ARTICLE
The HeLa Bomb and the Science of Unveiling
Sandra Harvey
University of California, Santa Cruz
sharvey1@ucsc.edu
In early 1966, geneticist Stanley Gartler provided
some upsetting news to the attendees at the Second Decennial Review
Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture. He had reviewed some of
their work for his study, “Apparent HeLa Cell Contamination of Human
Heteroploid Cell Lines” (1968). The HeLa cell line was derived from the
biopsy of a squamous cell carcinoma taken from the cervix of Henrietta
Lacks, an African-American woman who died from this cancer in 1951. In
his presentation, Gartler revealed the HeLa cells’ capacity to pass
themselves off as other cells and contaminate the samples with which
they came into contact. He was able to identify the HeLa cells because
they formed the only cell line included in Gartler’s sample that was
derived from a black person. Based on his findings, Gartler argued that
much of the attendees’ work was “open to serious question…[and some]
would be best discarded” (Gartler, 1968, p. 175). As Robert Stevenson,
who later became president of the American Type Culture Collection, put
it, the geneticist “showed up at that meeting with no background or
anything else in cell culture and proceeded to drop a turd in the punch
bowl” (Skloot, 2011, p. 154). Scientists who attended the conference
allegedly referred to this unexpected news as the “HeLa bomb.”1
This essay returns to the HeLa cell stories and reveals the violence
and underlying fear of miscegenation that fed public intrigue at the
time. While narratives about HeLa contamination are not new, I ask that
we stop to contemplate Gartler’s revelation and its description as a
bomb to grasp how race and gender inform contemporary ways of knowing
in the United States. Key to comprehending this moment are narratives
of black racial passing, which assume a black subject who is able and
eager to belie their blackness and pass for white. Scientific racism
re-enforced passing narratives through the “one-drop” rule linking
blackness to blood, and blood to purity. The
rule assumes that black blood is a contaminating substance to which white
blood (and any other blood) is vulnerable; if a person had at least a
"drop" of black blood, they would be read as black within the United
States. Tracing the accusation of passing highlights it as an apparatus
of knowing the other, a technology of disciplining and surveilling
bodies, and a regime for regulating populations. Given this historical
context, this essay considers the moment the HeLa cells are
“discovered” to have originated in a black body rather than a white one
as an accusation of racial passing leveled at the cells themselves. In
doing so, it demonstrates the ways that the accusation of passing, as
both an in vivo and in vitro reading apparatus, becomes an important mechanism for knowing, steeped in epistemological violence.
Considering the accusation of HeLa’s passing allows for a departure
from the ways the trope has most often been debated within US
literature, film, and socio-cultural studies.2 Most
scholars have been preoccupied with the “passer” and their alleged
strategy rather than the anxiety, excitement, and panic that animate
the accuser’s attempts to see, classify, and regulate bodies. In
focusing on the “passer’s” agency, such scholarship also often comes close
to reducing the passing dynamic to the decisions of an autonomous and
rational subject.3 HeLa
contamination is an instance in which the passing offender is not a
subject but an object—basic biological material. Thus, one must reject
much of the journalistic reporting that imbues
HeLa with an anthropomorphized agency. At the same time, following the
lead of Mel Chen (2012) and New Materialists, I ask how the HeLa cells
have been animated by the fantasies and phobias of black violence and
racial contamination.
Focusing on passing as a reading apparatus of bodies, this essay
makes explicit the violence present in “the act of scientific
innovation” (Wald, 2012, p. 202). This is because science (social,
biological, or otherwise) that rests on the relationship between an
autonomous seeing, measuring, and creating subject and a knowable and
measurable object is implicated in the epistemological claims of the
passing accusation. Coming to terms with the racialized and sexualized
animacies that enliven the HeLa cells, this paper thus follows from
feminist works in science and technology studies that have illustrated
the ways we are not the sole beings producing knowledge, works that
call for us to wrestle with the failing conceits of modern (scientific,
colonial, and nationalist) mastery. In so
doing, it demands that we move beyond contemporary bioethical concerns
regulating the object’s informed consent and participation in order to
imagine an ethics of knowing that is consequential with our own complex
vulnerability amongst other racialized and gendered objects.
In this vein, I examine the narratives about HeLa’s passing from the 1950s to the
present, including peer-reviewed articles on cell culturing and
genetics, science journalism, and cultural studies literature. Rather than reinforce a “Science” versus “Culture” binary, one
must consider these bodies of writing as interdependent genres within
the archive of scientific knowledge production. This
approach troubles the notion that scholarly work within the laboratory
or the peer-reviewed journal can be read outside of socio-cultural and
historic contexts, and imagines the possibility of critical scientific
discussions about blackness, gender, or sexuality that do not take
essence as either their assumption or goal.4 The
rules dictating what is appropriate scholarly or scientific knowledge
do not insulate its practices or findings from popular discourse. On
the contrary, they obfuscate the discursive power that historical
narratives exert within scientific and other scholarly work. Leaving them unchecked produces a naturalizing effect.5 To
consider the intricacies of scientific discourse within this larger
network of knowledge production, it is necessary to read archival
documents alongside more informal exchanges at scholarly conferences,
interviews between scientists and journalists, and other popular
literature and cultural studies writings. In this way, I trace what
cultural studies scholar Hortense Spillers (1987) calls an “American grammar”
shaping and ordering concepts of blackness and gender within even
scientific discourse. This grammar overdetermines black women as
at once commodities, laborers, hypersexualized objects, and duplicitous
subjects.
