The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Samuel N. Beshers
A service and sermon led and preached by Sam Beshers
in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign,
October 10, 2010
Opening Words
We are here to abet creation and to witness to it,
to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature
so that creation need not play to an empty house.
-- Annie Dillard
Introduction
In the fall of 1951 a young African-American woman died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins. Before she died, doctors took and cultured cells from her tumor. In all previous attempts to grow human cells, the cultures had quickly died out. But not these. They grew rapidly and proved to be immortal. Today they are a mainstay of research into human biology, genetics and medicine and are used throughout the world. They are known as “HeLa” cells, from the first two letters of the young woman’s first and last names: Henrietta Lacks. This morning we are going to tell the story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells.
The readings for this service, extensive quotes in the sermon, and nearly all of the information used, come from a book called “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, by Rebecca Skloot, published earlier this year.
Meditation
From “Deborah’s Voice” in Prologue (words of Deborah Lacks, daughter of Henrietta)
When people ask – and seems like people always be askin to where I can’t never get away from it – I say, Yeah, that’s right, my mother name was Henrietta Lacks, she died in 1951, John Hopkins took her cells and them cells are still livin today, still multiplyin, still growin and spreadin if you don’t keep em frozen. Science calls her HeLa and she’s all over the world in medical facilities, in all the computers and the Internet everywhere….
But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad about that to where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But I don’t got it in me now more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was.
First Reading: From Chapter 23 “It’s Alive”
“On a hazy day in 1973, in a brown brick row house five doors down from her own, Bobbette Lacks sat at her friend Gardenia’s dining room table. Gardenia’s brother-in-law was in town from Washington, DC, and they’d all just finished having lunch. As Gardenia clanked dishes in the kitchen, her brother-in-law asked Bobbette what she did for a living. When she told him she was a patient aide at Baltimore City Hospital, he said “Really? I work at the National Cancer Institute.”
They talked about medicine and Gardenia’s plants, which covered the windows and counters. “Those things would die in my house,” Bobbette said, and they laughed.
“Where you from anyway?” he asked.
“North Baltimore.”
“No kidding, me too. What’s your last name?”
“Well, it was Cooper, but my married name is Lacks.”
“Your last name is Lacks?”
“Yeah, why?”
“It’s funny, he said, “I’ve been working with these cells in my lab for years, and I just read this article that said they came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. I’ve never heard that name anywhere elese.”
Bobbette laughed. “My mother-in-law’s Henrietta Lacks but I know you’re not talking about her – she’s been dead almost twenty-five years.”
“Henrietta Lacks is your mother-in-law?” he asked, suddenly excited. “Did she die of cervical cancer?”
Bobbette stopped smiling and snapped, “How’d you know that?”
“Those cells in my lab have to be hers,” he said. “They’re from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks who died of cervical cancer at Hopkins in the fifties.
“What?!” Bobbette yelled, jumping up from her chair. “What you mean you got her cells in your lab?”
He held his hands up, like Whoa, wait a minute. “I ordered them from a supplier just like everybody else.”
“What do you mean, ‘everybody else’?!, Bobbette snapped. “What supplier? Who’s got cells from my mother-in-law?”
Second Reading: From Chapter 23, pp. 188-190
(Deborah Lacks has gone to give blood at Johns Hopkins at the request of the geneticist Victor McKusick, who is characterizing the cells genetically both for medical research and to develop tests to determine when cell cultures are contaminated by HeLa.)
When she asked McKusick to explain more about the cells, he gave her a book he’d edited called Medical Genetics, which would become one of the most important textbooks in the field. He said it would tell her everything she needed to know, then autographed the inside front cover. Beneath his signature he wrote a phone number and told her to use it for making appointments to give more blood.
McKusick flipped to the second page of the introduction. There, between graphs of “Disease Specific Infant Mortality” and a description of “the homozygous state of Garrodian inborn errors,” was the photograph of Henrietta with her hands on her hips. He pointed to the paragraph that mentioned her:
Parenthetically, medical geneticists making use of the study of cells in place of the whole patient have “cashed in” on a reservoir of morphologic, biochemical, and other information in cell biology derived in no small part from study of the famous cell line cultured from the patient pictured on this page, Henrietta Lacks.
