UPDATE: Famous Tumors

Summary

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Radiolab: "UPDATE: Famous Tumors"

Date: October 22, 2013
Hosts: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich
Special Guests: Rebecca Skloot, David Quammen, Mark Salzman, Dr. Oren Davinsky, Adrienne Noe

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Overview

This episode of Radiolab dives deep into the strange, astonishing, and sometimes unsettling stories of famous tumors. It features three main segments:

1. The story of President Ulysses S. Grant’s preserved throat tumor
2. The saga of devil facial tumor disease in Tasmanian devils and contagious cancers in animals
3. The remarkable legacy of Henrietta Lacks and her immortal HeLa cells—with an important update on her family’s recent involvement in genomic research ethics.

Through these stories, Radiolab explores the biology of cancer, ethical quandaries about ownership of human tissue, and the profound way tumors can affect individual lives and broader society.

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Segment 1: Grant’s Tumor (00:47–04:41)

Key Discussion Points:

• Introduction to Adrienne Noe, director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where Grant’s actual tumor is kept.
• Robert and Jad visit the museum and get a look at the historic specimen.
• The irony of President Grant—a lifelong, heavy cigar smoker—dying from throat cancer.

Notable Quotes:

• [01:57] Adrienne Noe: “Well, you may know who's buried in Grant's tomb, but I know what's buried in Grant's tumor.”
• [03:32] Adrienne Noe: “February of 1885, tissue was removed, examined, and his physicians concluded that he had a squamous cell carcinoma. And ultimately he was treated for pain and died in July of 1885, that same year.”

Memorable Moment:

• Grant’s tumor is kept in a box that looks just like a cigar box—the source of his cancer.
  [03:09] Robert Krulwich: “Oh, wow. It was resting in a box that looked, it happens, exactly like a cigar box.”

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Segment 2: Tumors That Leap—Devil Facial Tumor Disease (04:46–21:02)

Key Discussion Points:

• Science writer David Quammen tells the story of visiting Tasmania, following the journey of wildlife photographer Christo Bars, who first noticed unusual, lethal facial tumors in Tasmanian devils.
• Experts try to determine the cause: environmental toxins, viruses, or something stranger.
• Dr. Anne-Marie Pearse discovers that the tumors are genetically identical in different devils.
• Explanation from cancer biologist Carlo Maley: Cancer as an evolving ecosystem, not merely a single rogue cell gone awry.
• Tumors in Tasmanian devils are actually contagious cancer: they are physically passed from animal to animal via bites, with the devils’ low genetic diversity allowing the foreign tumor to evade immune detection.
• Discussion expands to other contagious animal tumors: canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) in dogs, possibly 2,000–5,000 years old—the oldest continuous animal cell line known.

Notable Quotes:

• [12:08] David Quammen: “They were all the same tumor.”
• [12:22] David Quammen: “This epidemic of cancer in Tasmanian devils was a crazy, impossible tumor that was jumping. It was leaping from one devil to another.”
• [17:16] David Quammen: “Tasmanian devils, God bless them, bite one another in the face a lot. ... They’re fighting and biting and swallowing and crunching.”

Memorable Moments:

• [19:01] Carlo Maley: “Evolution is all about dumb luck. ... That, he says, is what makes evolution happen.”
• [19:45] Robert Krulwich: “How long has that [canine tumor] been going on?”
  David Quammen: “Somewhere between 2,200 and 5,000 years.”
  Jad Abumrad: “Whoa. Over two millennia.”
• [20:25] David Quammen: "This tumor is essentially an animal, a parasite ... one individual parasite that may never die."

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Segment 3: When Tumors Create—Phenomena, Pleasure, and Spirituality (22:27–33:09)

Key Discussion Points:

• Introduction to rare cases where tumors cause beneficial or profound experiences, especially in the brain.
• Discussion of the movie "Phenomenon" (1996), where a brain tumor makes a man a genius.
• Dr. Oren Davinsky relates real neurological cases, such as a man whose brain tumor caused sexual pleasure from looking at safety pins—lost after surgical removal of the tumor.
• Mark Salzman’s novel “Lying Awake,” in which a nun’s temporal lobe tumor produces mystical experiences of God, raising questions about the nature of religious or transcendent experiences.
• Dr. Davinsky weighs medical and ethical considerations if a person's sense of self or spiritual experience comes from a brain abnormality.

Notable Quotes:

• [24:01] Dr. Oren Davinsky: “A gentleman was described who ... would look at safety pins and have an orgasm. ... The more shiny and the more numerous the safety pin, the stronger the sexual experience.”
• [27:04] Mark Salzman (reading): “She looked down to the floor ... the silence in the room came alive like the words left out of a poem. ... God is here, she answered. You were here all along.”
• [30:55] Dr. Oren Davinsky: “Could it truly be that this is God’s avenue to speak to us? ... It may be that ... some states of neurologic dysfunction allow you to harmonize, or tune in, or receive those messages, so to speak.”
• [32:33] Robert Krulwich quoting Dostoevsky: “For several moments, I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life... for a few seconds of such bliss, I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life, perhaps.”

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Segment 4: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the Legacy of HeLa Cells (35:10–58:56)

Key Discussion Points:

• Rebecca Skloot introduces the story of Henrietta Lacks—a Black woman whose cervical cancer tumor led to the first immortal line of human cells, now known as HeLa.
• Dr. Howard Jones recalls the unusual appearance and texture of Henrietta’s tumor.
• Lab assistant Mary Kubicek describes the unending, explosive growth of these cells—a singular scientific breakthrough.
• HeLa cells fuel numerous advances: polio vaccine development, research into viruses, chemotherapy, even space biology.
• Familial and ethical fallout: HeLa cells were mass-distributed and commercialized without the family’s knowledge or Henrietta’s consent.
• Emotional interviews with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who struggled with the knowledge that her mother’s cells—genetically her mother—were everywhere, enduring experiments and even space flights.
• The “identity crisis” and trauma for the family due to misinformation and lack of communication from the scientific community.

Notable Quotes:

• [37:03] Dr. Howard Jones: “When you touched it, you might think it was red jello.”
• [39:52] Rebecca Skloot: “They grew a lot. ... They doubled in size every 24 hours.”
• [47:10] Rebecca Skloot: “HeLa cells can ... float on dust particles. ... They take over.”
• [50:41] Rebecca Skloot: “At one point, 25 years after their mother died, someone called and said, hey, part of her is still alive, and we’ve grown enough of her so that it could wrap around the earth several times.”
• [58:56] Rebecca Skloot, recounting Deborah with her mother’s cells: “She just raised them up to her lips and she said, you’re famous, but nobody knows it.”

Memorable Moments:

• The revelation that Deborah was terrified of running into "clones" of her mother’s cells—confusing biological immortality with literal resurrection.
• A healing encounter between Deborah and her cousin, Gary, with a powerful prayer when Deborah was overwhelmed.
• Deborah’s first meeting with HeLa cells in a lab: gazing at their glowing, swirling presence on a screen.
• The news that Deborah died of a heart attack only a week before Rebecca’s studio visit—which added emotional weight to the episode’s conclusion.

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Segment 5: The Update—HeLa Genome, Ethics, and Family Involvement (59:04–66:47)

Key Discussion Points:

• Since the release of Rebecca Skloot’s book, Henrietta’s story has exploded in public consciousness: scholarships, monuments, and a high school named for her.
• In March 2013, a German group published the complete genome of HeLa cells online, without consulting the Lacks family.
• This release raised new privacy concerns: although it’s “just” tumor DNA, Henrietta’s genetic heritage is reflected in her descendants.
• The Lacks family’s distress and intervention led to a historic meeting with the NIH (National Institutes of Health).
  • A committee (including Lacks family representatives) now oversees access to the HeLa genome data, balancing scientific progress with respect and protection for the Lacks family’s privacy and legacy.
• The family, now including grandchildren and great-grandchildren, steps into an active leadership/public role.

Notable Quotes:

• [61:06] Rebecca Skloot: “You can, in fact, learn about people, and in fact, you cannot even hide people's private information if you try.”
• [62:39] Adrienne Noe (Jerry Lacks): “Back in the 50s, ... Her cells were removed without her family's knowledge. ... Then you come 2013 and you have Henrietta's—I felt as though it was her medical records being published publicly.”
• [64:32] Adrienne Noe (Jerry Lacks): “We don’t want to stop science, but yet we don’t want certain information to be just broadly available publicly.”
• [65:54] Rebecca Skloot: “It’s the grandchildren, the third and fourth generation of Lackses. This is their story now.”

