The Turner Station Address

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.