The book was filled with complicated sentences explaining Henrietta’s cells by saying, “its atypical histology may correlate with the unusually malignant behavior of the carcinoma,” and something about the “correlate of the tumor’s singularity.”
Reading magazines took Deborah a long time because she had to stop often to look words up in her dictionary. Now she sat in the clinic gripping McKusick’s book, not even trying to read the words. All she could think was that she’d never seen that photograph of her mother before. What happened to her to make her end up in there: she wondered. And how did he get that picture? Day swore he’d never given it to McKusick or any of Henrietta’s doctors; Deborah’s brothers swore they hadn’t either. The only thing Day could figure was that maybe Howard Jones had asked Henrietta for a picture, then stuck it in her medical record. But as far as Day knew, no one had ever asked permission to publish it.
When I talked to [McKusick’s former postdoctoral researcher] Susan Hsu, now a director of medical genetics at the American Red Cross, she told me that working with McKusick on HeLa cells was a highlight of her career. “I’m very proud,” she told me. “I probably will Xerox these paper and tell my kids this is important.” But when I explained to her that the Lackses thought she was testing them for cancer, and that they were upset about scientists using the cells without their knowledge, she was shocked.
“I feel very bad,” she said. “People should have told them. You know, we never thought at that time they did not understand.”
She also told me she had a message she hoped I’d give to the Lacks family when I talked to them next: “Just tell them I’m really grateful,” she said. “They should be very proud of the mother or the wife – I think that if they are angry probably they didn’t realize how famous the cells are now in the world. It’s unfortunate thing what happened, they still should be very proud, their mother will never die as long as the medical science is around, she will always be such a famous thing.”
Toward the end of our conversation, Hsu mentioned that she could learn much more from testing the family’s blood today, since DNA technology had advanced so much since the seventies. Then she asked if I’d tell the Lacks family one more thing for her: “If they are willing,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind to go back and get some more blood.”
Sermon: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. No one knows how she became Henrietta. Four years later her mother died and she was sent to Clover, Virginia, live with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks. His family still farmed the tobacco fields their ancestors had worked as slaves. Tommy Lacks was raising another grandchild, David Lacks. Henrietta and David grew up together as cousins, and their first child, Lawrence, was born a few months after she turned fourteen. A second child, Elsie, followed when Henrietta was eighteen. She and David (always called Day) married when she was twenty and he was twenty-five. The following year they moved to Turner Station, a village near Baltimore populated mainly by black steel workers, and Day went to work at the Bethlehem steel mill at Sparrows Point. By 1951 they had three other children, David Jr (Sonny), Deborah, and Joe, born in September 1950.
In January 1951, Henrietta Lacks complained of a “knot” inside her and went to see a gynecologist at the Johns Hopkins clinic for colored people. The gynecologist, Dr. Howard Jones, found a tumor on her cervix, like none he had seen before (and unlike any he saw for the rest of his career). After biopsy the tumor was diagnosed as a carcinoma, or cervical cancer. He prescribed the standard radiation treatment, in which glass tubes containing radium were placed inside and immediately outside of Henrietta’s cervix for two days at a time. After two treatments the cervical tumor had disappeared and the doctors thought she was cured, even though Henrietta continued to complain of internal pain. She was given regular X-ray treatments to ensure that no cancer remained. In June she returned to Hopkins, saying she thought the cancer was spreading, but the doctors found nothing wrong with her. Finally in August her pain and weakness were so great that when she went to Hopkins for treatment she asked to stay. Two months later, on October 4, she died. An autopsy showed that the cancer had spread through her entire body and affected nearly all of her organs.
On her deathbed Henrietta told her sister, Gladys, to tell Day to make sure the children were all right and that nothing happened to them.
During Henrietta’s first radiation treatment, Dr. Jones took a sample of her tumor cells and gave them to his Hopkins colleague Dr. George Gey. Jones and his boss, the surgeon Richard TeLinde, were trying to better understand cervical cancers, both to promote aggressive treatment when it was necessary and to prevent many hysterectomies that they believed were unnecessary. Culturing cancer cells would allow more reliable diagnoses and help them make their case. Gey himself had been trying for three decades to culture human cells to find the causes and cure for cancer. All previous attempts had failed. Gey gave Henrietta’s normal and cancer cells to his assistant Mary Kubicek, who set up the culture tubes and labeled them “HeLa” for “Henrietta” and “Lacks”. After four days she noticed that the cancer cells were growing rapidly, while the normal cells grew slowly and then died. By the following morning the cells had doubled, and the continued to survive and to double every twenty-four hours. The HeLa cell line was born. No one had asked Henrietta for permission to take her cells, and neither she nor anyone in her family was told about HeLa. It wasn’t until over twenty years later that any of them would find out.