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Episode Highlights and Themes

• Cancer as Evolution: Tumors are not static; they are dynamic, evolving communities of cells, often acting as independent "organisms" over time—sometimes literally contagious and effectively immortal.
• Science and Ethics: The story of Henrietta Lacks raises enduring questions about bodily autonomy, consent, and who benefits from scientific discovery—issues as urgent now as ever, especially with genetic data.
• Human Stories within Science: Whether it's the pain and legacy of Henrietta Lacks or the existential questions raised by brain tumors, the podcast maintains a deep sensitivity to the lived experiences behind biological phenomena.
• Memorable Imagery: The cigar box for Grant’s tumor, floating HeLa cells as “swirling hurricanes,” and the image of a daughter warming a vial of her mother’s cells—all evoke the deep entanglement of biology and humanity.

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Timestamps by Segment

• 00:47 – Grant’s Tumor
• 04:46 – Devil Facial Tumor Disease
• 22:27 – Tumors as Gifts (Pleasure, Genius, or Spirituality)
• 35:10 – HeLa Story Begins
• 59:04 – HeLa Update: The Family and the Genome

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Final Words

This episode is a quintessential Radiolab blend: science as detective story, medical history as human drama, and ethical complexity at the heart of innovation.
Henrietta’s story in particular continues to evolve: as her family moves from being voiceless to becoming stakeholders, the world is given a new blueprint for engaging with the people behind the data that drives medical progress.

Recommended Reading:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Find out more:
radiolab.org

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Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Adrienne Noe]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from WNY.

[Adrienne Noe]

And npr.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hey.

[Adrienne Noe]

Hi.

[Robert Krulwich]

How are you?

[Adrienne Noe]

I'm fine. How are you?

[Robert Krulwich]

Robert, Nice to speak to you after all these years.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yes, it's been quite a few years.

[Robert Krulwich]

I should let you know that Jad Albumnot has just wandered in.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello.

[Adrienne Noe]

Hi.

[Robert Krulwich]

And Jad, this is Adrienne Noe, last.

[Adrienne Noe]

Name is N O E, and I'm director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you know why we're calling you, right?

[Adrienne Noe]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, so let's just spring it on the audience. I don't remember how I happened to bump into you. I don't even know how this came up.

[Adrienne Noe]

I think you and I had been co presenters at a TED conference. Maybe that's what it was probably a decade ago. We may have been talking about important events in New York or civic architecture, but I do remember perking up at the phrase Grant's Tomb.

[Jad Abumrad]

Grant's tomb. So Robert said something to you about Grant's tomb?

[Adrienne Noe]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then you turn to me and say it again.

[Adrienne Noe]

Well, you may know who's buried in Grant's tomb, but I know what's buried in Grant's tumor.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tumor. Grant's tumor.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

You see, it turns out that at the museum she works at, there is.

[Adrienne Noe]

A tumor that had been excised from the throat of President grant in the 1880s.

[Jad Abumrad]

Actual tissue from Grant's tumor.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yes, that's right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes. Here we are.

[Robert Krulwich]

We're outside the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

[Jad Abumrad]

Eh, Goi filmy.

[Adrienne Noe]

It is kept behind several locked doors.

[Mark Salzman]

So you guys don't have an inkling.

[Adrienne Noe]

Of what you're about to see if.

[Jad Abumrad]

We go in there?

[Adrienne Noe]

No, but it's a privileged area.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Brian Spatola. He's the collections manager. And he led us down a long.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hallway, through some doors into a back room.

[Jad Abumrad]

Holy moly. Oh, my God. There's like they're twin babies in formaldehyde.

[Adrienne Noe]

Look.

[Robert Krulwich]

Brains, heads, torsos, and majority. We haven't even gotten to the tumors.

[Jad Abumrad]

So he led us out of that room and into another one, and they.

[Robert Krulwich]

Are sitting on a table and waiting for us.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is this the thing about which we spoke? It is. Was President Ulysses Simpson Grant's tumor.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, wow. It was resting in a box that looked, it happens, exactly like a cigar box.

[Adrienne Noe]

Uh oh.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which is a little ironic.

[Robert Krulwich]

This was a guy who never, ever stopped having a cigar in his mouth.

[Adrienne Noe]

He never stopped having cigars.

[Rebecca Skloot]

He smoked as many as 12 cigars a day.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it was probably the cigars that made the tumor.

[Adrienne Noe]

February of 1885, tissue was removed, examined, and his physicians concluded that he had a squamous cell carcinoma. And ultimately he was treated for pain and died in July of 1885, that same year.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. That's pretty fast.

[Robert Krulwich]

So that's what killed President Grant, then?

[Adrienne Noe]

It was a tumor? Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

I didn't know that.

[Adrienne Noe]

So you see the staining that they used to bring out the details in.

[Robert Krulwich]

The cells is the darkness the tumor?

[Jad Abumrad]

The darkness is the tumor. Wow.

[Robert Krulwich]

The very stuff that even though President Grant got through Vicksburg and even though he came east and they tried to kill him here, they tried to kill him there, they tried to kill him, then he goes and becomes president. This is what actually killed him.

[Adrienne Noe]

This is what killed him.

[Robert Krulwich]

Can I touch it?

[Jad Abumrad]

No.

[Robert Krulwich]

We may not be able to touch the actual tumor of the President of the United States, but we can touch on this subject. We can grasp this subject, we can examine this subject. Coming up on Radiolab for the next hour. It's totally tumors.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, come on, don't call it that. Cause really what we're gonna talk about are not just any tumors, but famous.

[Robert Krulwich]

Tumors, immortal tumors, devil tumors, contagious tumors.

[Jad Abumrad]

And tumors that speak in the voice of God.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich. I'm not to be confused with the big ones.

[Jad Abumrad]

And I'm Jad Abumrad, and this is Radiolab. Stay with us. All right. To get things. To get things rolling. This first story is about something that we thought was not possible, that we hoped was not possible.

[Robert Krulwich]

We learned it from.

[David Quammen]

I'll make it work from this guy, David Quammen. I'm a science journalist.

[Robert Krulwich]

He is, I think, my favorite in my generation. I think he is the best writer that writes about science.

[David Quammen]

I specialize in evolutionary biology and travel on assignment to faraway places and interesting situations.

[Robert Krulwich]

So first of all, where are you going to take us to? What part of the world?

[David Quammen]

I'm going to take you to Tasmania, which is the island state off the south coast of Australia. You know, you go to Australia and you think of rock and deserts and red dirt and heat, but you keep going south, all the way off the south coast. Suddenly you have these rolling green countrysides, lots of wallabies, One of the species of kangaroo that are abundant like England.

[Robert Krulwich]

Countryside with wallabies. Is that the.

[David Quammen]

Exactly. With small kangaroos hopping around.

[Robert Krulwich]

But our story does not actually begin in Tasmania.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nope. It starts in Holland with a gentleman.

[Robert Krulwich]

By the name of Christo Barsch.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is that bar as in B A, A R bars with an S?

[David Quammen]

Christo Bars is a wonderfully independent, spirited plumber.

[Jad Abumrad]

A plumber?

[Adrienne Noe]

Yes, Plumbing. I do to make a living and photographing is for me a big hobby.

[Robert Krulwich]

We don't know just how great a plumber he is, but he's a very good wildlife photographer and he looks for interesting animals to shoot with the camera, I mean. So over the years, very often he puts down his wrench and he travels.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah, well, we don't have that many animals here in Holland. A little bit of roe deer and sometimes a fox.

[Robert Krulwich]

And in the early 90s, he goes.

[David Quammen]

To take his latest photography sabbatical in Tasmania.

[Adrienne Noe]

I went to Tasmania on boat.

[Jad Abumrad]

Were you there to take pictures of wallabies or kangaroos?

[Adrienne Noe]

No, no, no, no.

[David Quammen]

He was there this time to photograph devils. Tasmanian devils, Yeah.

[Adrienne Noe]

I quite like the animals.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does. I mean, I know the cartoon, but what does a real Tasmanian devil actually look like?

[Adrienne Noe]

Well, they're about as big as a little pit bull, but look a little.

[David Quammen]

Bit more like white yoke on its chest. Big set of formidable teeth. They'll eat almost anything.

[Adrienne Noe]

Anything? Anything they can find.

[David Quammen]

Platypus, kelp, maggots and fish, snakes, garbage cans, the occasional rubber boot, you name it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Anyway, when Christo gets to Tasmania, he drives up the coast. He finds dead animals on the road. You know, roadkill or roadkill from the road to use as bait.

[Jad Abumrad]

What sort of roadkill?

[Adrienne Noe]

Kangaroos.

[Jad Abumrad]

A little devil can eat a kangaroo?

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh, yeah. When there are three, four, five together, they eat a big kangaroo. In an hour, it's gone.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Robert Krulwich]

So he takes the dead kangaroo, drags it to a clearing in the forest, sets up his photography equipment very close, and then what happens?