Reading the archive in this way, I argue that the threat of
miscegenation continues to be a disavowed phobia that places race and
gender passing narratives at the crux of biopolitics, biotechnology,
and bioethics.6
The first “HeLa Bomb” and its fallout
The story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line is not a new one.
In 1951, George Gey, the director of tissue culture research at Johns
Hopkins University, discovered the sample of cancerous cells he had
received from Lacks’s cervical biopsy divided continuously within the
correct conditions, something no other cells were known to do at the time. The discovery opened the possibilities for in vitro
studies exponentially. Narratives of the cell line and the identity of
the woman from whom the cells were taken emerged fairly soon after and
quite strategically. In fact, one of the earliest narratives of the
HeLa cell line and the identity of Henrietta Lacks was publicized to
garner support and funding for the Foundation for Infantile Paralysis
and its efforts to find a poliovirus vaccine; the discovery of the HeLa
cell line and the lab technology developed to keep the cells dividing
were the greatest contributions to the effort’s success. The
foundation’s director Roland Berg convinced Gey, who was uncomfortable
with publicizing Lacks’s name, that the story of the HeLa cells must
also include a story of the cell “donor.” How else could the foundation
garner interest? The cell line discovery story needed to also be a
personal story. In a letter to Gartler, Berg explained that it was
“axiomatic in presenting this type of material to the public that to
inform them you must also interest them. As one who has been writing
for the public for the past fifteen years in this field, I have learned
that you do not engage the attention of the reader unless your story
has basic human-interest elements. And the story of the HeLa cells,
from what little I know of it now, has all those elements” (Berg,
1953). Thus, since the cells’ “discovery,” foundations, science
journalists, science studies and cultural studies scholars, and even
(or especially) the scientists who have used her cells to further their
own research have told and retold stories of Henrietta Lacks and her
cells.
During this early period, however, race was not central to the HeLa
narratives (Landecker, 2007). In fact, the identity of the woman from
whom the cells originated was unclear and often misstated. Some authors
referred to her as Henrietta Lakes or Helen Lane; others named her
Helen L. Even as Roland Berg attempted to convince Gey to reveal the
woman’s background publically, he referred to her as “Mrs. Lakes”
(Berg, 1953). Further, because Lacks was not explicitly described as
black, she was assumed by most to be a white woman, as the Foundation
for Infantile Paralysis no doubt tacitly implied—the “unsung heroine of
medicine” (Landecker, 2007, p. 164). Indeed, Berg wrote, “Here is a
situation where cancer cells—potential destroyers of human life—have
been channeled by medical science to a new, beneficent course, that of
aiding the fight against another disease” (Berg, 1953). In science
literature, “HeLa” began to refer not to the specific cancerous cells
of a black woman’s cervix, but to the universal, “generalized human or
cellular subject” (Landecker, 2007, p. 165). Even Gey’s attempt to keep
Lacks’s name and information private contributed to the fabrication of
this symbolic woman. He assured Berg, “an interesting story could still
be built around a fictitious name” (Gey, 1953). In this period, HeLa’s
was a story of how any individual—presumably, of course, a white
individual—could contribute to scientific advancement and, thus, the
progress of the nation. This raises the question of how the HeLa cell
line became racially fixed as black.
Rebecca Skloot’s now widely read and critiqued book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
(2011), had a chapter on this particular moment—the 1966 Second
Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture—yet she
did not elaborate on its cultural and political significance. She,
however, recognized that it was an important event in the scientific
community and thus named the five-page chapter she dedicated to it,
“The HeLa Bomb,” appropriating the term scientists used informally to
refer to the scandal of HeLa contamination.
Race, specifically
blackness, was at the center of Gartler’s presentation. In his
research, he had compared both phenotypes and genotypes of twenty
sample cell lines and found them to be sharing the same phenotype
variations. More specifically, of the two principal variants, the
samples had a type that appeared most frequently in the “American Negro
male population” (Gartler, 1968, p. 750). In March 1966, Gartler wrote
to Gey to confirm the race of the woman from whom the HeLa cells were
taken and concluded, “I have not ascertained the racial origin of all
the lines examined; it is known, however, that at least some were
thought to have been derived from Caucasians (KB, WISH, Prostate, CMP) and at least one (HeLa) from a Negro” (Gartler, 1968, p. 750).7 Through
the framework of racial biostatistics, Gartler concluded that the
sample cell lines had been taken over by HeLa cells and marked by a
phenotype most commonly held by black men. He made no comment about any
sex discrepancy. Instead, the narrative told by cell culture scientists
and popular science journalists was one of white cells vulnerable to
contamination and disappearance by aggressive, duplicitous black cells.8 Prudent
scientists should be vigilant of the cell lines and tissue cultures in
their own laboratory, the narrative warned. Gartler argued that much
of the work using cell lines that assumed a particular origin was “open
to serious question…[and] would be best discarded” (p.