In April 1951, George Gey appeared on television to describe his work. He showed a bottle, probably containing HeLa cells, and “explained that his lab was using those cells to find ways to stop cancer. He said, ‘It is quite possible that from fundamental studies such as these that we will be able to learn a way by which cancer cells can be damaged or completely wiped out.’” To promote such studies of cancer causes and cures, Gey began giving away and sending HeLa cells to anyone who might be interested. Among other places, they went to New York, Texas, Amsterdam, Chile, and India. Those researchers gave the cells to others, so that they rapidly spread to labs around the world.
Cell culture at the time had a bad name, in part because of the many failures and in part from bad publicity. One scientist gained media attention when he claimed to have successfully cultured chicken heart cells. Each year a birthday party was held as the cells lived ten, then fifteen, then twenty years and more. But the scientific and medical benefits of the cells never materialized, and ultimately there were suspicions that the cultures were repeatedly contaminated and the original cells long since dead. Meanwhile, “a 1930s radio horror show …told the story of a [scientist] who had created an immortal chicken heart in his lab. It grew out of control, filling the city streets, …consuming everyone and everything in its path.” The show gave nightmares to the young Bill Cosby, who when he grew up wrote a comedy sketch about it.
One of the first major uses of HeLa cells was for the new polio vaccine. In 1952, Jonas Salk announced that he had developed a polio vaccine using monkeys. He wanted to do a test on two million children, but before he could do that the vaccine would have to be tested on human cells. George Gey realized that he had the perfect cells, quickly confirmed that HeLa was susceptible to the polio virus, and provided cells for a HeLa Distribution Center established at the Tuskegee Institute. The Center initially supplied the cells to polio testing labs, where the Salk vaccine was found to be effective and was approved for human vaccinations. But they soon found they had plenty of cells and began shipping them to any scientists who wanted to work with them.
The importance of HeLa cells for biological research cannot be overstated. They have been used to make fundamental discoveries about genetics, disease, viral and bacterial infections and molecular biology. They are still a staple of biomedical research and are used in labs all over the world. As Rebecca Skloot writes,
The reason Henrietta’s cells were so precious was because they allowed scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. They cut HeLa cells apart and exposed them to endless toxins, radiation, and infections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa cells into immune-compromised rats, which developed malignant tumors much like Henrietta’s. If the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter – scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again.
HeLa cells also did most things that normal cells do, and because they grew much faster than any normal cells, they also produced faster results. Technological advances have only increased their usefulness. There are more than 17,000 patents based on work with HeLa cells.
The HeLa cells have been a boon to science and medicine. For the Lacks family they have been a source of anger, fear, suspicion and confusion. The story of the family and the cells raises some fundamental issues about ethics and the ownership of one’s own body. And for two of the children in particular, it highlights their inner searching and longing for the mother they were too young to ever know.
Life was not easy following Henrietta’s death. Sonny, Deborah, and Baby Joe all caught tuberculosis from a cousin; Joe spent most of his second year in the hospital and was taken in by a succession of cousins. Day worked two jobs to support his family, leaving Lawrence, the oldest to drop out of school and look after his siblings. When Lawrence faked an ID so he could get into pool halls, he was drafted into the army. A couple named Galen and Ethel then moved into the house to look after the children. According to cousins, Ethel may have been more interested in looking after Day than the children; in any case she became the classical evil stepmother, giving the children extreme amounts of work, little food, and physical abuse including beatings. Galen sexually harassed and abused Deborah. Joe grew up angry at everyone and everything. No one told them until they were much older what happened to their mother; all they knew was that she was gone.
Lawrence returned from the army, got married and went into business for himself. Sonny graduated from high school and joined the air force. In her junior year of high school, Deborah got pregnant. It was Lawrence’s wife, Bobbette, who encouraged Deborah, made it possible for her to stay in school, and pushed her to get her first job. Joe successively failed at school, the army, and a succession of jobs because of his rage and inability to deal with authority. In his twenties he went to prison and while there studied Islam, and changed his name to Zakariyya.