[Adrienne Noe]

Well, you just wait.

[Robert Krulwich]

So he waits, and as the night Falls. Little black shapes begin to creep out of the woods.

[Adrienne Noe]

You can hear them sniffing. And they'll find the roadkill. And then they just start eating and fighting with each other. It's quite scary if you don't know what you're eating.

[Robert Krulwich]

As they eat, Krisno, standing at a safe distance in the shadows, takes their pictures. Over the years, he's done this over and over and over. And he always sees lots of devils.

[David Quammen]

Devils in front of his lenses, sometimes 20 devils running around, devils in his kitchen.

[Adrienne Noe]

They'll come into your tent.

[David Quammen]

Devils everywhere.

[Robert Krulwich]

But after a bunch of trips, something happened. It was Easter 1996. He was in the park watching a dead kangaroo and waiting for the devils to show.

[Adrienne Noe]

But only thing I saw was one devil.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just one?

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah. So I thought, I'll try another spot at another spot. Tried it there. Two devils.

[David Quammen]

They're not gone entirely, but they're scarce. And he notices something strange about one or two of the devils. There was something on the faces.

[Adrienne Noe]

Face and on their back and on their mouth.

[David Quammen]

And something that looked like a growth, a large, ugly growth.

[Adrienne Noe]

Thought, oh, well, maybe they've been bitten or fighting with each other. A bit swollen up, but it was really big, you know, and blood coming out.

[David Quammen]

And this was the first alarm bell.

[Jad Abumrad]

So, Christo, you were the first to see it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, and this was just the beginning.

[Adrienne Noe]

Like a plague out of hell, a dark death is sweeping Tasmania.

[Robert Krulwich]

Television reporters got the story and began reporting that more and more Tasmanian devils had these lumps on their faces.

[David Quammen]

They fill the eye sockets, they puff out the lips, they infect the gums. It's really sad and hideous.

[Robert Krulwich]

And whatever they were, they turned out to be lethal.

[David Quammen]

To jump ahead a little bit, the effect that had on the population, in.

[Robert Krulwich]

Some cases, devil populations collapsed by 90%, died off very quickly. Scientists looked at the disease and determined that it was some kind of tumor. Cancer?

[David Quammen]

A cancerous tumor.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then the question was, what's causing them?

[Jad Abumrad]

So what did they think?

[David Quammen]

Well, the toxic chemical was guess number.

[Robert Krulwich]

One, some poison or pesticide from the environment.

[David Quammen]

Guess number two was a virus.

[Robert Krulwich]

So they tested in places where the devils live, looking for something toxic or some virus, and they found nothing.

[David Quammen]

And then along comes a woman named Ann Marie Pierce. She looked at some tumors close up, very close up from 11 different devils.

[Robert Krulwich]

So she's looking at the first tumor.

[David Quammen]

And she found that the chromosomes were.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sort of mangled, which isn't really that strange because that's what cancer is. It's like your genetic stuff gone screwy.

[David Quammen]

Right.

[Robert Krulwich]

But then she looked at the tumor.

[David Quammen]

From the next devil, and she found not just also mangled chromosomes, but chromosomes that were mangled in exactly the same way as they had been in the first devils.

[Robert Krulwich]

So now she looks at a third identical and then a fourth identical, and then a fifth identical. All 11.

[David Quammen]

Exactly the same pattern in each.

[Jad Abumrad]

Does that. I. I feel the sensation of awe, but I don't quite have these understanding attached. Does that mean that these tumors are all brothers?

[David Quammen]

What that meant was that these tumors were all genetically identical.

[Jad Abumrad]

What?

[David Quammen]

They were all the same tumor.

[Jad Abumrad]

How can they all be the same tumor?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, they can't, because that would mean that these Tasmanian devils caught the cancer from some other Tasmanian devil.

[David Quammen]

Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, what do you mean exactly? You can't catch cancer.

[David Quammen]

This epidemic of cancer in Tasmanian devils was a crazy, impossible tumor that was jumping. It was leaping from one devil to another.

[Jad Abumrad]

A leaping tumor.

[David Quammen]

Yeah, a leaping tumor.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this is the point in this tale where we really have to question everything that we thought we knew about cancer. Now, most people think of cancer as.

[David Quammen]

Like a situation in which one of your cells starts replicating and doesn't stop. It replicates uncontrollably until it destroys you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so that's like the one cell theory, which is, frankly, how I thought cancer worked.

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh, Peter, we have to go ahead to start.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then we spoke with this fellow. Yep, his name's Carlo Mali, cancer biologist.

[Adrienne Noe]

At the Wistar Institute.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he told us, if you really want to understand what's happening with the devils, you got to toss out the one cell cell theory. Because cancer is not just.

[Adrienne Noe]

It's not just a cell going haywire.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, it's actually many cells competing, competing.

[Adrienne Noe]

For space, competing for resources, and in.

[Jad Abumrad]

The process, driving each other haywire. Like, if you were to somehow go into a tumor, he says, what you would find is between a billion and.

[Adrienne Noe]

A trillion cells in there.

[Jad Abumrad]

These are different cells, this huge clump of cells, and they're, they're all fighting it out because, you know, space is tight, food is scarce. And what'll happen is, in the middle of this melee, you know, as the cells are competing, each individual cell is trying to copy itself. Copy, copy, copy. And somewhere along the way, you get eventually a copying error. And every so often, says Carla, one of these mistakes will give the new cell a new talent. In the case of cancer, it usually starts with something pretty simple, like the ability to slurp up food faster, nutrients.

[Adrienne Noe]

Like oxygen and glucose.

[Jad Abumrad]

And now with this advantage, that mutant.

[Adrienne Noe]

And all of its progeny will take over that area of the tissue.

[Jad Abumrad]

But not for long, because now you got all these mutants, and they start to flex until random. Finally, again, you get another copying mistake. And maybe this second copying mistake gives the cell the ability to divide faster. Right? So there it is, proliferating faster than its neighbors, and it takes over, growing and displacing the other cells. But, yeah, it just keeps getting worse, because now you've got these double mutants. They can eat fast, they can divide quickly, and they start to fight until you get a third mutation, then a.

[Adrienne Noe]

Force, and you just keep ratcheting it up. And eventually, roughly five to 20 mutations.

[Jad Abumrad]

You end up with a cell that is so gnarled, so mutated, and so powerful that it can literally spit a kind of acid.

[Mark Salzman]

Called a matrix metalloprotease.

[Adrienne Noe]

That allows it to rip through the membrane barriers.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this is when you're really in trouble, because now the cell can roam.

[Adrienne Noe]

And so the cells leave the primary tumor. They've got to dissolve their way into a blood vessel.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's a mutation.

[Adrienne Noe]

Then they've got to survive in the blood.

[Jad Abumrad]

Another mutation, Then they've got to stick somewhere else. Yet another.

[Adrienne Noe]

Then they've got to dissolve back through the arteriola lining.

[Jad Abumrad]

And another. Yeah. So it sounds like cancer is always evolving to be more cancerous. It totally is.

[Mark Salzman]

This also explains why we haven't been.

[Jad Abumrad]

Able to cure it. Why when a person takes chemotherapy drugs, the cancer will go away for a while, but then it'll come back stronger because the cells have evolved a resistance to those drugs.

[Adrienne Noe]

When I first got into work on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Cancer, I was impressed at how malevolent.

[Adrienne Noe]

The disease seems, as if it's being designed to kill us.

[Jad Abumrad]

So here's my question. This leaping tumor in the devils.

[Adrienne Noe]

Mm.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is this a case where the tumor is actually evolving into a new form, like after, say, the 50th mutation or whatever? Like now, it doesn't just have the ability to travel in a body, but it can somehow leap out of a body, through the air and into another body.

[Adrienne Noe]

Sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, but, I mean, that's really scary.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yes, it is pretty scary.

[Jad Abumrad]

But this is amazingly rare and according to Carlo, demands some pretty special circumstances.

[Robert Krulwich]

How would, in a Tasmanian devil would some tumor get from one individual to another? How would that happen?

[David Quammen]

Tasmanian devils, God bless them, bite one another in the face a lot. They're scrambling over carcasses. They're fighting and biting and swallowing and crunching. And the males also bite females during the mating period. He's a little bit of a rough lover. So you have the male and the female biting each other in the face.

[Jad Abumrad]

So a devil with a tumor on its face, let's say it's mating with another devil and it bites that second devil in the face. What exactly happens at that point? Is it just rubbing its tumor against.

[David Quammen]

When you think of these big, ugly tumors, think of feta cheese. And when one devil bites another, there's a tendency for the tumor to crumble and to shed tumor cells that then fall into the wounds on the second devil.