175).
Upon HeLa’s unveiling, many researchers and funders were concerned
about the validity of their work. Popular science journalist Michael
Rogers reported, “Careers had been built on the basis of human tissue
culture research, papers written and published, grants and fellowships
received—and now, abruptly arose the possibility that the fundamental
unit of study might not have been even vaguely what it was supposed to
be” (1976, p. 50). However, scientists’ reactions to HeLa cells passing were
also affected by socio-cultural imaginaries. The fallout from Gartler’s
accusation blurred the lines between the professional, the personal,
and the ideals and practices of disinterested scientific inquiry for
the cell tissue community and the biotechnology industrial complex more
broadly.
For example, during the conference, one of the affected cell lines that
Gartler identified was fellow scientist Leonard Hayflick’s WISH
line, which was derived from tissue originally in the amniotic sac of Hayflick’s infant daughter. Upon hearing Gartler’s
presentation, Hayflick’s concern for his cell line turned to racial
paranoia. Worried about the possibility of in vivo rather than in vitro
contamination, he called his wife during the conference break to ask
whether he was, in fact, his daughter’s biological father. As he retold
the anecdote during his own presentation, “She assured me that my worst
fears were unfounded” (Skloot, 2011, p. 156). The room, reportedly,
“erupted in laughter, and no one said anything else publicly about
Gartler’s findings” (Skloot, 2011, p. 156). Racial and sexual anxiety
turned to comedy as the threat of miscegenation was temporarily covered
over. It was not just that HeLa appeared to the scientific community as
a passing actant, but that it had the capacity to make passing subjects
out of others—for example, Hayflick’s daughter.
The link between HeLa contamination and the destruction of professional
careers and scientific progress emerged through the racialization,
gendering, and hypersexualization of both the cells and their human
source. Suturing the cells to the subject, this anthropomorphism drew
from tropes of black female hypersexuality and labor. The narratives
were rampant in popular science journalism, but also existed in the
traffic between scientists, science journalism, and cultural studies.
One journalist wrote that for a cell culture lab to receive a letter
from Walter Nelson-Rees, a cell culturist who dedicated his work to the
detection of HeLa contamination, was like receiving “a note from the
school nurse informing the parents that little Darlene had VD” (Michael
Gold, quoted in Landecker, 2007, p. 172). In an essay for the London Review of Books,
novelist Anne Enright recounted a series of websites that explained how
to detect the papillomavirus DNA in HeLa cells. She reflected, “I think
this means that Henrietta Lacks had genital warts. I think this means that she slept around” (Enright, 2000, p. 9, emphasis in original). Additionally, in an article for the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia,
cellular biologist Lisa Weasel described HeLa cells as “a laboratory
workhorse” that, although unreliable, performed the role of control
group (Weasel, 2004, p. 185). HeLa and Henrietta Lacks were
contagious and were so together because of the discursive slippage
between the narratives of the cellular material and the woman as
subject. As Michael Rogers’s particularly sensationalist journalistic
account of HeLa contamination argued, “In life, the HeLa source had
been black and female. Even as a single layer of cells in a tissue
culture laboratory, she remains so” (1976, p. 50).
These tropes animated scientific discourse as well. For example, in an
interview with Michael Rogers, Nelson-Rees underscored just how
toilsome the task had become, acknowledging, “I hoped I’d never have to
look another HeLa in the face” (Rogers, 1976, p. 51). If the cells had
at one time signified the universal human cellular subject, the
unveiling of their passing resulted in a confrontation between
scientists and the particularities of their object of study. Racial
phobia and its concomitant desires manifested in a black woman’s face
returning the gaze. The uncanny moment of the passing object violently
and obscenely ruptures any assumptions of science’s inherent goodness.
