In an interview on The Strangeness of Life

Your next choice is Rebecca Skloot’s Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This is almost a detective story – it’s about the woman who unknowingly helped create the polio vaccine and uncover the secrets of cancer.

Yes. This is a fascinating book on so many different levels. It is really compelling as the story of the author trying to uncover the history of the woman from whom all these cells came.

Who was known as ‘HeLa’.

She had cervical cancer, and samples were taken from her body. Scientists who were trying to culture human cells discovered that her cells could just grow and grow and grow. It had never been seen before.

Why do you think that was?

That is one of the things that I find particularly fascinating. What happened to Henrietta Lacks is that she was infected with human papillomavirus. Now lots of people get infected with this virus. It is very common on people’s skin, for example. A lot of people carry it and don’t even know it; in some cases, it causes a small wart. But if it is spread sexually, women can develop cervical cancer from it. 

And it is amazing what this virus does. We usually think of viruses as infecting cells and making new copies of themselves until the cells explode and die. All the new viruses then go off and kill other cells. But that’s not what all viruses do. I am obsessed with viruses.

I know you have just written a book about them.

For me, part of the fascination with Rebecca’s book is that it is the story about what viruses can do. The papillomavirus infects a cell in the skin or other kinds of lining in the body. But it doesn’t try to kill the cell; it actually does the opposite. It actually produces proteins that link onto the proteins in the cell and speed up its growth and division. Basically, its strategy is: If there are more host cells that are infected with the virus, that means there are more viruses.

The reason most of us can have this type of virus and not be harmed by it is that we are constantly shedding the top layer of our skin. That’s what dust is.  The viruses in these cells gradually rise towards the surface of our skin, and then we just get rid of them. So they don’t hang around long enough to cause trouble. There is this nice kind of balance between the virus and the host most of the time.

But with Henrietta, there was no balance.

Exactly. For people with cervical cancer, the virus just speeds things up too much. Once you get that kind of uncontrolled growth, you have cancer. In the case of Henrietta Lacks, the virus created a kind of super-cancer, because it could not only grow rapidly in her body, but also grow rapidly in a Petri dish.  So it is continuing to grow today, even though she has been dead for some 50 years.

But her children and grandchildren live on – and the author actually tracked them down and went to visit them, to see how they are coping.

She did. One of the reasons I like this book and my previous choice, Mutants, so much is that they both recognise the human dimension of their story. They are talking about very strange biology, but there are people involved. And they are real people; they are not just cardboard cutouts. Henrietta Lacks’s family faced the strangeness of life in a very intimate way. Their mother dies of cancer, and yet years later they hear from scientists that she is actually still alive, and she is in a lab somewhere. And they try to make sense of it all, which is tough, because they are not scientists. Her husband only got a grade-school education.

In an interview on Science

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about the woman who unknowingly helped create the polio vaccine and uncover the secrets of cancer. This is a fascinating book on so many different levels. It is just as compelling as the story of the author trying to uncover the history of the woman from whom all these cells came from.

Who was known as “HeLa”.

She had cervical cancer, and samples were taken from her body. Scientists who were trying to culture human cells discovered that her cells could just grow and grow and grow. It had never been seen before.

Why do you think that was?

That is one of the things that I find particularly fascinating. What happened to Henrietta Lacks is that she was infected with human papillomavirus. Now lots of people get infected with this virus. It is very common on people’s skin, for example. A lot of people carry it and don’t even know it; in some cases, it causes a small wart. But if it is spread sexually, women can develop cervical cancer from it. And it is amazing what this virus does. We usually think of viruses as infecting cells and making new copies of themselves until the cells explode and die. All the new viruses then go off and kill other cells. But that’s not what all viruses do.

I am obsessed with viruses. For me, part of the fascination with Rebecca’s book is that it the story of what viruses can do. The papillomavirus infects a cell in the skin or other kinds of lining in the body. But it doesn’t try to kill the cell, it does the opposite. It actually produces proteins that link onto the proteins in the cell and speed up its growth and division. Basically, its strategy is: If there are more host cells that are infected with the virus, that means there are more viruses.

The reason most of us can have this type of virus and not be harmed by it is that we are constantly shedding the top layer of our skin. That’s what dust is. The viruses in these cells gradually rise towards the surface of our skin, and then we just get rid of them. So they don’t hang around long enough to cause trouble. There is this nice kind of balance between the virus and the host most of the time.

But with Henrietta, there was no balance.

Exactly. For people with cervical cancer, the virus just speeds things up too much. Once you get that kind of uncontrolled growth, you have cancer. In the case of Henrietta Lacks, the virus created a kind of super-cancer, because it could not only grow rapidly in her body but also grow rapidly in a Petri dish. It is continuing to grow today, even though she has been dead for some 50 years.

But her children and grandchildren live on – and the author actually tracked them down and went to visit them, to see how they are coping.

She did. Henrietta Lacks’s family faced the strangeness of life in a very intimate way. Their mother dies of cancer, and yet years later they hear from scientists that she is actually still alive, she is in a lab somewhere. And they try to make sense of it all, which is tough because they are not scientists. Her husband only got a grade-school education.

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