# The Turner Station Address *A Biography of Henrietta Lacks* — Legendary Biographies No. 054 - **Subject:** Henrietta Pleasant Lacks - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Social Issues - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 202 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 202 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-069-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-213-7) - **Content notes:** medical exploitation; cancer death Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/054-the-turner-station-address.html ## About this book She was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, the ninth of ten children to a tobacco-farming family. She married her first cousin David "Day" Lacks at twenty and moved with him to the Sparrows Point steel mill outside Baltimore. On February 1, 1951, at Johns Hopkins Hospital — the only institution in the segregated city that would treat Black patients — Dr. Howard Jones diagnosed her with cervical cancer. During her radium treatment, a sample of her cancer cells was taken without her knowledge and given to George Gey's tissue-culture laboratory. The cells became the first immortal human cell line. They are called HeLa. They have been used in the development of the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilisation, gene mapping, COVID-19 vaccine research, and every cancer drug developed in the last seventy years. Henrietta Lacks died on October 4, 1951, at thirty-one. She is buried in an unmarked grave in Clover, Virginia. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier and follows the arc the ethics of which the post-2010 American medical-research community has spent fifteen years trying to repair. The book traces the family through the Hopkins treatment and the death, the seventy years in which the cells were sold for profit while the descendants worked as tobacco-pickers and steel-mill workers, the 2010 Rebecca Skloot book that broke the silence, the 2013 NIH controlled-access agreement, the 2023 Thermo Fisher settlement, and the 2026 Novartis settlement. What emerges is a portrait of a thirty-one-year-old Black mother of five whose cells the American medical-research enterprise has been running on ever since, and of the family whose seventy-year fight has begun to compel the same enterprise to pay. ## Contents 1. The House on the Lacks Land 2. Turner Station 3. The Colored Ward 4. The Cells That Would Not Die 5. The Body That Was Burning 6. The Children Left Behind 7. HeLa Goes Global 8. The Family Finds Out 9. Jim Crow Medicine 10. The Woman They Called Helen Lane 11. Crownsville 12. The Contamination Crisis 13. The Genome Controversy 14. The Lacks Family Fights Back 15. The Consent Question 16. Skloot and the Book That Changed Everything 17. The Compensation Question 18. The Cells That Outlived Her 19. The Settlement ## Questions **Who is The Turner Station Address about?** Henrietta Pleasant Lacks. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Turner Station Address — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,529 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 202 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: medical exploitation; cancer death. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.