In returning to the question of how the uncovering of this cell line
came into discourse through a bomb metaphor, one must ask after the
biopolitical work that this metaphor enacts. To take the bellicose
reference literally is to assume the HeLa passing as a warlike moment
in the midst of the compiling of biomaterials for medical research. As
the basis for his argument about biopolitics, Michel Foucault insisted
that medicine itself is “a political intervention-technique with
specific power-effects” (2003, p. 252). The underlying biopolitics of
defending society is a matter of “destroying that [sort] of biological
threat that those people over there represent to our race” (Foucault,
2003, p. 257). Thus, to think of the HeLa passing as a bomb within the
historical context of the time—1966—is to think the passing threat
together with other bomb threats and detonations of the time: the Cuban
Missile Crisis in 1962, the escalation of the Vietnam War between 1963
and 1969, and the bomb that ripped through Birmingham’s 16th St. Church
in 1963. During the Cold War and black uprisings against Jim Crow, the
threat of a nuclear bomb encouraged duck and cover practices and
hypervigilance against the communist that might be lurking in our own
backyard—“Red Under the Bed.” The metaphor projects the threat of a
black woman and worker, who passes undetected in the sample of cervical
cells. Within the passing narrative, HeLa threatens the sort of
categorization necessary for biopolitics of the sovereign state and for
the integrity and coherency of the individual, knowing subject. Within
the context of war, the threat of HeLa passing constituted the
possibility of not knowing who the other was, not knowing how to
identify and target the other or, even worse, to discover that one was
the other.9
With this frame of reference, surveillance and regulation become critical techniques
that bind medicine and science to a larger national and geopolitical
project—one that biologists see themselves as taking on. For example,
in an article in Science,
journalist Rhitu Chatterjee refered to Roland Nardone, a cell biologist
at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC as “the Paul
Revere of cell contamination” (Chatterjee, 2007, p. 929). To this day,
so critical is the threat of contamination that Nardone authored and
widely
disseminated a white paper titled, “Eradication of Cross-Contaminated
Cell Lines: A Call for Action” in which he characterized the 1970s as a
decade full of “revelations” of cell contamination and “concealment of
knowledge [of wide spread contamination] and manipulation [of results]
through editing” (Nardone, 2007, p. 2). Washington reporter David
Dickson wrote that the reluctance to authenticate cell samples resulted
in “corruption of scientific literature…forgery…falsifying data…fraud
against the federal government…[and] a criminal offense” (Dickson,
cited in Nardone, 2007, p. 2). Nardone recommended that government,
private funding
institutions, scientific journals, professional societies, laboratory
directors, and academic department heads contribute to the surveillance
and authentication of cell samples (Nardone, 2007, p. 4). In these
ways, scientific practice and the practices and ideologies of
nationalism and accumulation are mutually informed phenomena.
What
is more, this form of knowledge production must be understood as a
moral task that enables the proliferation of the human over the
unpredictability of nature and its objects. The epigraph to Michael Gold’s book, A Conspiracy of Cells,
cites Francis Bacon on this ethics of knowing: “If a man will begin
with certainties, he shall end in doubts; But if he will be content to
begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties” (Gold, 1986). The
quotation is placed opposite a full-length image of Henrietta Lacks in
a suit with her hands on her hips. The promise of modern scientific
research invokes a moral disposition towards knowing; it asserts that
one be humble, that one make no assumptions. This particular ethics of
knowing begins with a presumption of humility and gives rise to a
deserving subject capable of knowing the truth about the world itself as object.10
However, Gold’s use of Bacon’s quotation to offer a solution to HeLa
contamination disavows the ethic’s epistemological investment in
mastery. I am reminded of another Francis Bacon quotation that feminist
scholar Anne McClintock underscores: “My only earthly wish…is to
stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the
universe to their promised bounds…leading to you Nature with all her
children to bind her to your service and make her your slave”
(McClintock, 1995, p. 23). Bacon’s remark reveals modern science’s
colonial underpinnings by positing a female and othered Nature to be
discovered by and contained under the dominion of Europe’s man. Bacon’s
sentiment is rooted in what McClintock calls “porno-tropics,” a
structure of colonial epistemology that allows the knowing subject to
project his fantasies, desires, taboos, and phobias onto the colonial
space ripe for discovery and mastery (1995, p. 23). To have dominion
over and make visible its veiled, feminized interior is to “know” or be
certain about the occulted other. As such, Nature and women occupy a
similar position in colonial and scientific discourse—each existing for
the sole purpose of being known and thus possessed, contained, and
enjoyed. This process of knowledge accumulation is not a
disinterested practice of empiricism but a psycho-political-economic
acting out of the phantasy of mastery.
The biopolitics that shape scientists’ search for HeLa contamination
and journalists’ actions in retelling the story of Henrietta Lacks and
the HeLa cells must also be read alongside patterns of black
surveillance in the US. The term “passing” emerges in antebellum
runaway slave narratives about the “tendency” of black slaves to pass
themselves off as free to escape bondage.11 Some
did so by literally forging paper passes, while others tried hiding
their blackness from public perception by passing for white, for
native, or for immigrant. The passing
slave was a fugitive slave. Thus, the passing accusation is one form of
unveiling, which assumes that the most important properties of a black
subject/object are fugitivity and fraud. In the more contemporary case
of Henrietta
Lacks, both scientists and science journalists used her blackness and
her sexuality to describe the cells’ tendency to be out-of-control and
deceptive. Nonetheless, in their practice of detecting HeLa, scientists
and journalists cannot rely on the visual to confirm the cells’ racial
“truth.” Cellular biologists track this interiority through the
material “data” of Lacks’s cells. The centrality of visual evidence in
scientific progress maintains that the regulatory technique of
unveiling has become more precise in identifying, grasping the truth of
the subject or matter, and tracing its every move. The western gaze is
taken up in DNA fingerprinting, a practice science journalist Rithu
Chatterjee argued “has become the standard tool for authenticating cell
lines” as well as identifying criminal and foreign bodies (2007, p.
