Henrietta Lacks's cells were taken without her knowledge, as was routine then

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old Black woman and mother of five, sought treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the few hospitals in the segregated Baltimore area that treated Black patients, for what turned out to be an aggressive cervical cancer. During a biopsy, her treating physician sliced off a small sample of both healthy and cancerous tissue and sent it, without asking her permission or even informing her, to researcher George Gey's tissue culture lab down the hall.

Skloot is careful to place this within its historical context: taking leftover tissue for research without specific consent was standard, unquestioned practice at the time, not a targeted violation of Henrietta specifically — patients of all backgrounds routinely had tissue used this way. But she also documents how thin the era's protections were for poor and Black patients specifically, who were more likely to be treated at teaching hospitals as convenient, low-cost sources of clinical material and research subjects.

Henrietta died of her cancer just months later, never learning that a sample of her tumor had been kept and was, at that very moment, doing something no human cells had ever done in a laboratory before.

Takeaway: what happened to Henrietta wasn't a rare abuse — it was standard practice in an era with essentially no meaningful concept of patient consent for research tissue.