In 1973, when Bobbette heard that Henrietta’s cells were alive and being used for research,
It was like a nightmare. She’d read in the paper about the syphilis study at Tuskegee, which had just been stopped by the government after forty years, and now here was Gardenia’s brother-in-law, saying Hopkins had part of Henrietta alive and scientists everywhere were doing research on her and the family had no idea. It was like all those terrifying stories she’d heard about Hopkins her whole life were true, and happening to her. If they’re doing research on Henrietta, she thought, it’s only a matter of time before they come for Henrietta’s children, and maybe her grandchildren.
Gardenia’s brother-in-law told Bobbette that Henrietta’s cells had been all over the news lately because they’d been causing problems by contaminating other cultures. But Bobbette just kept shaking her head and saying, “How come nobody told her family part of her was still alive?”
“I wish I knew,” he said. Like most researchers, he’d never thought about whether the woman behind HeLa cells had given them voluntarily.
Bobbette excused herself and ran home, bursting through the screen door into the kitchen, yelling for Lawrence, “Part of your mother, it’s alive!”
Lawrence called his father to tell him what Bobbette had heard, and Day didn’t know what to think. Henrietta’s alive? he thought. It didn’t make any sense. He’d seen her body at the funeral in Clover himself. Did they go dig it up? Or maybe they did something to her during that autopsy?
Lawrence called the main switchboard at Hopkins, saying, “I’m calling about my mother, Henrietta Lacks – you got some of her alive in there.” When the operator couldn’t find a record of a patient named Henrietta Lacks in the hospital, Lawrence hung up and didn’t know who else to call.
Gradually the family learned that HeLa cells were used worldwide in research, that they had made many important contributions to science and human health, and that they were the basis of a multimillion dollar industry. They had two main responses. The first was to wonder why they themselves had never profited from the cells, and how they could do so. In this they would never be successful, as they gradually came to accept. They had no knowledge of the law and no money to pay for lawyers to plead their case. And starting over twenty years after the fact, it was not clear what legal rights they had or who might have owed them money. The current state of law is that once a person’s cells or tissues are given up then they are no longer his or her property and may be used by the recipient in any way. However, this area of law has yet to be thoroughly tested. Ironically, one of the early judgments was based on the failure of either Henrietta Lacks or her family to assert ownership of HeLa – which of course they never had the chance to do. At the time this book was being written, most of the family still could not afford any health insurance.
The family’s second main response was to wonder and worry what had been done to their mother. Their wonder and worry were fueled by what they heard about HeLa from news reports and from researchers.
Not that the researchers were trying to scare them. They tried to provide information, but without realizing the vast gulf in knowledge and social attitudes separating them from the Lacks family.
All of the Lackses had grown up accepting that one agreed to whatever a white doctor said. At the same time, they were fearful and suspicious of doctors and hospitals, Hopkins in particular. Children were scared with stories of black people being snatched off the streets at night to become experimental subjects. “When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or Hopkins might get us.” Such fears were rooted in medical experiments on slaves, and in trafficking in bodies: “Black corpses were routinely exhumed from graves for research, and an underground shipping industry kept schools in the North supplied with black bodies from the South for anatomy courses.”
From 1951 to 1973 the family had no contact at all with the biomedical research community that had developed and was using HeLa cells. Coincidentally, right around the time of the family’s discovery in 1973, geneticists at Johns Hopkins became interested in locating the family to solve an important problem. Cell cultures worldwide, thought to be taken from many different people, were all turning out to be HeLa. If HeLa was in the lab, it could contaminate other cultures unless extra special care was taken, and once in a culture, HeLa grew faster than anything else and simply took over. The cells could only be identified by genetic testing, and for this the scientists needed blood samples from the Lacks family. Through records at Hopkins they found Day and his children, who agreed to give the samples. The Lackses did not have a clear idea of what the samples were for, but they knew Henrietta had had cancer and assumed that the blood was for some kind of cancer test.