929). The “digital epidermalization” of biometric surveillance
renders bodies as racialized, “digitized code,” demanding that they
respond to the questions, “Who are you?” and “Are you who you say you
are?” (Brown, 2015, p. 109).
While the HeLa passing emerges as a crisis of security and instability,
the passing narrative works to contain and regulate the incalculability
and unwieldiness of blackness, gender, and sexuality. The accusation of
passing reasserts the human’s ability, even its moral imperative, to
trace and manage nature’s order of things so that they might not ever
unexpectedly “stare you in the face.” Thus, Gartler’s revelation of
HeLa contamination was, paradoxically, a story of the stability and
predictability of other noncancerous human cells. The 1966
presentation concluded with just this argument. He reasserted that his
findings demonstrated “the remarkable stability of normal human
cultures, that is, the virtual absence of spontaneous cellular
transformation among them” (Gartler, 1968, p. 175). Gartler suggested
that “the incorporation of stable
genetic markers in material to be cultured is the best guarantee
against contamination” (Gartler, 1968, p. 175, my emphasis). What
scientists needed to do was identify and categorize the stable cell
characteristics that would also allow them to grasp the truth of the
cell (and limit black female sexuality). Once this was accomplished,
there would be no cases of “mistaken identity” or “identity theft,” as
Chatterjee would later describe the HeLa phenomenon (Chatterjee, 2007).
Unveiling new biocitizens
A more recent iteration of unveiling occurred in 2013 when German
scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory published the
HeLa genome in an article titled “The Genomic and Transcriptomic
Landscape of a HeLa Cell Line” (Landry et al., 2013). The paper was
widely available on the Internet and the scientists had not consulted
the Lacks family before publishing. At the same time, the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a study by University of Washington
researchers, who had also sequenced the HeLa genome and were about to
publish it in the journal Nature,
when public outrage erupted. NIH Director Francis Collins
acknowledged that the study’s principal investigators should have
discussed their plans with the Lacks family even before seeking funding
to begin their project. The German researchers pointed out that they
had followed the ethical standards set for genomic research in
publishing their findings. They did, however, apologize for publishing
them given the conditions under which the HeLa cells were initially
harvested. It is true; scientists are not required to seek informed
consent from a donor to publish their genome sequencing. Nonetheless,
the HeLa case was special, as almost everyone (the NIH, the genome
community, science journalists, the editorial board of the New York Times)
agreed. It was special even though Henrietta Lacks was but one of many
persons whose biomaterials have been taken for scientific use without
their knowledge.
Francis Collins moved quickly to address the bioethical concern by
meeting with the Lacks family. The parties agreed
that in the future, researchers who wanted to work with the HeLa genome
could apply for the data stored in the NIH’s database of genotypes and
phenotypes. In addition, the NIH would form a HeLa Genome Data Access
working group, which would review the applications and require
researchers to submit annual reports of their work. Finally, two Lacks
family members would participate in the working group. When a family
member asked about financial restitution for the use of the genome and
about profits from the use of commercial products derived from the
genome, Collins insisted that this could not happen. Nature
reported, “[d]irectly paying the family was not on the table, but
[Collins] and his advisers tried to think of other ways the family
could benefit, such as patenting a genetic test for cancer based on
HeLa-cell mutations. They could not think of any” (Callaway, 2013, p.
133). What resulted from the Collins deal is an arrangement in which
descendants of Henrietta Lacks were to contribute to scientific inquiry
by participating in the ritual of giving or refusing consent to
researchers wishing to use her body (parts) for the public good. At the
same time that the family’s inclusion became institutionalized, any
notion of reparations was denied.
Participatory initiatives have often been taken up as a solution to
science’s etho-political crisis and its historical relationship to
certain killable subjects and useful bodies and body parts. However,
the family’s participation emerges through the research establishment’s
response to yet another unveiling of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa via the
publication of the HeLa genome. The family was concerned the
publication exposed, once again, Lacks’s identity, but it also exposed
the medical research establishment’s inability to prevent further
injury. We can consider this moment in which the HeLa Genome Data
Access working group was formed as a result of what Sheila Jasanoff
calls “bioconstitutionalism.” These are moments of negotiation that
“redefine the obligations of the state in relation to lives in its
care” (Jasanoff, 2011, p. 3). The term reflects a liberal tradition in
which a state is sovereign over its polity to the extent that it is
able to ensure security. The dynamic is evident in a published
interview with Patricia King, the head of the National Commission for
the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research
(2004). Discussing guidelines for increasing African Americans’
participation in clinical studies, King pointed to a tension between
pushing for inclusion in science and offering protection from science.
She comments, “I think that we just haven’t been able to figure out yet
how to include people without putting them at more risk than we want to
put them” (2004, p. 11). Thus, the bioconstitutional moment is one that
pieces together biopolitical needs of the state with those of the
individual. National security dictates that the state must invest in
medical research but must also reduce risk, for example, by protecting
the privacy of individual participants. This dynamic includes a series
of public unveilings (published medical research, knowledge production,
and data sharing) and re-veilings (reifying and protecting individual
identity, labor relations in research, and desire and pleasure in
colonial underpinnings) as constituting a liberal ethics of knowing, or
as research bioethics.
