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In the Interval of Surveillance, Contagion, and Immortality: Temporalities of Misery and Resistance in HeLa Research
Friday, June 2, 2017: 1:45 PM
BRESL 217 (Hofstra University)
This paper reads the narratives of HeLa cell contamination within a legacy of regimes of surveillance, containment, and mastery in US chattel slavery. On the margins of biological and genomic research narratives is the story of how the HeLa cells were harvested from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman and migrant from the South who died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins in 1951. The story of her cells’ reproduction and science’s use of them without her or her family’s consent is shaped by what Kara Keeling called a temporality of intervals that binds black colonial representation and reaction to it. The public emergence of the HeLa story within science and science journalism is compelled to refer simultaneously to the initial injury of the past, to the present state of her family’s lack of access to health care, and to a future immortality represented in the ability of the HeLa cells to reproduce continuously in vitro. The paper draws on a collection of correspondence, lab notes, published articles, and newspaper clippings related to Henrietta Lacks and HeLa from the George O. Gey Collection at the Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and articles on HeLa published in scientific journals, science journalism, and cultural studies articles (1950-present). Furthermore, this paper looks at the period of 1951 to 1980 and asks after the force of HeLa’s haunting between initial injury and immortal contamination to trouble the biopolitics of race, nation, and our failing attempts at historical redress.