[Robert Krulwich]

But there's something here I don't understand. Why wouldn't the immune system of the.

[David Quammen]

Devils kill those cells, prevent those cells from taking root?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, because that's what immune systems do.

[David Quammen]

And the latest answer is that, well, Tasmanian devils don't have as much genetic diversity as you would expect.

[Robert Krulwich]

What that means, David explained to us, is that the Tasmanian devil population has gotten so inbred, they're so alike at a genetic level that their immune systems are now confused. They don't know the difference between their own cells and invading cells coming in from other devils.

[David Quammen]

Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which doesn't actually sound like the tumor is all that powerful. So I asked Carlo, is this really the story of a tumor evolving, more adaptive, or is it just the story of a tumor getting lucky?

[Adrienne Noe]

I think those are the same story.

[Jad Abumrad]

How do you mean? I mean, evolution is all about dumb luck. The way he explained it, it's dumb luck that the tumor was on the outside of the face. It's dumb luck that they bite each other a lot, that a cell could come along that could shed and fall into a wound. It's all dumb luck. But that, he says, is what makes evolution happen. That's natural selection right there.

[Robert Krulwich]

And when you step back, sometimes the results are just.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nuts. Yeah, just nuts.

[David Quammen]

And this is the point where we need to talk about a transmissible tumor in dogs. Canine transmissible venereal tumor.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is a tumor, he says, that's evolved way beyond the one in the devils and way longer.

[Robert Krulwich]

How long has that been going on?

[David Quammen]

Well, it's been going on for somewhere between 220500 years.

[Jad Abumrad]

Whoa, whoa. Between 220500 years?

[David Quammen]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes, over two millennia.

[David Quammen]

Exactly. And if that's the case, then it's the oldest continuous animal cell line in existence on planet Earth.

[Jad Abumrad]

You might need to say that again.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because that is just too strange.

[David Quammen]

It is.

[Jad Abumrad]

It is even stranger, says David Quammen. When a tumor lives this long, propagates itself for this long, you can only really call it one thing.

[David Quammen]

This tumor is essentially an animal, a parasite, not a species of parasite, but one individual parasite that may never D.

[Robert Krulwich]

David Quammen is the author of Song of the Dodo and Natural Acts.

[David Quammen]

This is David Quammen calling from Tropical Bozeman. Radiolab is funded in part by the.

[Adrienne Noe]

Alfred P. Sloan foundation and the National Science Foundation.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by npr.

[Adrienne Noe]

End of message. This is Laura Docter from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Radiolab is supported by Squarespace, the all.

[Rebecca Skloot]

In one platform dedicated to providing a.

[Adrienne Noe]

Simple way to create a website, portfolio or online store for business or personal use. Squarespace provides templates and drag and drop tools to create professional websites. Users create sites that are mobile ready, including 24, 7 support domain names and e commerce, all on the same platform. For free trial, visit squarespace.com Radiolab hello, my name is Kate and I am calling from Seattle, Washington. Radiolab is supported by Audible.com, a provider of digital audiobooks and more, with more than 150,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature, including fiction, nonfiction and periodicals. Audible selection includes Physics of the How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the year 2100 by Michio Kaku. To learn more about Audible and get a free audiobook of your choice, go to audiblepodcast.com Radiolab.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich. The topic is totally tumor, of course.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's my line, by the way. Oh no, no. So yeah, we've been talking about tumors this hour. Famous tumors. And thus far they've been really bad.

[Robert Krulwich]

Terrible tumors.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really bad.

[Robert Krulwich]

Scary, horrible tumors. But because we are fair minded about everything, even tumors, let us consider the possibility that sometimes tumors can be rich, beautiful and desirable. For example, George Malley is an ordinary man who is about to become extraordinary.

[Jad Abumrad]

Name as many mammals as you can in 60 seconds. How about alphabetical?

[Adrienne Noe]

Aardvark, baboon, caribou, dolphin, Eohipdis. What is going on?

[Jad Abumrad]

George? In this 1996 movie, John Travolta plays a guy who gets a brain tumor and the tumor makes him into a genius.

[Adrienne Noe]

You learned the Portuguese language in 20 minutes. Not all of it.

[David Quammen]

Phenomenon.

[Robert Krulwich]

He didn't learn the accent though.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tumor doesn't give accents. But.

[Robert Krulwich]

But it does raise a real question, which is like, is it possible for a tumor to create something good? Yeah.

[Adrienne Noe]

Jed. Nice to meet you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nice to meet you. So we paid a visit to a guy, a doctor, named Oren Davinsky.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

I'm a neurologist at NYU Langone School of Medicine.

[Robert Krulwich]

And Dr. Davinski has had a lifelong interest in the beneficial effects of certain kinds of brain conditions.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

Right. I'll just tell you, I think one of the most fascinating cases in neurology.

[Jad Abumrad]

Very quickly, and this one we were not prepared for.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

A gentleman was described who, ever since he was a child, would look at safety pins and have an orgasm.

[Robert Krulwich]

At safety pins?

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

At safety pins. The more shiny and the more numerous the safety pin, the stronger the sexual experience.

[Robert Krulwich]

And this happened from his pubescent period. He just. Safety pins turned him on. Right.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

At the time he made this association, when he looked at a safety pin, he had an orgasm.

[Robert Krulwich]

He got to have been embarrassed by this. This is worse than being so.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

So he would go into private. He realized this is not something most people do. He never talked about it, and he did it in private. And then he got married. After the war, he was honorably discharged and got married and then started having less sex with his wife because the safety pin was. Safety pins were much more enjoyable. Sometimes he just had to think about a safety pin, not even hold it up.

[Robert Krulwich]

So are we seriously making the case that this guy is getting a benefit from his pin obsession?

[Jad Abumrad]

But I think actually you could say that the experiences that this guy was having with those safety pins gave him a kind of pleasure that maybe is unavailable to the rest of us from.

[Robert Krulwich]

An odd, odd source.

[Jad Abumrad]

But, you know, pleasure is pleasure until, says Davinsky, this fellow began to have seizures.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

He got admitted to a psychiatric hospital in London, the Maudsley, one of the big psychiatric units. They actually got an eeg. And to make a long story short, there was a benign tumor right in.

[Robert Krulwich]

The part that's called the temporal lobe, sort of in the middle of your head, right behind your eyes.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

But they took it out.

[Robert Krulwich]

They took it out.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

They took it out and they cured him of his wonderful experience. So he never was able to. He could look at safety pins all day long, but he would never again enjoy them the way he had for his whole life.

[Jad Abumrad]

How did he feel about that?

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

I think it was a mixed blessing, as you would imagine.

[Robert Krulwich]

And this idea that from a tumor you can get something not so good, but also something good. This is an idea that has. Well, there's been a novel written on this theme.

[Mark Salzman]

The title of the book is Lying.

[Robert Krulwich]

Awake by a friend of mine.

[Mark Salzman]

My name is Mark Salzman.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mark is a writer who lives out in California. And he thought, I'm going to imagine a nun.

[Mark Salzman]

Our main character is Sister John of the Cross.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is a woman who had joined a nunnery because she felt just lonely for a relationship with God.

[Mark Salzman]

Yes. It's just not enough for her to tell herself, yes, God is there. What she longs for is a tangible sense of God's presence, a sense that she can really feel, feel God's presence in her life. And she begins having what she thinks are migraine headaches. The regular doctor that the sisters see tells her that she seems to be having migraine headaches. They're coming more and more frequently. And there comes a point when one of these headaches changes dramatically. And then everything is different.

[Robert Krulwich]

Everything is different. What's different? What happens?

[Mark Salzman]

Shall I read?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Mark Salzman]

You kind of have to imagine this scene taking place in an environment of profound silence. She's in the cloister. She and one other sister, they're working on a sewing project. They're sewing an altar cloth. One of the pins slipped out of her hand, ringing like a miniature triangle as it bounced off the floor. She looked down to the floor and saw that it looked impossibly distant. When she reached down for the pin, her hand looked strangest of all, as if it belonged to someone else. The silence in the room came alive like the words left out of a poem. Something buried so deep inside her that she'd forgotten it was there, rose to the surface. Sister, are you not feeling well? God was present in Sister Anne's voice. He was present in her face. Nothing was changed, yet everything was changed. God is here, she answered. You were here all along.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, this is a field goal, isn't it, for someone who is seeking a spiritual connection? She has one.

[Mark Salzman]

That's right. This is the moment she's been waiting for all her life.

[Robert Krulwich]

But there is a problem, because when these feelings come.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm sorry, she has a tumor. Let's just get the non surprise out of the way.

[Robert Krulwich]

The show is called Totally Tumor. She has, like, a cough.

[Jad Abumrad]

First of all, it's famous tumors, okay?