The multiple acts of veiling and unveiling make possible the
contemporary biopolitical social contract, which does not merely
encourage participation but requires it. As research continues to be
privatized, neoliberal biocitizens must ensure their own protection,
and are thus responsible for their own health outcomes. Sociologist
Nikolas Rose argued, “our somatic, corporeal neurochemical
individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence, and
responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation, and so to a
politics of life itself” (2007, p. 8). As emergent members of the body
politic, black people have both the entrepreneurial responsibility to
manage our own individual health and to further the nation’s collective
biosecurity. Because it favors the individual’s responsibility to keep
their body alive, this formation forgoes the possibility of addressing
collective historical trauma. Instead, the narrative frames
participation as a moral imperative, which designates those who
cooperate as civilized. For the good of the individual and the state,
the message proclaims, one must not stand in the way of research.
In the case of HeLa research, Skloot’s advocating for “justice” and
protection for the Lacks family was also an attempt to make the case
that family members supported scientific progress and the public good
and simply wanted to be informed of and consent to their participation.
For example, in her 2013 opinion piece for the New York Times,
she argued that “[t]he Lacks family is proud of HeLa’s contributions to
society, and they don’t want to stop HeLa research. But they do want to
learn about the HeLa genome—how it can be used for the good of science
while still protecting the family’s privacy—so they can decide whether
to consent to its publication” (Skloot, 2013). In this rendition of the
contract, new biocitizens come into being, or are unveiled, in their
capacity to own themselves—their body parts, their biomaterial—and in
their capacity to “gift” their bodies to science. In managing these
economies of exchange and inclusion, liberalism sets up its bioethical
dilemma—when does one’s right to research infringe upon another’s right
to protect themselves from the risks of research? This article’s goal
is not to prescribe the right balance but to underscore what the
question itself forecloses. What is not acceptable, and what becomes
transgressive in this scenario, is a politics of refusal.
The bioconstitutional moment is a coercive and violent one as Henrietta
Lacks and her family are repeatedly interpellated as biopolitical
subjects through the act of participation. As cultural studies scholar
Karla Holloway wrote, “The experiences of women and black Americans are
particularly vulnerable to public unveiling” (2011, p. 9). HeLa has
become the exemplary case for examining the bioethics of cell tissue
and genomics research, particularly with regard to informed consent, in
the same way the Tuskegee syphilis experiment signals the worst-case
scenario of bioethical risks in US clinical trials. Fantasies and
phobias around deviant black sexuality overdetermine who must represent
subjects of injury. The result is both epistemological and material
violence for those expected to be science’s continuously productive
subjects. In his 1953 letter to Gey, Berg perhaps unwittingly named the
heart of the matter. HeLa is required to repeatedly perform as the
example par excellence of
science research’s progress and risks because of the racial passing and
contamination accusations unleashed on them. A major concern following
the 2013 genome unveiling is the extent to which the privacy of
Henrietta Lacks and her family, already public icons, can be managed.
As Skloot argued in the Times,
“[the family members] want researchers to acknowledge that HeLa cells
are not anonymous and should be treated accordingly” (Skloot, 2013).
The comment underscores the reason this case has become special: there
is already no hope for anonymity.
In reading Skloot’s comment against the grain, one could conclude that anonymity is not the same as privacy. The Oxford English Dictionary
defines anonymity as “a lack of outstanding, individual, or unusual
features.” To be anonymous is to be able to escape the particularizing
surveillance of the racial biometric regime. Accordingly, one might
read anonymity as that which makes possible the universal human with
all his privileges, autonomy, and rational decision-making. That is,
anonymous cells are those that are able to stand in for the universal
or human cellular subject rather than stare back at scientists with a
confrontational and particularizing gaze. We might understand anonymity
as a prerequisite not just for the status of human but also for the
status of the liberal biocitizen, which, as Holloway (2011) notes, has
full capacity to negotiate privacy. In this regard, privacy as an
extension of citizenship refers to the right of the autonomous subject,
the individual citizen who has the right to privacy, to private
property, and even to his/her own body as property. Privacy becomes a
critical component of liberal risk reduction. However, HeLa has no hope for
anonymity, just as black subjects more broadly lack access to
anonymity.
What, then, is to be made of a call for refusal?12 Further,
what is to be made of a black public that refuses to participate
especially when the health-care systems pay little attention to the
ongoing trauma of colonialism and the after life of chattel slavery as
fundamental to collective wellness?
This is the sort of exchange that does not play by the rules of the
health market’s regulation of individual moral virtues. Requests for
reparations from institutions of knowledge production are often seen as
“getting in the way” of knowing and as affronts to colonial science,
the nation, and the universal subject.13 The demand for reparations
troubles the notion of the inherent good of science and the gestures of
inclusion that liberal multicultural scientists and policymakers have
made toward black subjects, including the Lacks.