Deborah had always been afraid that she would get the same cancer that killed her mother. Now with the request for blood samples, “…[she] couldn’t stop worrying. She was terrified that she might have cancer, and consumed with the idea that researchers had done – and were perhaps still doing – horrible things to her mother. She’d heard the stories about Hopkins snatching black people for research, and she’d read an article in Jet about the Tuskegee study that suggested doctors might have actually injected those men with syphilis in order to study them.”
As we have heard, at Hopkins she asked Victor McKusick, the famous geneticist leading the study of her family’s blood, for more information. Unfortunately, the information he gave her only added to her questions and fears. In most of their interactions with the media and with the research and medical communities, the Lackses found that information flowed easily out to scientists and the public, but very little flowed back.
In the year 2000, Rebecca Skloot began work on a book about Henrietta Lacks, her family, and her cells. She contacted the family, eventually won their trust, and helped them get much of the information and understanding they had long been seeking.
We will close with part of Skloot’s account of a visit by Skloot, Deborah Lacks, and Zakariyya Lacks to a research lab at Johns Hopkins, where they were given a tour and shown their mother’s cells in a microscope by a researcher named Christoph Lengauer.
…Minutes later, Christoph walked toward us through the lobby of his building, smiling, hand outstretched. He was in his mid-thirties, with perfectly worn denim jeans, a blue plaid shirt, and shaggy light brown hair. He shook my hand and Deborah’s, then reached for Zakariyya’s. But Zakariyya didn’t move.
“Okay!” Christoph said, looking at Deborah. “It must be pretty hard for you to come into a lab at Hopkins after what you’ve been through. I’m really glad to see you here.” He spoke with an Austrina acent, which made Deborah wiggle her eyebrows at me when he turned to press the elevator call button. “I thought we’d start in the freezer room so I can show you how we store your mother’s cells, then we can go look at thtem alive under a microscope.”
“That’s wonderful,” Deborah said, as though he’d just said something entirely ordinary. Inside the elevator, she pressed against Zakariyya, one hand leaning on her cane, the other gripping her tattered dictionary. When the doors opened, we followed Christoph single file through a long narrow hall, its walls and ceiling vibrating with a deep whirring sound that grew louder as we walked. “That’s the ventilation system,” Christoph yelled. It sucks all the chemicals and cells outside so we don’t have to breathe them in.”
He threw open the door to his lab with a sweeping ta-da motion and waved us in side. “This is where we keep all the cells,” he yelled over a deafening mechanical hum that made Deborah’s and Zakariyya’s hearing aids squeal. Zakariyya’s hand shot up and tore his from his ear. Deborah adjusted the volume on hers, then walked past Christoph into a room filled wall-to-wall with white freezers stacked one on top of the other, rumbling like a sea of washing machines in an industrial Laundromat. She shot me a wide-eyed, terrified look.
Christoph pulled the handle of a white floor-to ceiling freezer, and it opened with a hiss, releasing a cloud of stem into the room. Deborah screamed and jumped behind Zakariyya, who stood expressionless, hands in his pockets.
“Don’t worry, Christoph yelled, “it’s not dangerous, it’s just cold. They’re not minus twenty Celsius like your freezers at home, they’re minus eighty. That’s why when I open them smoke comes out.” He motioned for Deborah to come closer.
“It’s all full of her cells,” he said.
Deboraph loosened her grip on Zakariyya and inched forward until the icy breeze hit her face, and she stood staring at thousands of inch-talk plasic vials filled with red liquid.
“Oh God,” she gasped. “I can’t believe all that’s my mother.” Zakariyya just stared in silence.
Christoph reached into the freezer, took out a vial, and pointed to the letters H-e-L-a written on its side. “There are millions and millions of her cells in there,” he said. “Maybe billions. You can keep them here forever. Fifty years, a hundred years, even more – then you just thaw them out and they grow.”
. . .
Christoph reached into the freezer behind him, grabbed another vial of HeLa cells, and held it out to Deborah, his eyes soft. She stood stunned for a moment, staring into his outstretched hand, then grabbed the vial and began rubbing it fast between her palms, like she was warming herself in winter.
“She’s cold,” Deborah said, cupping her hands and blowing onto the vial. Christoph motioned for us to follow him ot the incubator where he warmed the cells, but Deborah didn’t move. As Zakariyya and Christoph walked away, she raised the vial and touched it to her lips.
“You’re famous,” she whispered. “Just nobody knows it.”
. . .