[Mark Salzman]

Yes, she has a meningioma, a benign tumor, small, about the size of a raisin, in the temporal lobe area of.

[Robert Krulwich]

Her brain, right in the same spot where the safety pin fellow had his tumor.

[Mark Salzman]

So the problem for her is, should I have the tumor removed, give up the most satisfying and fulfilling experience of my whole life, or should I sacrifice my health in order to share with others the experiences that I'm having?

[Jad Abumrad]

So we thought, well, Oren Davinsky, the doctor we spoke with first, I think.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

Every case is unique and individual.

[Jad Abumrad]

He does see patients like this.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is what he does for a little.

[Jad Abumrad]

So we took the case to him.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, here's the question. If a person comes and says, I'm having what I want, and you are suspicious that what she also is having is a disease, what do you do about the patient?

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

If I knew for sure that the tumor, let's say, was benign and would never grow and the only thing that person experienced was this religious feeling that they found extremely enjoyable, I would say let's do nothing but do serial scans to make sure nothing grows and that you're safe.

[Robert Krulwich]

But in the book, as it happens, the nun got a little worse. She had a few more headaches, more severe, and they took the tumor out.

[Mark Salzman]

The seizure activity stops. These experiences stop coming. And she does feel afterwards a sense of.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of blah.

[Mark Salzman]

She feels as if she sort of tumbled out of a Himalayan mountain into a muddy village. This is common, apparently, in patients after they've been treated.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right. So my last question then is really about the. Seems to me the deepest question of all in this case is that if someone has a very important and meaningful experience and you have a sense it may be a abnormality, a physical abnormality that is triggering that, do you regard them as delusional? Like, there's just the possibility here that maybe these people are having an actual conversation.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

So, yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

There's no question or you not even consider that?

[Adrienne Noe]

No.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

I mean, so science. I think the question you ask and I think you're getting at is, could it truly be that this is God's avenue to speak to us? And people in the late 1800s thought it was through the right hemisphere, and that's often where these cases occur, in the right hemisphere. So it may be that. That's right. It's the more emotional hemisphere. And when things are in a perturbed state, you may be more receptive to experiencing spiritual things. And I think there probably is some physiologic basis that allows you to tune into a broader world, and maybe some states of neurologic dysfunction allow you to harmonize or tune in or receive those messages, so to speak.

[Robert Krulwich]

In which case then your tumor or your epilepsy would be the.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

The window or the conduit.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right. I do feel like I need to place an asterisk right here, like we are talking about a tumor in the end.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, but understand that every feeling, every thought you have comes from cells in your brain. If any of those cells can produce a glorious experience, then the experience stands on its own. And sometimes, in very well documented cases, these are extraordinarily profound, desirable things.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

They're often hard to put into words.

[Robert Krulwich]

Have you tried, I mean, when you.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

Yeah. I mean, people, you know, Dostoevsky's probably the most articulate person with epilepsy who's had a religious experience and who wrote down what he experienced. I don't have the quote in front of me, but it's, you know, this felicity, this, this feeling I get.

[Robert Krulwich]

For several moments, he was quoted to say, I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world. And this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss, I would give 10 or more years of my life, even my whole life, perhaps.

[Adrienne Noe]

This is Oren Davinski.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

Support for NPR comes from NPR stations and the Wallace Foundation, a source of ideas for expanding learning opportunities beyond the school day.

[Robert Krulwich]

At wallacefoundation.org the Ford Foundation, a resource.

[Mark Salzman]

For innovative people and institutions worldwide.

[Adrienne Noe]

On the [e-mail] and Kauffman, the foundation.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Of entrepreneurship committed to growing economies and expanding human welfare.

[Adrienne Noe]

On the [e-mail] this is nice. Hi, Radiolab. This is Kate from Toronto. Radiolab is supported by Warby Parker. Featuring the Home Try on program. Customers pick five pairs of glasses to try on from the Warby Parker collection with no shipping charges and no obligation to purchase and buy a pair. Give a pair for every pair of glasses purchased. A pair is provided to someone in need. [e-mail] Radiolab and use promo code Radiolab during final checkout. Hi, this is Ann Marie Woodward from Arroyo Grande, California, and I'm recording this while my boys take a nap. Radiolab is supported by 23andMe. 23andMe provides a personal DNA kit so individuals can better understand how their genes impact health, which helps individuals and their doctors find health areas to keep an eye on. And 23andMe also gives ancestral information and helps discover personal global origins or perhaps find living relatives. The personal DNA kit designed to give individuals more control over their personal health. Available at 23andme.com Radiolab.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jada Bumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. And our topic today is Totally tumors. Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, you call it what you want. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter because the topic is tumors. Famous tumors. And our next and final tumor related tale is one I've been.

[Robert Krulwich]

I've been wanting to do this particular tumor story for forever. Forever, like two years Ago, I think.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, longer than that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's a story that comes from a friend of mine, Rebecca Skloot.

[Rebecca Skloot]

You want me to talk? Make noise.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's her.

[Rebecca Skloot]

We can move me closer, probably.

[Jad Abumrad]

She's a journalist.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Is that better?

[Jad Abumrad]

And she has been wanting to tell.

[Robert Krulwich]

The story even longer.

[Jad Abumrad]

Since she was in the womb. Yeah, I mean, she's been researching this story for 10 years.

[Adrienne Noe]

Hello. Hello.

[Jad Abumrad]

And she just wrote a book called the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Now, the story is about a tumor that expands and never stops. Begins in 1950. A black woman in Baltimore is in her bathroom, and she discovers, pretty much all on her own, that she has cancer.

[Rebecca Skloot]

It's a little bit of a mystery how she initially knew this, but she knew it was there. A knot, she called it. She had told her cousins for a while that she thought there was something wrong with her, with her womb. And she climbed into her bathtub and she slid her fingers up inside of herself and found this lump.

[Jad Abumrad]

Chapter one.

[Rebecca Skloot]

First, she went into her local doctor.

[Adrienne Noe]

By chance, I happened to be an attending at that time.

[Jad Abumrad]

The guy she eventually ended up seeing at Johns Hopkins University was this fellow, Dr. Howard Jones.

[Adrienne Noe]

I'm 98. Next month I'll be 99.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. So when she came in to see you, can you tell me anything about what she was like?

[Adrienne Noe]

Well, she was a.

[Jad Abumrad]

You didn't remember anything?

[Adrienne Noe]

No, I really don't.

[Jad Abumrad]

But you remember her tumor, right?

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh, absolutely. I never saw anything like it before or after.

[Rebecca Skloot]

This didn't look like a normal tumor. It was. It was deep purple and about as.

[Adrienne Noe]

Big as a quarter, sort of shiny, very soft. That was another thing about it. On examination, slightly raised. When you touched it, you might think it was red jello.

[Rebecca Skloot]

There was something very strange about the way it looked.

[Adrienne Noe]

There was something weird about it.

[Jad Abumrad]

So doctors took a sample.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, so they would cut off these little teeny tiny pieces. Really small, teeny tiny.

[Adrienne Noe]

A bite or two.

[Rebecca Skloot]

They would take a piece, put it in a tube, and one would go to the lab for diagnosis.

[Jad Abumrad]

And in this case, since it was.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Hopkins, they would take an extra piece and give it to a man named George Geye.

[Jad Abumrad]

2. So George Guy was a researcher who worked at Hopkins. He had a deal with the clinic that anytime they got a patient with cervical cancer, they'd give him a tiny piece of the tumor. What he really wanted to do, his main mission, actually, not just his scientists everywhere, were trying to do this. They wanted to find a way to grow human cells outside of a human being in a dish in A dish.

[Rebecca Skloot]

George Guy had been trying to do this, working on this, for decades.

[Jad Abumrad]

And why exactly?

[Rebecca Skloot]

It's sort of like. It's sort of like having a little tiny bit of a person in a lab that's detached from them so that you can do whatever you want with them. You know, you can't bombard some person with a bunch of drugs and just wait to see how much they can tolerate before their cells all explode. But you can do that in cell culture, so.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh. So this is like. This is like the basic thing you need to study human biology. You need cells in a dish.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Problem was, anytime they tried to grow human cells in a dish.

[Adrienne Noe]

My dog.

[Jad Abumrad]

They would die.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah, they died.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is George Guy's former lab assistant. Can you just tell me your name? You know, my name is so and so.

[Adrienne Noe]

My name is Mary. I'll put my maiden name in there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, sure.

[Adrienne Noe]

Toy Kubachak.

[Jad Abumrad]

Mary lives just outside of Baltimore, about an hour from where she used to work with George guy.

[Adrienne Noe]

This is Dr.

[David Quammen]

Guy.

[Jad Abumrad]

She showed me some pictures.

