The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
In 1951, an impoverished young black woman named Henrietta Lacks developed a case of cervical cancer so vicious that, 50 years later, her attending physician still remembered the tumor. Before the woman died in the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital, scientists collected a tissue sample from the mass and put it in a lab dish. For years they had tried and mostly failed to grow human cells in culture. To their amazement, Lacks’s cells grew and divided, grew and divided; fed the proper nutrients, they doubled relentlessly every 24 hours. To this day, "HeLa" cells are wildly popular for research on everything from cancer drugs to environmental toxins. As Lacks’s daughter Deborah tells the journalist Rebecca Skloot, "Them cells are still livin’ today, still multiplyin’, still growin’ and spreadin’." The reader learns all this and much more thanks to Skloot’s remarkable reporting in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks , which tells the full story of these cells: from the obscure life of their tobacco-farmer originator, to the laboratories around the world where the cells live on, to their legacy for the Lacks family today. We all have HeLa cells to thank for their role in developing the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, and drugs to treat AIDS, among many other advances. They have also played a critical role in the rise of environmental medicine by broadening our understanding of how factors outside the body affect our individual health. HeLa cells were used to document how gamma rays and an endless stream of toxins, hormones, and environmental stressors assault human cells and DNA. The field of toxicology is rapidly changing, and HeLa has been there every step of the way. Researchers are now looking beyond how external agents cause obvious DNA mutations to discover how our environment triggers epigenetic changes — that is, how genes in "normal" DNA can be turned off and on in ways that make us behave differently, metabolize differently, and become ill in much sneakier fashion. Skloot is particularly concerned with the human story behind HeLa and the ethical issues it raises. Lacks never gave permission for her cells to be used in research, and for decades her children had no clue that a part of their mother was still very much alive. While biotech and pharmaceutical companies made billions from selling HeLa or the drugs made possible by HeLa cells, many of Lacks’s human descendants suffered, with no health insurance, from undertreated medical conditions. Even today, as Skloot notes, medical patients have surprisingly few legal rights when it comes to their tissue samples, which may be stored without consent and then used for research, even when those tissues contain genetic information with the potential to generate enormous profits. In a world where genes are now patented, living tissues become one more commodity. In the story of HeLa, Skloot has unearthed a fascinating — and landmark — instance of the way in which environmental ethics and medical ethics overlap. In effect, Skloot wonders aloud, perhaps human cells should be treated not like garbage but like natural resources to be managed and respected. In one moving scene, two of Lacks’s children meet Christoph Lengauer, a scientist at Johns Hopkins, who shows them what her "ethereal fluorescent green" cells look like under a microscope. Lengauer is the first medical professional to acknowledge aloud the shoddy way the family was treated. He tells them he thinks human cells should be handled like a Texas gusher: both the oil company and the landowner share the profits. Other experts have suggested managing cells like intellectual property, with royalties going to the owner, while still others believe nature’s material should remain in the public domain for all to use. At the very least, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks makes a strong case for the notion of informed consent, as our living tissues seed the rich new fields of genetic research.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
We Imagine a New Landscape
Realities even more fundamental than ideology and politics undergird American life: common sense and making an honest buck. Our current issue offers two superb examples. In our cover story, contributing editor Michael Behar takes us to a conservative redoubt in central California, where pumping oil and serving the military-industrial complex have for decades formed the foundation of the economy. But now, Kern County’s planners, developers, and landowners are constructing a new future built on solar and wind power and other forms of renewable energy — all driven by the pure, irresistible economic logic of these emerging technologies. County planner Lorelei Oviatt assists energy companies in placing their new projects on private, marginal land — for instance, arid, unproductive agricultural fields — in order to preserve public open spaces that citizens value for wildlife and solace. Behar observes Oviatt as she buoyantly navigates the messiness of democracy, capitalism, and property rights. Her success in consummating deals and breaking ground on new projects suggests a post-partisan pursuit of profit and public good simultaneously — a happy convergence of local self-interest and global self-preservation. We dispatched another contributing editor, Craig Canine (our resident gearhead), to profile a leading Japanese car company. Not the one much in the news lately for its quality-control problems. Rather, a quieter company that is less in the public eye but that may have done more than any other enterprise in the world to change the automotive landscape. Many, if not most, car experts see Honda as the supreme green vehicle manufacturer. The company has consistently been preeminent in fleetwide fuel efficiency, meaning that it earns kudos — and, by the way, healthy profits — not with a single eco-glamorous hybrid but across its entire line of cars. Canine describes a fascinating corporate culture that has remained true to its own idiosyncratic philosophy and resisted most of the American industry’s self-destructive delusions. At Honda’s U.S. headquarters and at the big LA Auto Show, Canine spoke to the company’s top brass and brainiac engineers for a glimpse of our automotive future. Hybrids? Plug-in electrics? Engines powered by hydrogen fuel cells? Canine reads the tea leaves. Finally, I direct your attention to two pieces simply because of the sheer pleasure they offer. Sharman Apt Russell has given us a funny, true account of her attempt to become the world’s leading expert on a common but remarkable beetle in her own backyard. We have also published a stunning portfolio by the photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel , who have spent almost a decade chronicling the often elusive, watery edges of New York City. Robert Sullivan has written an accompanying essay that guides readers through the history, geography, and significance of this border terrain. Taken together, all these stories help redefine our own conceptual borders — natural/man-made, conservative/progressive, professional/amateur — and beckon us to forge a better if less familiar path forward.
