Finding Henrietta Lacks

Here’s the compelling story of how a young Rolling Stone writer tracked down and published the identity of a then-anonymous cell donor, now known to millions of readers from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. As Rebecca describes, back in 1976, a very young science writer was the first to locate the Lacks family and explain to them Henrietta’s remarkable role in biomedicine. This is the story of how that happened.

She was only known as “Helen Lane” (the pseudonym for Henrietta that the researchers used in public), but her apparently immortal cells had already started to earn an enormous place in science. Michael Rogers, then a staff writer for the rock and roll magazine, wanted to bring it to life by actually finding her surviving relatives and paint a portrait of “Helen” herself.

It seemed like a long-shot at best, and in fact nearly proved impossible. Back in the Seventies, the biomedical community controlled information far more closely than today. Plus, the unspoken rules of science writing at the time made printing a tissue donor’s real name ethically dubious. Ultimately, through a single slip of the tongue by a researcher, Rogers was able to find the family—as they were on the very first step of the difficult journey that Rebecca so ably chronicles in her book.

This 8,000 word booklet describes Rogers’ efforts to find Henrietta Lacks—within the particular opportunities and challenges of journalism in the Seventies—and also includes the text of the original 1976 article.