[Adrienne Noe]

And he's sitting at. At a microscope.

[Jad Abumrad]

Look at him. He looks. He seems like a really big guy, like a really tall guy.

[Adrienne Noe]

He was a big guy.

[Jad Abumrad]

At least 6, 5, judging from the picture.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah, he was.

[Jad Abumrad]

And in every slide that she showed me, he had kind of a crazy smile on his face. Like he's got a. Like he's having.

[Adrienne Noe]

He's like a big bear of a man. That's what I always thought of.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, yeah. In any case, Mary says they were completely stumped at why the human cells always died, but they just did.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

So on the day that George Guy walked in, handed Mary a tube with a little chunk of a nameless woman's cervical cancer inside, I knew nothing about her. No one expected anything.

[Adrienne Noe]

No, he was doing that. Well, he probably is ever hopeful. But, you know, I was eating lunch and I thought, oh, the heck with it. You know, it's not going to grow. I'm going to finish a sandwich. And that's what I did.

[Jad Abumrad]

3.

[Adrienne Noe]

Then I went in and she gave.

[Jad Abumrad]

The cells some food, did my usual, turned on all the machines and left. Came back the next day. They hadn't died. So she came back the next day, and they were growing. And then the next day, still growing.

[Adrienne Noe]

They just kept plugging along.

[Jad Abumrad]

And the next.

[Rebecca Skloot]

They grew a lot.

[Jad Abumrad]

Rekka says they doubled in size every 24 hours.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, they just grew all of a.

[Adrienne Noe]

Sudden, you know, I kept transferring them and making more tubes, transferring them, making more tubes, transferring. They were very Reliable and stronger. They just kept plugging along.

[Jad Abumrad]

Meanwhile, the woman who had spawned all these cells died, Right?

[Rebecca Skloot]

Officially, she died of uremia, which is like toxicity of the blood because she wasn't able to get rid of the toxic waste that usually goes out in.

[Jad Abumrad]

Your urine, but not her cells.

[Adrienne Noe]

And to tell us this story is a privilege to introduce Dr. George Guy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wasn't long after that George Guy appeared on TV holding in his hand a little bottle.

[Adrienne Noe]

Now, let me show you a bottle in which we have grown massive quantities of cancer cells. So did you want to look at the photos?

[Jad Abumrad]

You can't really get a sense of how aggressive this tumor was. Was until you go to the Hopkins archives and look at George Guy's pictures and videos.

[Adrienne Noe]

Okay, this is the film can here.

[Mark Salzman]

The HeLa cell film.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then it hits you.

[Robert Krulwich]

These are enlarged 10,000 times.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my God. Swirling hurricanes of cells, just like thousands of little pots, some small and some very large, clumped together.

[Adrienne Noe]

Kept transferring them and making more see.

[Robert Krulwich]

Them under the microscope.

[Jad Abumrad]

Looks like something has just exploded.

[Robert Krulwich]

Undergoing division.

[Adrienne Noe]

That's amazing. They just kept plugging on. Keeps getting bigger and bigger, stronger.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's indestructible. It's indescribable.

[Adrienne Noe]

Nothing can stop it.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Why hers just sort of took off and grew and the other ones that they had tried before didn't is just a little bit of a mystery. Nobody really knows.

[Jad Abumrad]

4. Nonetheless, George Guy knew what he had. This new cell line was what they'd all been waiting for. So early on, right after this woman died, George Guy sent Mary back down to get more cancer cells from the corpse.

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh, he sent me down to the morgue. Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh, yeah. So I went down there, and the coroner, I don't know who he was. Dr. Guy was there too, and they were standing down at her feet, sort of. Meanwhile, she's like, she's lying out there. She's already open. I got some samples. Coroner would take them out and give them to me.

[Jad Abumrad]

What'd she look like?

[Adrienne Noe]

I couldn't look at her face. I couldn't look at her. The only thing I looked at were her toes. And they had chipped nail polish on them. And that was really like, oh, this is a real person.

[Jad Abumrad]

What was it about the nail polish that hit you?

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh. Cause it was chipped. Because, you know, that she hadn't been able to take care of her nails for a long time if they got chipped like that. And it showed that she was proud of herself. Not everyone wears nail polish on their toes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Over the next several Months, while this woman's body lay decomposing in the ground, George Guy and Mary produced hundreds of thousands of her cells, her tumor cells. And he named them the HeLa strain. HeLa, like HeLa H E L A. No one would actually know why he had named them that for about two decades. But what he did with these cells, you know, would be unusual nowadays. Like, if somebody now found a cell that was special, they'd run off to the patent office and then sell it to Merck for a billion bucks. But George Guy, he just passed them out freely, didn't try and make any money off. He was just.

[Adrienne Noe]

Because it was a nice, nice new thing that could help science.

[Jad Abumrad]

Mary says that George Guy began to send HeLa all over the world.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

And pretty soon she was in hundreds of labs.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And, you know, this was in the midst of the polio epidemic.

[Adrienne Noe]

This is the season when polio is at its worst.

[Jad Abumrad]

We're talking early 50s, right?

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah. So this is 1951, 52. You know, schools are being closed. Kids are being kept inside to this cruel disease.

[Adrienne Noe]

Medical science still has no complete answer.

[Rebecca Skloot]

There was this enormous effort to develop a polio vaccine.

[Jad Abumrad]

Problem was, in order to develop a vaccine, you had to have enough polio virus, you know, enough quantity to be able to study it in a lab. And they had no way of making enough.

[Robert Krulwich]

So what do they do?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, one of the guys, that Guy. One of the guys that Guy had sent the cells to, this collaborator, friend of Guy's, discovered something kind of amazing, which was that polio loved the HeLa cell. Put polio inside a HeLa cell. HeLa would copy and in the process, make more polio.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it's the super Xerox cell. No matter what you want to do, it'll be like, make a copy, Make a copy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Make a copy. Yeah. So now they had a way of making polio.

[Rebecca Skloot]

HeLa could just be a polio factory.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so the government made a factory.

[Rebecca Skloot]

But the Tesco Institute, a real one, literally a factory. So they had these big, you know, stainless steel vats of culture medium that were sort of rotated constantly. Autoclaves for sterilizing all their equipment. A row with four or five microscopes, crazy Frankensteinish gizmos. They had this machine that was like an automatic cell dispenser, and it had this long mechanical arm. Insquirt a certain amount of this culture medium filled with HeLa cells into a tube.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. This is like the beauty of industry right here.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, it is, absolutely.

[Jad Abumrad]

The cells that were produced at this factory, she Says were used to test.

[Adrienne Noe]

The polio vaccine, Potent vaccine to prevent the dreaded disease.

[Rebecca Skloot]

The test that they were doing were enormous. It was the largest field trial ever done. At its peak, the Tuskegee Helo Production center was producing about 6 trillion cell cells a week, which is kind of.

[Jad Abumrad]

Inconceivable, but that was actually only the beginning, says Rebecca, because this factory led to an even bigger one that was for profit. Right. And that second factory was the first.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Time any human biological material was commercialized.

[Jad Abumrad]

So this was the first biotech company.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, basically.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. But when they first started mass producing hela, what sorts of things were done to these cells? What sorts of problems were investigated?

[Rebecca Skloot]

Like, anything you can imagine. So they infected HELA cells with every kind of virus. Hepatitis, equine encephalitis virus, yellow fever, herpes, measles, mumps, rabies, whatever. Like, you just. Any. Any vaccine. And this was just. And this was a revolution for scientists. There was research on chemotherapy drugs. HeLa cells went up in some of the first space missions.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah. So they were.

[Jad Abumrad]

HELA went into space.

[Rebecca Skloot]

HELA went into space. Which, every time I hear what I.

[Jad Abumrad]

Think of, like, HELA in space. Why? I mean, just because the premise was.

[Rebecca Skloot]

To see what happens to human cells in zero gravity. You know, if we're going to be sending people up into space, what's going to happen to them up there? So HELA went up before any humans did, and then she eventually went up. She. The cells. There was actually.

[Jad Abumrad]

That was an interesting little slip up there.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, I know.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so let's actually skip forward in the story to the point where that. That slip up. You just heard that pronoun confusion gets personal.

[Robert Krulwich]

What happens?

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, it's the late 60s, and Hela has led to a revolution in science. And now there are hundreds of cell lines, not just hela, but hundreds. And somewhere along the way, scientists discover that HeLa is so aggressive that she's actually been contaminating and taking over all of these other cell lines.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, you just said she, but I get your point.

[Jad Abumrad]

And she does it in the. It does it in the strangest way.

[Rebecca Skloot]

HeLa cells can. You know, they can float on dust particles. They can ride on.

[Jad Abumrad]

They can what? They can float on dust particles?

