for a while in the lab.
    But Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intensity. By the next morning they’d doubled. Mary divided the contents of each tube into two, giving them room to grow, and within twenty-four hours, they’d doubled again. Soon she was dividing them into four tubes, then six. Henrietta’s cells grew to fill as much space as Mary gave them.
    Still, Gey wasn’t ready to celebrate. “The cells could die any minute,” he told Mary.
    But they didn’t. They kept growing like nothing anyone had seen,doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, accumulating by the millions. “Spreading like crabgrass!” Margaret said. They grew twenty times faster than Henrietta’s normal cells, which died only a few days after Mary put them in culture. As long as they had food