Vital passages and an ethical practice of knowing
With regard to the researcher, what might an ethical practice of
knowing look like? This might be one that does not only acknowledge
others’ refusal but is also complicit in it. Additionally, ethical
learning must be willfully permeable to contamination. This is not a
contamination that assumes whiteness as vulnerable and black or brown
bodies as always already contaminated, such that ongoing lead
contamination in Flint, Michigan or uranium contamination on Navajo
lands remains invisible. It is rather an openness to contaminate an
epistemology that relies on the equivalence of knowing and mastery and
disavows the violence this produces. It is also a call for openness to
temporal contamination, which troubles the teleological narrative of
progress with regard to knowledge production.
To turn to the question of temporality, and specifically immortality,
and to blur the boundaries between its figurative and material
instantiations, one might take seriously the proposition of “The Immortal
Life of Henrietta Lacks” (my emphasis). However, this consideration
must deviate from the way in which Skloot and others have trafficked in
“immortality” for sensationalist ends. Instead, this ethical
consideration refuses to dismiss the Lacks family’s concerns as
scientific illiteracy. It also refuses to anthropomorphize the cells.
Certainly, scholars like Priscilla Wald were right to insist that the
cells are not “Lacks herself,” yet this argument will be always already
too late (2012, p. 202). The HeLa cells, once fixed as black and thus
incapable of anonymity, continue to be animated by the iconicity of
Henrietta Lacks as a sign of black female hypersexuality. However, taking
seriously the concerns that the HeLa cells are an instantiation of
Henrietta Lacks opens up a different truth. It allows one to return to
the violence of the act of colonial unveiling (the bomb), to HeLa’s
confrontational “stare,” and to the radical potential of the object. As
Toni Morrison warned us in her novel, Beloved (1988), nothing ever really dies.
Thus, what if the cells are, in fact, black, uncontrollable, unreliable, and
contaminating? For example, the gender assigned to the cells in many
narratives change, as each discursive passage animates them in
different ways. In the 1950s, HeLa was understood as an example of the
universal human subject—cells from a white woman. Then, in 1966,
Gartler’s statistical analysis of the cells briefly included them in
the category “Negro male population.” Finally, once the cells were
fixed to Henrietta Lacks, scientists, science journalists, and others
began describing the cells as hypersexual, black, and female. The ease
with which the public has attached different genders to the cells has
not received much attention. The fungibility of blackness and the
cells as both laborer and commodity allow for HeLa to move fluidly (perhaps fugitively)
through a variety of raced and gendered positions. As scholar Saidiya
Hartman argued this fluidity enables “the black body…to serve as the
vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment”
(Hartman, 1997, p. 26). On the other hand, blackness as a contaminating
agent refuses to be “containable within a given trajectory of movement
and desire” (Chen, 2012, p. 178). This is a politics of refusal that
stages HeLa as a “bad object.” The cells not only create a momentary
crisis of paternity for Hayflick’s daughter, but also threaten to make
the child a passing actant herself. This is something black cells are
still wont to do, as can be attested by Jennifer Cramblett, a white
woman who filed a lawsuit against Midwest Sperm Bank in 2014 for
“wrongful birth” after it unwittingly impregnated her with sperm from a
black donor (Cuevas, 2014).
Considering the immortality of HeLa and Henrietta Lacks together
demands an encounter with the pain of their fixation, constant
unveiling, and fetishized consumption. As black feminist scholar M.
Jacqui Alexander described, affect survived the Middle Passage even
when ancestors did not. She wrote, “Not only humans made the Crossing,
traveling only in one direction through Ocean given the name Atlantic.
Grief traveled as well” (Alexander, 2005, p. 289). This is the case in spite of
institutional efforts to leave the past behind. Countering this
narrative of progress, HeLa becomes a temporal and affective force of
accumulation that shatters or explodes the integrity of black
subjectivity in each moment it is publically unveiled.14 Each
passing of HeLa, each HeLa “bomb,” ruptures linear biopolitics, making
“the past” palpable, material, and confrontational. To argue that HeLa
is an uncanny temporal force, then, is not to simply say that the cells
offer an alternative vision of time. Instead, HeLa becomes a worlding
force that troubles any notion of linear biopolitical time by violently
demanding that the boundaries between “past,” “present,” and “future”
be called into question. HeLa’s animacy resides in the affective,
material power of memory, in what physicist and feminist scholar Karen
Barad called “the very nature of spacetimemattering” (2011, p.
29).
In forging an ethical practice of knowing we might take away some
important considerations. Because history, with all its seeping wounds,
endures in the material, we must take seriously its multiple forms of
entanglement and specific material relationships. We must do this not
in simply observing or measuring an other, nor in affecting an other,
but in the ways the other is already in us. This ethics of learning,
then, consists in taking seriously the politics of refusal in which
HeLa engages when evading containment. It requires a will towards
understanding the self and its time as contaminated. At last, this
openness to learning as permeability and contamination is a risk that
cannot be managed.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Tala Khanmalek, James Battle, Herman Gray, and Jennifer
Reardon for their invaluable comments, questions, and inspiration and
to the UC Santa Cruz Science and Justice Research Center.