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah. So they can.

[Jad Abumrad]

You mean they can hop out of a dish and just get on a particle and just float?

[Rebecca Skloot]

Mm. Out the door, up the stairs, down the hall. One HeLa cell into a lab, drops into a dish cell culture, where there's other cells growing. And because HELA cells are sort of powerful cells. They take over.

[Jad Abumrad]

So on the heels of this catastrophe, someone at Hopkins decides to make a test. Let's make a test that will allow us to genetically determine if a cell is HELA or if it isn't. And to make a long story short, this desire for a genetic test led scientists and then journalists to ask a question which amazingly, for 25 years had not been asked. Who was this woman? And that's when we found out her name. Henrietta Lac. This is the sound of Rebecca reading Henrietta's medical records for the first time.

[Rebecca Skloot]

This is a 30 year old colored woman.

[Jad Abumrad]

She's sitting with Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah.

[Rebecca Skloot]

This is 2nd of November. So this is again when she was pregnant with you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Henrietta had five kids when she died at the age of 31. Most have no memory of her because they were too young. That's especially true of Deborah.

[Adrienne Noe]

I was only 15 months old and I don't remember anything about my mother.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, so she, you know, she, she had spent her entire life just sort of longing to know who her mother was. And did she like dancing?

[Adrienne Noe]

You know, I always wanted to know what she liked to do, where she went, where she liked to eat.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Did she breastfeed? Deborah, she was really sort of almost fixated on that idea. She wanted to know if she was breastfed.

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh, I don't know. You know, I don't know what I would give up just to. Just to have her here, I tell you, just to see her and hold her.

[Jad Abumrad]

So in 1973, when a scientist calls the Lacks family and Deborah hears that little bits of the mother that she never knew are still alive, and oh, by the way, can we take a blood test from you and your family? Because we're having some contamination problem. We need these genetic markers, blah, blah, blah.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Well, as you can imagine, took me by surprise.

[Adrienne Noe]

It really did.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was really confusing.

[Adrienne Noe]

I mean, how much of ourselves is out there, you know?

[Jad Abumrad]

Eventually she went online, did some searches.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And found thousands and thousands of hits.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like for instance, on Gila clones.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And Deborah had heard, you know, various journalists in the past had come to her and mentioned, you know, Dolly the cloned sheep, and said, you know, your mom, they did this with your mom too. Meaning that's actually where the technology started. The first cells ever cloned were HELA cells, but that was just cloning a cell, not cloning an entire being. But that distinction is very complicated, particularly for somebody who doesn't know what a cell is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Skloot]

So Deborah, between what journalists had told her and Googling Henrietta Lacks and clone thought there were thousands of clones of her mother around and.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really? You mean like a bunch of Henriettas?

[Rebecca Skloot]

Thousands.

[Jad Abumrad]

Walking the streets, walking around. And Rebecca says that one of Deborah's biggest fears was bumping into one of these clones.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She said, you know, she would say I would have to go talk to her, and she wouldn't know that I was her daughter. And I don't know that I could handle that. Wow, it sounds so fantastical. How could someone believe that there are copies of her mother walking around? But at one point, 25 years after their mother died, someone called and said, hey, part of her is still alive and we've grown enough of her so that it could wrap around the earth several times.

[Jad Abumrad]

At that point, all bets are off.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, right, exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

Not to mention that it's actually not that crazy because your DNA is in your cells. So if your cells are taken out of you and they still grow, well, isn't that still you alive?

[Robert Krulwich]

It's of you, but it's clearly not you. And yet it's going on and on. That's. It's a funny middle space, that's for sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. So here's what happened as Rebecca went off in search of Henrietta Lacks. Every so often, Deborah would come along and sit with her as they intervene, you know, anyone they could find, friends, family. And eventually, over many, many years, a picture does emerge of who this woman was.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She was born in Roanoke, 1920, Virginia. And I think she was the 10th of the 11 children, but apparently she.

[Jad Abumrad]

Was the one that stood out.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Everybody talked about her as just being. She was the catch.

[Adrienne Noe]

Oh, my goodness. I don't think I could top her.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Sadie Sturtevan, Henrietta's cousin.

[Adrienne Noe]

Henry was a beautiful girl. I was beautiful myself.

[Rebecca Skloot]

But Henny was very pretty.

[Adrienne Noe]

Brown eyes, long hair.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this is Henrietta's sister, Gladys.

[Adrienne Noe]

That tanned complexion.

[Jad Abumrad]

Everyone they spoke with zeroed in on the same few points.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Like, first, she was really meticulous about her nails.

[Jad Abumrad]

Always painted them red.

[Rebecca Skloot]

This very deep red.

[Jad Abumrad]

And second, Henrietta just had this.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She was very strength, forthright, very sassy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like her cells. Now, the unfortunate thing is that when it comes to her life, you know, how she lived, there's not a ton of detail. Right. October.

[Rebecca Skloot]

So this is when she first went.

[Adrienne Noe]

In with her cancer.

[Jad Abumrad]

But in that hotel room, when the two of them were flipping through the medical records, they did start to get some detail.

[Adrienne Noe]

Okay, now, here's her autarky, right.

[Jad Abumrad]

About how she died.

[Rebecca Skloot]

These are things I'm gonna take notes about.

[Jad Abumrad]

Was she in A lot of pain when she died.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, this was the hardest thing. She was eventually in a pretty unbelievable amount of pain.

[Adrienne Noe]

She complains of pain in the right.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Lower quadrant, wailing and crying and, you know, moaning for the Lord to help her.

[Jad Abumrad]

According to the records, doctors tried everything.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Morphine. They injected 100% alcohol straight into her.

[Jad Abumrad]

Spirit.

[Adrienne Noe]

In spite of the alcohol injection last week.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She would have these fits of pain through spasms where this waves of pain would hit her and she would rise up out of the bed and thrash around. So they strapped her to the bed and her sister, along with one of her friends, you know, one of them would tighten the straps and the other one would put a pillow in her mouth so that she would. Wouldn't bite her tongue, just.

[Adrienne Noe]

If I only just had the chance to take care of her.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, dealing with how her mother died was one thing, but the cells made it more complicated for Deborah.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Her mother was alive in these cells somehow. So if that's true, that left very big questions. And the first of them for Deborah was how can Henrietta rest in peace if part of her, with part of her soul is being, you know, shot up to the moon and injected with all these chemicals and irradiated and bombarded.

[Adrienne Noe]

It was just so painful knowing, you know, they had her cells on the back of a donkey going to Turkey, you know, in the airplanes, just going all over the world. I just don't know.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She worried about them. She worried that it hurt her mother. When you infect the cells with Ebola, does somehow her mother feel the pain that comes with Ebola?

[Jad Abumrad]

And had a scientist ever, like, sat down with her? No. I mean, just explain to her, like, this is.

[Rebecca Skloot]

No, never. Nothing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because it just strikes me that it wouldn't be that hard to explain that, like, when you take cells out of a body, it's kind of like when you cut your fingernail off, it just doesn't.

[Rebecca Skloot]

But your fingernail doesn't keep growing and living after you cut it off. It's really hard. There is no other example of some way that you can take something from someone's body and have it keep living and not have a person feel it.

[Jad Abumrad]

And all these worries, says Rebecca, began to build in Deborah's mind, and build and build.

[Rebecca Skloot]

There came at this point. So we were at her cousin's house.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is her cousin Gary.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She was broken out in hives. And she was telling him all the stuff that she'd recently learned.

[Jad Abumrad]

You can almost hear it on the tape. She says to him, she can't carry the burden of these cells anymore. She can't do it.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And I had been sort of trying to talk her down, and he was trying to talk her down. And then just out of nowhere, he just started sing.

[Adrienne Noe]

God y. I know the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Table.

[Adrienne Noe]

I know the.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And he started preaching.

[Adrienne Noe]

There are some things that doctors cannot do.

[Rebecca Skloot]

He held her head in his hands.

[Adrienne Noe]

And we come to you tonight the author and the finisher of our faith, and we thank you for being a way maker. You make a path in the mighty waters you call the mountains that skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. We thank you tonight. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for that. Thank you, Lord. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jesus. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Jesus.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And she just relaxed.

[Adrienne Noe]

I feel light. Amen. I feel light.

[Jad Abumrad]

She didn't realize it then, but that night, Deborah was on the verge of a stroke.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Want to walk up and see the building?

[Adrienne Noe]

You want to walk? Okay, you may. He said, he's just up this hill.

[Jad Abumrad]

One of the most striking moments of the story is when the two of them visit Hopkins, and Deborah meets her mother's cells for the first time.

[Adrienne Noe]

I show you that room, and I can't show you the cells because the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Scientist had finally contacted her.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Christoph Linger, the scientist who invited us into his lab to see the cells. He had projected them onto a screen.

