Immortality. Now there's a concept. Concepts. A few thousand of. Religion embraces a number of those. Faith too. Myth. I read a book called The Infinite Book (spoiler: it isn't), which recounts a few thought experiments taking into account probability theories and human behaviour research about what we would do. (I would either hole up in Borges's library or vote for mortality - really, is one of these not enough?) And immortal life - I'd call that a tautology.
Enter The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
Misleading tautology? Henrietta Lacks' story deserves to be told. (I started to rampage about this woman's rights, a la Skloot's book, when I saw the other side of the argument. More to come. Patience is a virtue.) Henrietta was an African-American woman treated for cancer in the 1950s. The cancerous cells were like ants - she was treated for one cluster in her cervix and suddenly they were everywhere. After the autopsy, the doctor described the clusters as pearls coating every organ.
Enter the 'bad guys'. Even before Henrietta's death, doctors harvested the cells as part of a routine harvest for medical research. Growing cell cultures was at the time the medical profession's Holy Grail. Except, well, this grail was discoverable. A cell culture is basically a cluster of cells that you can sustain in the lab, outside of the human body. A ready supply of material to experiment on. Obviously, you need specific conditions, which was a hit-and-miss with no principle to work from before Henrietta's cells.
These cells being like ants, they divided like crazy, even out of the body. Short version: the cells were named HeLa and eventually companies began processing and distributing the cells for cash. Lots of. The polio vaccine was developed using HeLa and the cells are still used in labs around the world for research. Tada; this one woman has helped, is helping and will help to extend human beings' lifespans.
Did the doctors have the right to first harvest and then use her cells for commercial gain without her or her family's consent? US law then and to some extent now says yes. The book suggests no (unbiased much?). I was convinced (which speaks well of the writing) but now I wonder.
See, my first reaction was a writer's: to imagine scenarios full of philosophical meaning and emotion. Bear in mind: a) I am a nihilist, which means that in the absence of evidence otherwise, nothing has meaning (which explains my sense of humour) b) the story reminds me of a creepy short story about an ape subjected to scientific experiments that dies and returns to kill his torturer (and no, not Kafka's) c) another Gothic short story about a man who dies and is buried but his soul remains trapped in his body (burying my hamsters was traumatic and I want to be cremated).
I keep imagining that some essence of Henrietta remains in her cells, even those that form in the lab and not in her body. In fact, her preacher cousin echoes this, to my sentimental horror. Researchers have injected all sorts of viruses into her body, from polio to HIV, as well as bond them to the cells of an ape and clone them. Hee-bee-gee-bees. If this is immortal life, keep your blerry library.
And here my balloon deflates to earth with a whistle. Cells that have no will and are not sentient might be life but do not have life. (The whistle is a sigh of relief. The phrase is just a literary device!) Not only that, but the original HeLa cells are mostly dead (except for one or two frozen cultures, kept as a record). These cells are the descendants of roughly 3 times the number of days since the Adam and Eve were extracted. The line is immortal, not the lifespan of the cells.
You probably arrived here before me; revisit the horror of points b and c on an impressionable, imaginative and very empathic child. Ms Skloot also arrived here long before me. Roughly half of the book focuses on Henrietta's daughter Deborah. I thought this was a failing of the book, a pandering to the wishes of the family to get them to endorse the book. But Deborah, her children and grandchildren represent immortality. Each ancestor lives on, however diluted, in our cells. The life in question is that of the human race (which, to point out is not strictly immortal, as in unkillable and infinite. Just saying).
Which brings us round to the ethical dilemma. Deborah was profoundly 'messed up', and not only because of the issue with the cells and partly because of institutionalised racism (highlight, star and underline 'institutionalised'). She was paranoid, depressive and perhaps manic. She had little education and so was stuck in that quagmire of wanting to do better but not having the time, money or qualifications. All she really wanted was someone to explain what exactly HeLa was and why it was.
The irony of the story is that Deborah and her brothers cannot afford medical care or medication, despite the fact that their mother's indirect contribution to science cannot be calculated.
Taken without context, that fact seems profoundly unethical. However, if we begin to assign rights to cells and/or tissue outside of the body, things begin to get a little... chaotic. Does this apply to my skin cells? To a bloody plaster I remove? To my tonsils or wisdom teeth? Must the doctors get my consent before they incinerate the tissue? What if I want them buried? Do I have the rights to profit from your scientific knowledge and ingenuity, and from a company's processing and distribution structures? My contribution is precisely 'indirect' - tissue I happen to have growing in my body. Can we compensate evolution too?
(Hmmm that last question would make a good story.) Luckily, I am a writer, so I can pose the questions without having to provide the solutions. What a nihilistic profession this! I don't have to make a single decision without proof; I can put two (or more - I think that's called rugby) opponents into a ring and manipulate situations that reveal their essences. And, if I want, I can choose one side and arm it with steroids. But I still don't have to back it! Because I am but an onlooker. And you are but a reader.
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