Notes
1 “[S]cientists
who were at the conference where Gartler made his initial presentation,
and others who were active in the field at the time,” used this term.
Quoted from the author’s personal correspondence with Rebecca Skloot on
27 March 2015.
2 See the following novels written in the early twentieth century: Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1993), Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1999), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1995), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (2001). Examples of films extending into the late twentieth century include Imitation of Life (1959), Pinky (1949), Illusions (1982), and True Identity (1991).
3 Take,
for example, Rudolph P. Byrd’s and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s note (2011)
about Jean Toomer passing in which they speculated about Toomer’s
motivations with regard to social mobility and ideological and literary
movements. Additionally, scholar Gayle Wald provides an account of
black folks’ refusal to pass and the intelligibility of black American
identity within the national body politic (2000). Scholars of trans
politics also debate the strategy of passing. For example, Sandy Stone
calls for a radical refusal to pass: “Transsexuals who pass seem able
to ignore the fact that by creating totalized, monistic identities,
forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality, they have foreclosed
the possibility of authentic relationships. Under the principle of
passing, denying the destabilizing power of being ‘read,’ relationships
begin as lies… transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their
history, to begin to rearticulate their lives not as a series of
erasures in the service of a species of feminism conceived from within
a traditional frame, but as a political action begun by reappropriating
difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed
body” (1992, p. 170). In contrast, C. Riley Snorton (2009) highlights
the radical promise of trans passing.
4 There is
abundant literature on race and genomics, for example, but the effort
has often been led by science and technology social scientists and
published in humanities or social science focused mediums. See, for
example, the writings of Fullwiley (2008), Roberts (2014), Duster
(2005), TallBear (2013), and Reardon (2009). Some scientists such as
Lisa Weasel, a cell and molecular biologist, have addressed these
intersections yet this scholarship is also often published in
humanities or social science focused journals. However, there are
exceptions in journals that address the cross sections of biology,
health, and the social. See for example Ruha Benjamin and Ian
McGonigle’s “Molecularization of Identity” (2016) in Genetics Research, Sarah Franklin’s “Culturing Biology” (2001) in Health, Lisa Parker’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Feminist Themes, and Research Ethics” (2012) in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and Priscilla Wald’s “The Art of Medicine: Cognitive Estrangement, Science Fiction, and Medical Ethics” (2008) in The Lancet.
5 As an
example, George Gey’s personal files contain his lab notes and
peer-reviewed articles on the possible cellular sources of cancer, as
well as newspaper clippings about his laboratory and his personal and
professional life, human interest stories on the discovery of HeLa
cells and Henrietta Lacks, and correspondence with funders that
discussed the importance of Lacks’s story to garner additional research
funding.
6 I analyze race
and gender together to underscore how subjects are always passed in
terms of both, not one or the other. More than making an argument about
intersectionality, I am gesturing along the lines of Frantz Fanon
(2008), Hortense Spillers (1987), and Saidiya Hartman (1997), that
subjects emerge (they pass) as a racialized gender or a gendered race,
that there are multiple race/genders that emerge both materially and
discursively. For example, Spillers argues that black women are passed
for “‘Peaches’ and Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ [and]
‘Aunty,’” and against the expectations of a variety of white womanhoods
(1987, p. 65). HeLa, of course, is passed within this same American
grammar.
7 On April 1,
1966, Gey responded to Gartler's inquiry noting that the HeLa cell line initiated from "the cervix in a colored woman
aged 31 years” (Gey, 1966).
8 See Rogers (1976) for an example of this and Landecker (2007) for a critique.
9 One key
component of sovereignty theories, from those by Jean Bodin, Thomas
Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to those of Immanuel
Kant, is that of identifying who is a member of the body politic held
together through the social contract. The making of the sovereign is a
constant, delineating practice of identification. See, for example,
Bodin (1992), Kant (1983), and Rousseau (2011).
10 For examples
of earlier writing on this form of knowing in the world and the sort of
subject to which it gives form, see Heidegger (1977) and Foucault
(1970).
11 See, for example, Marshall (2010), Johnson (2000), Waldstreicher (1999), Smith and Wojtowicz (1989), and McCaskill (1994).
12 For a thorough discussion of refusal see Benjamin (2016) and (2013), Reardon and TallBear (2012), and Simpson (2007).
13 For example, see the case of Farmer-Paellmann v. FleetBoston in Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA (2016, p. 121-140).
14 See Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.
“Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so
that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of
rough edges, would…put me back in the world…Nothing doing. I explode.
Here are the fragments put together by another me” (2008, p. 89).
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Bio
Sandra Harvey is
a PhD candidate in Politics with a designated emphasis in Feminist
Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her scholarship
investigates the production of race and gender through surveillance
technologies originating in colonialism and chattel slavery. Her
dissertation, Passing for Free, Passing for Sovereign, traces
narratives of race/gender passing as they emerge in science, settler
colonial law, conceptual art, and Enlightenment philosophy.