[Adrienne Noe]

Don't be confused.

[Dr. Oren Davinsky]

They look green here.

[Adrienne Noe]

Okay.

[Rebecca Skloot]

They're sort of neon green in this particular case because of the way they were stained and projected. So they're very ethereal looking. They're very sort of. They glow, you know? I mean, when you think about angels, right? You think of something glowing. Kristof turned on this screen, and she just, you know, I mean, Deborah just gasped.

[Adrienne Noe]

She just, oh, my God. This is about 200 times bigger than what they really are.

[Jad Abumrad]

A swirling hurricane of cells.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Did you say, oh, that's my mother?

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Pretty good for you.

[Adrienne Noe]

God leave. Yeah, you know. Oh, God. In.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Kristof gave. He gave her a vial of these cells that she could hold in her hand. And they came out of a freezer so they were very cold. And she sort of rubbed her hands together with the vial in her hand to sort of warm them up and sort of blew on them to keep them warm. And then she just sort of whispered to the cells. It was sort of incredible. She just raised them up to her lips and she said, you're famous, but nobody knows it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just a week before Rebecca and I spoke in the studio, she Got a call that Deborah had died.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She had a heart attack and died in her sleep.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so as you may know at this point, that segment was based on Rebecca Skloot's book, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's an amazing book. It came out right when we released that piece. It's been a couple years now, and recently we met up with Rebecca in Chicago just to get an update.

[Rebecca Skloot]

It's like the book came out and then.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because since the publication of that book.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Story just sort of exploded.

[Jad Abumrad]

It just took off. Scholarships were named after Henrietta.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Henrietta was given an honorary doctorate. Monuments, highway placards, and historical landmarks and buildings named after her. There's a high school called Henrietta Lacks High keylethai for short.

[Jad Abumrad]

Meanwhile, the book is exploding. She went on this, like, insane book tour. Members of the Lacks family began to join her.

[Rebecca Skloot]

It started off with just Sonny Lacks would go and do a sort of onstage Q and A, and people started cheering and scientists standing up saying, I want to tell you what I did with these cells, and I want to tell you why this was important for me. And I'm sorry it was hard for you. And people reaching out. I'm alive today because of this drug that your mother sells. Developer. You know, I do this in my lab. I mean, they just. It never stopped. It was just a flood.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which is, in a way, what Deborah always wanted.

[Rebecca Skloot]

She wanted to go to every event. She wanted to be on every television show. She had her dress picked out for Oprah, like, you know, eight years before the book came out. You know, she was. Deborah wanted this. This is exactly what she always dreamed of.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then just last year, something interesting happens. Interesting and troubling.

[Rebecca Skloot]

So, yeah, so March 2013, this group of scientists from Germany sequenced the HELA genome and published it online. Where anyone can download it. You just click a button. I downloaded it. It was just there. And they did not ask the family. And my initial reaction when I saw this press coverage was, they did what? Because within the HELA genome, there was also Henrietta's genome. And some of that was 50% of that was passed on to her kids and 25% potentially turn her grandkids. But one of the things. So when they put out a press release, when this genome was sequenced and on it, it had a little, you know, frequently asked questions that the press might wonder about. And one of them was, can you learn anything about Henrietta or her children from this genome? And the answer was, no, can't learn anything about them. And I do. And I believe that they. That they believe this, but this is a misconception. You can, in fact, learn about people, and in fact, you cannot even hide people's private information if you try. And so one researcher took the genome and created essentially a report on Henrietta's genes. You have x percent chance of bipolar disorder, alcoholism, obesity. Just has this huge range of things. And some of it is, yes, there's some real potential privacy violation, like with the Alzheimer's genes and things like. Like that bits of information about your family. I will not tell you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, this report that this dude made, did he list all of these things you're describing?

[Rebecca Skloot]

And he sent it to me. So I called the Laxes and said, you know, did you know this, Anything about this? And Rebecca had called, you know, they did not.

[Adrienne Noe]

And it kind of bothered us because we're saying, okay, why wasn't a family involved with this decision making?

[Jad Abumrad]

That was Jerry Lacks.

[Adrienne Noe]

Jerry Lacks.

[Jad Abumrad]

Y. Henrietta Lacks, granddaughter.

[Adrienne Noe]

Back in the 50s, you had Henrietta Lacks. Her cells were removed without her family's knowledge. Then you go, in the 70s, my dad and his siblings, they took blood samples, used it for research. They didn't give consent. Then you come 2013 and you have Henrietta's. I felt as though it was her medical records being published publicly.

[Rebecca Skloot]

You know, their first question was, can you get them to take it down so we can figure out what it is, what it means? So I reached out to the scientists and said, the Lacks family, you know, has asked that you take this down. And they replied immediately. They took it offline immediately. And then I contacted Francis Collins, who's, you know, the head of the nih. I also reached out to Kathy Hudson, who used to run the Genetics and Public Policy center at Hopkins and is now over at the NIH dealing with a lot of these issues. So I reached out to them and said, somebody needs to try to just help the last family get consent. Somebody needs to just go back, pretend like this is starting now, and just do what probably should have happened in the first place.

[Adrienne Noe]

And I say, might have been like a couple of weeks after that, several weeks after that, that we had a meeting with nih. It was my mom, myself, my sister, my dad, my uncle, my brother David, my sister Kim, my cousin Ron, Rebecca Skloot. She was actually on a conference call.

[Rebecca Skloot]

All the NIH folks drove up to Baltimore.

[Adrienne Noe]

We googled their names. Dr. Collins. And Kathy got sitting there, was like, oh, we were kind of. We was excited. Like, okay, yeah, we sitting in a room with the director. They all met just to listen to everybody. You Know, listen to our concerns, listen to our questions. What can be done? What can't be done?

[Rebecca Skloot]

The Lacks family asked about everything you could possibly imagine, went over, you know.

[Adrienne Noe]

The information about genome gene mapping, sequencing.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Just the basic science of genomes, to.

[Adrienne Noe]

Get a clear understanding of what the genome meant to science. We don't want to stop science, but yet we don't want certain information to be just broadly available publicly.

[Rebecca Skloot]

So they laid out three options. One was, we don't release any of them at all. And then there was a second option which was release it with no restrictions, just put it out there like the Germans did. And then there was a third option which was release it with restrictions. So the NIH would house it on their own servers and then in order to get access to it, you would have to send an application that said, this is the research we're going to do. There would be a committee for formed that was a group of scientists and then some members of the Lacks family.

[Adrienne Noe]

The Heal a Genome Committee, One grandchild.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And one great grandchild.

[Adrienne Noe]

My brother David and my cousin Veronica.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And obviously this is the option they picked. So, yeah, there's this committee and they just a few weeks ago saw their first batch of applications and then the news hit and it was the first time that they were part of the news.

[Jad Abumrad]

So they. The third generation.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Yeah, the Lax family, like Jerry Lacks was on MSNBC Live doing an interview about this and like, she, you know, she'd never done this before and, you know, they were in every newspaper. I mean, it was everywhere.

[Adrienne Noe]

Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Yeah. We are stepping into the spotlight.

[Rebecca Skloot]

It's the grandchildren, the third and fourth generation of Laxus.

[Adrienne Noe]

It's the great grandchildren.

[Rebecca Skloot]

This is their story now. And that's, you know, the other thing that is an undercurrent through all this is Deborah's gone.

[Adrienne Noe]

She was the one who was just so forceful and so dedicated with getting the information out there about her mom.

[Rebecca Skloot]

And, you know, when I look at the four years since the book came out, you know, there are a few moments that stand out as incredibly emotional ones for me, having to do with Deborah. But this, the first meeting, sitting on this speakerphone, listening to this meeting, these.

[Adrienne Noe]

High officials sitting at the table and have sincere concern about our questions.

[Rebecca Skloot]

If she could have said, what do I dream might someday happen? That would be what she would have described.

[Adrienne Noe]

I could just imagine her just sitting there and the chair just laughing, rocking back and forth, twiddling her fingers, saying, yay. Just absorbing all of this, this excitement.

[Jad Abumrad]

Before we close I want to thank Rebecca Skloot for giving us her raw tapes. Her book, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is truly spellbinding. You can get More [e-mail] Sign up for our podcast there. Radiolab.org I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krylwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening.

[Adrienne Noe]

Hello, this is Rebecca Skloot.

[Rebecca Skloot]

Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Michael Raphael, Zorin Wheeler, Lulu Miller, Tim Howard and Pat Walters, with help from Adi Narayan, Erin sand and Sharon Shattuck. Special thanks to Tim Clark and Timothy Wiseny. With a name like Skloot, I'm allowed to stumble on people's last names.