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We Imagine a New Landscape
Ohio Decides Coal Is a Bad Deal
On September 17, 2007, Andrew Wetzler walked into city hall in Oberlin, Ohio, to attend a meeting of the city council, fact sheets and presentation materials in hand. Earlier that year, Wetzler, an NRDC attorney, and other staff members from the newly formed Midwest office had fanned out to attend council meetings in nearly a dozen cities and towns across the state — from Oberlin to Westerville to Yellow Springs — to oppose the building of a new coal plant in Meigs County, in southeastern Ohio. The 960-megawatt coal-fired plant, proposed by American Municipal Power (AMP), would emit seven million tons of carbon dioxide each year. It would also pollute the air and water by releasing particulate matter, which can contribute to asthma and other respiratory problems, and sulfur dioxide, which can lead to acid rain. "It was a bad deal — environmentally and economically," says Shannon Fisk, an attorney in the Midwest office. AMP, an energy cooperative owned by its members — in this case, cities and towns across Ohio and neighboring states — wanted to finance the construction of the plant by locking member municipalities into long-term "take or pay" contracts. These contracts would require members not only to foot the bill for construction but also to commit to paying for the electricity the plant generated — no matter the cost. AMP assured its members that the plant would be relatively cheap to build and operate and provide an affordable source of electricity. But in reality, projected construction costs were rapidly rising and the expected operating costs were increasing significantly as well, thanks to the prospect of federal climate change legislation and new coal ash disposal rules, and a hike in the cost of coal. At the city council meetings, NRDC staffers made the case that the economics of building a new coal plant didn’t make as much sense in the long term as other available alternatives, such as wind and solar. Initially it looked like a losing battle, as city after city signed up with AMP despite NRDC’s advocacy efforts. "We knew we were up for a challenge in the heart of coal country," Fisk says. But in the fall of 2009, as AMP was preparing to break ground, its contractors estimated that construction of the new plant would be more than 167 percent higher than the initial projection in 2005, rising from $1.5 billion to nearly $4 billion. At a committee meeting in November 2009, AMP’s Ohio members decided to cancel the plant. Fisk believes that NRDC’s efforts laid the groundwork for community leaders to recognize a bad deal when they saw one. "Our message all along was that the plant would cost too much and that there were better alternatives," he says. "We were really the first ones to make this argument in Ohio." AMP’s plan for a new coal-fired power plant was one of 150 such proposals made during the Bush administration. As of today, 110 of them have been canceled. "People are realizing that the economic future of energy is in efficiency and renewables, not dirty nineteenth-century coal," says Fisk. NRDC is currently challenging another new coal-fired plant proposal in Ohio. Wetzler, who was living in Columbus in 2007, believes that having a presence in the Midwest helped NRDC achieve its goals. "I think we would have received a far chillier reception if we had flown in from Los Angeles or New York and tried telling these folks what to do," he says. The decision to cancel the plant could ultimately prove a boon to AMP’s Ohio members on several fronts. "There’s a great opportunity to make better choices here," says Thom Cmar, an NRDC staff attorney in Chicago. The plant was supposed to reduce members’ reliance on electricity from the wholesale market. But "saving energy through energy-efficiency programs is by far the cheapest option," says Dylan Sullivan, an NRDC energy advocate in Chicago. Ohioans will not only save money by not building the plant; they will also have one less source of pollution and carbon emissions fouling their air and water. "This is one more small step toward a sustainable energy future," says Cmar. "If it wasn’t for our willingness to really jump in and fight this thing on the ground, it wouldn’t have happened." Fisk believes that the decision to cancel the new plant sends a message far beyond Ohio. "It’s one thing when a state like California decides not to build a coal plant," he says. "But when a state in the heart of coal country decides not to do it — that’s a pretty strong statement."
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Canada’s Toxic Mess
Tar sands production in Alberta, Canada, has shot up considerably in recent years, from 482,000 barrels a day in 1995 to 1.3 million barrels a day in 2008, destroying bird habitat and leaving barren landscapes along the way. Some 205 square miles have been cleared or disturbed by mining operations, and tailing ponds cover more than 50 square miles. Pollution from tar sands development is monitored by an industry-and-government collaborative known as the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, or RAMP, which tests the Athabasca River and other waterways for the presence of toxic chemicals contained in bitumen — the semisolid form of oil that is extracted from the sands. OnEarth first reported on the effects of tar-sands mining in 2007 (" Canada’s Highway to Hell ," by Andrew Nikiforuk), and in December, a group of researchers led by David Schindler of the University of Alberta published a study that found RAMP’s estimates to be much too low. The molecules they detected indicate that some of the pollution clearly came from refineries, not from natural seeps. "The concentrations we found in the river are within the range known to be toxic to fish embryos," Schindler says.
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Canada’s Toxic Mess