Humans are curious creatures, composed of cells that originate from primitive cells, which evolved from atoms and molecules in the sea, brought by meteorites billions of years ago.¹ Yet evolutionarily, humans are a novelty: we have complex brains that allow us to think, self-reflect, and imagine. Our evolutionary path can be traced by our desire to categorize and conquer the world around us. What’s more, we have written books—scientific, fiction, and otherwise—to document discoveries and introduce inventive perspectives to further our understanding of life. 

One such book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which tells the story of an African American woman diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. Her cells were taken and experimented on without her consent, and continued to live and replicate after her death. Definitional pluralism erupted at this blurring of life and death. Were these cells still part of Henrietta, and if so, did that mean Henrietta was ‘alive’? Were her cells? Did she possess personhood? Did her cells? Part of the reason, I think, that these questions are so hard to answer is that they are so big and stupefying. They transcend biological rationality and elude our exceptionalism. 

By exceptionalism, I mean the artificial frameworks humans have created due to our widespread presence—systems, inventions, and institutions that reinforce the idea that humanity is fundamentally distinct from other species. Everywhere we look, the natural world is overrun by human constructs. We once cobbled wood and vines together to make refuge against harsh conditions; now, for the most part, we cobble funds to meet the inflating home prices. Water, previously found in rivers miles away, now gushes out of faucets at our convenience. Food, previously hunted and scavenged at risk of death, now comes in sealed packages on frozen aisles. Beyond these material changes, there’s the more intangible: religion has obscured the empirical nature of things and limited our engagement with the world [this should be, that needs to be this, etc] while politics has dampened our imaginative optimism and restricted openness to new ideas just for the sake of correctness. In other words, we are so physically and ideologically entrenched in our own business that our mentalities have become limited; so much so that whenever we encounter such a circumstance as Henrietta Lacks’ [i.e., human origin and death], we are left with nothing but our wits and morals.

Duly, in answering the first set of questions, ‘Was Henrietta Lacks still alive?’ and ‘Were her cells?’ it is important to look past human exceptionalism and use our wits to examine plain, biological facts. We live and die, just like any other organism on Earth, for billions of years. Yet we are not just an independent cluster of cells; we occupy a deeper, physical and conscious presence. We have a brain that registers our surroundings and a heart that gives life and direction to our cells and bodies. Once our heart ceases, however, all functionality stops, and our cells lose their unity. We return to the grim reality of evolution, of chemical spontaneity, rotting and decaying back into the environment, much like Henrietta Lacks after she perished from cancer in October of 1951. She ceased Living. But her cells continued to live, with a small l, while they were cultured. Why this capitalized distinction? Consider: our cells are full of proteins and nucleic acids that collectively enable them to live. Once these cells come together to form organs and body plans, however, I think life ascends trophically to Life, a purposeful state-of-being of interactions, innovations, and impulses [i.e., hunger, reproduction, and consciousness] where we are no longer bound entirely to the mechanics of natural selection. If Life dies, purposeful Living dies, and we lose our remarkable independence in this natural world. For instance, human cells specialize and replicate to form brains, which allow us to feel pain, engage in sensory experiences with the larger world, and shape our personalities. It is through these abilities that we share ourselves with the world, influencing others’ interpretations of us beyond just ‘functioning masses of cells,’ but as living, breathing organisms capable of biological synchrony. 

Similarly, there are questions of personhood: Did Henrietta Lacks possess it? Did her cells? Here, we must use our morals and acknowledge, rather than look past, our own exceptionalism. Why? Because society has filtered existential notions into digestible laws meant to serve the status quo, and ideas like personhood often become inseparable from institutions. We lose a sense of the true nature of things. Specifically, in the 1950s, personhood was distorted by the unregulated nature of medicine. When Henrietta Lacks was alive, her cells were taken and experimented on without her consent, as the U.S. health system had no established practices for informing patients when retrieving cell or tissue samples for research purposes. And so, her personhood suffered. The medical industry, driven by progress, immorally commodified her biology at the expense of her identity. Without being medically entrenched, however, we see that personhood in its most empirical sense is a biologically autonomous state of Life, unbent to institutions. But what of Henrietta Lacks’ cells after her death? Did they possess personhood? Well, they were living in the small ‘l’ sense and lacked the purposeful state-of-being of Life. So they themselves didn’t possess personhood. But this disqualification shouldn’t have made Henrietta’s cells free for poking and prodding. 

Morally speaking, it is not simply about what her cells were, but how they were in relation to their hosts. Just because Henrietta died doesn’t mean her cells should have been freely cultivated, because the scientists, so tethered to their medical institutions, never asked for consent. Here, medical exceptionalism proceeded in a similar manner as in Hursthouse’s Virtue Ethics and Abortion. She argues that ethical actions should be judged based on well-rounded demonstration of virtues and vices; focusing solely on whether a fetus, for instance, has personhood misses the larger ethical picture, because abortion, if permissible, can sometimes be callous or irresponsible depending on the context/virtues of the moral agent [1]. In Henrietta’s case, even if her HeLa cells didn’t possess personhood, the way they were taken and used without consent was still unethical and dishonorable – such actions were eventually remedied by the Belmont Report of 1979, which emphasized individual respect, beneficence, and justice to curb America’s medical exceptionalism. 

In this regard, then, when examining the case of Henrietta Lacks, the limits of human exceptionalism and its ethical dilemmas are recognized: while her cells continued to live biologically, her purposeful state of Life—her personhood—ended with her death. Yet, the medical industry, bound by institutional priorities rather than moral virtue, failed to respect her autonomy. This dilemma between living and Living, between biological function and conscious existence, I believe, compels us to continually use our wits, morals, and imaginations to reevaluate frameworks of ethics and identity. 

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1. Humans came to realize their stupefying insignificance early on, and it has confounded us ever since. In the 20th century, Stanley Miller and Urey Miller hypothesized that early Earth was bombarded by meteorites containing the necessary precursors to kick-start prokaryotic life. Baross and Hoffman went further and proposed the theory of hydrothermal vents, where life emerged from ‘Lost City’ vents formed by tectonic fissures and heated by serpentinization [water -> hydrogen gas via ferrous iron oxidation]. The hydrogen gas then traveled up the vents and, in carbonate pores, mingled with CO2 to form organic compounds. These organic compounds acted as precursors to modern RNA nucleotides, which then, over millions of years, synchronized with free-floating proteins, formed DNA for stability purposes, centralized peptide synthesis within pores, and then split off into archeal and bacterial lineages, evolving membranes and DNA replication, to roam the water. This unicellular life gave rise to multicellular forms, which itself encouraged primitive animals like amoeba, trilobites, sponges, and so forth. Eventually, life evolved into eclectic genetic and morphological sorts after the Cambrian explosion. Hundreds of millions of years later came the dinosaurs, the first mammals, great apes, hominins, and eventually, homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago. Or, more aptly speaking, 4.5397 billion years after Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago. ↩︎