Christoph leaned over the microscope again and began moving the cells quickly around the screen until he shrieked “Look, there! See that cell?” He pointed to the center of the monitor. “See how it has a big nucleus that looks like it’s almost pinched in half in the middle? That cell is dividing into two cells right before our eyes! And both of those cells will have your mother’s DNA in them.”
“Lord have mercy,” Deborah whispered, covering her mouth with her hand.
Christoph kept talking about cell division, but Deborah wasn’t listening. She stood mesmerized, watching one of her mother’s cells divide in two, just as they’d done when Henrietta was an embryo in her mother’s womb.
Deborah and Zakariyya stared at the screen like they’d gone into a trance, mouths open, cheeks sagging. It was the closest they’d come to seeing their mother alive since they were babies.
After a long silence, Zakariyya spoke.
“If those our mother’s cells,” he said, “how come they ain’t black even though she was black?”
“Under the microscope, cells don’t have a color,” Christorph told him. “They all look the same – they’re just clear until we put color on them with a dye. You can’t tell what color a person is from their cells.” He motioned for Zakariyya to come closer. “Would you like to look at them through the microscope? They look better there.”
Christoph taught Deborah and Zakariyya how to use the microscope, saying “Look through like this…take your glasses off…now turn this knob to focus.” Finally the cells popped into view for Deborah. And through that microscope, for that moment, all she could see was an ocean of her mother’s cells, stained an ethereal fluorescent green.
“They’re beautiful,” she whispered, then went back to staring at the slide in silence. Eventually, without looking away from the cells, she said, “God, I never thought I’d see my mother under a microscope – I never dreamed this day would ever come.”
“Yeah, Hopkins pretty much screwed up, I think,” Christoph said.
Deborah bolted upright and looked at him, stunned to hear a scientist – one at Hopkins, no less—saying such a thing. Then she looked back into the microscope and said, “John Hopkin is a school for learning, and that’s important. But this is my mother. Nobody seem to get that.”
“It’s true,” Christoph said. “Whenever we read books about science, it’s always HeLa this and HeLa that. Some people know those are the initials of a person, but they don’t know who that person is. That’s important history.”
Deborah looked like she wanted to hug him. “This is amazing,” she said, shaking her head and looking at him like he was a mirage.
Suddenly, Zakariyya started yelling something about George Gey. Deborah thumped her cane on his toe and he stopped in midsentence.
“Zakariyya has a lot of anger with all this that’s been goin on ,” she told Christoph. “I been trying to keep him calm. Sometime he explode, but he’s trying.”
I don’t blame you for being angry,” Christoph said. Then he showed them the catalog he used to order HeLa cells. There was a long list of the different HeLa clones anyone could buy for $167 a vial.
“You should get that,” Christoph said to Deborah and Zakariyya.
“Yeah, right,” Deborah said. “What I’m gonna do with a vial of my mother cells?” She laughed.
“No, I mean you should get the money. At least some of it.”
“Oh,” she said, stunned. “That’s okay. You know, when people hear about who HeLa was, first thing they say is, ‘Y’all should be millionaires!’ ”
Christoph nodded. “Her cells are how it all started,” he said. “Once there is a cure for cancer, it’s definitely largely because of your mother’s cells.”
“Amen,” Deborah said. Then, without a hint of anger, she told him, “People always gonna be makin money from them cells, nothing we can do about that. But we not gonna get any of it.”
Christoph said he thought that was wrong. Why not treat valuable cells like oil, he said. When you find oil on somebody’s property, it doesn’t automatically belong to them, but they do get a portion of the profits. “No one knows how to deal with this when it comes to cells today,” he said. “When your mother got sick, doctors just did what they wanted and patients din’t ask. But nowadays patients want to know what’s going on.”
“Amen,” Deborah said again.
Christoph gave them his cell phone number and said they could call any time they had questions about their mother’s cells. As we walked toward the elevator, Zakariyya reached up and touched Christoph on the back and said thank you. Outside, he did the same to me, then turned to catch the bus home.
Deborah and I stood in silence, watching him walk away. Then she put her arm around me and said, “Girl, you just witnessed a miracle.”
Benediction
May peace dwell within our hearts, and understanding in our minds. May courage steel our wills. And may the flame of truth, justice, compassion and community burn brightly within our hearts until we’re together again.
Amen.
