Top 80 Rebecca Skloot Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

— Rebecca Skloot

2. “Like the Bible said,? Gary whispered, ’man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometimes we care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.”

— Rebecca Skloot

3. “When I tell people the story of Henrietta Lacks and her cells, their first question is usually Wasn’t it illegal for doctors to take Henrietta’s cells without her knowledge? Don’t doctors have to tell you when they use your cells in research? The answer is no – not in 1951, and not in 2009, when this book went to press. Today.”

— Rebecca Skloot

4. “Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.”

— Rebecca Skloot

5. “Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.”

— Rebecca Skloot

6. “I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.”

— Rebecca Skloot

7. “But normal human cells – either in culture or in the human body – can’t grow indefinitely like cancer cells. They divide only a finite number of times, then stop growing and begin to die. The number of times they can divide is a specific number called the Hayflick Limit, after Leonard Hayflick, who’d published a paper in 1961 showing that normal cells reach their limit when they’ve doubled about fifty times.”

— Rebecca Skloot

8. “I keep with me all I know about you deep in my soul, because I am part of you, and you are me.”

— Rebecca Skloot

9. “But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins’s relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks – a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.”

— Rebecca Skloot

10. “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.”

— Rebecca Skloot

11. “Whether you think the commercialization of medical research is good or bad depends on how into capitalism you are.”

— Rebecca Skloot

12. “Hopkins say they gave them cells away,” Lawrence yelled, “but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

— Rebecca Skloot

13. “But I tell you one thing, I don’t want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that’s just sad.”

— Rebecca Skloot

14. “But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime.”

— Rebecca Skloot

15. “Because of this history, black residents near Hopkins have long believed the hospital was built in a poor black neighborhood for the benefit of scientists – to give them easy access to potential research subjects. In fact, it was built for the benefit of Baltimore’s poor.”

— Rebecca Skloot

16. “Many doctors tested drugs on slaves and operated on them to develop new surgical techniques, often without using anesthesia. Fear.”

— Rebecca Skloot

17. “The term informed consent first appeared in court documents in 1957, in a civil court ruling on the case of a patient named Martin Salgo. He went under anesthesia for what he thought was a routine procedure and woke up permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The doctor hadn’t told him the procedure carried any risks at all. The.”

— Rebecca Skloot

18. “Though no law or code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient, the law made it very clear that performing an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without permission was illegal.”

— Rebecca Skloot

19. “Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. And as Howard Jones once wrote, “Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.”

— Rebecca Skloot

20. “As one of Henrietta’s relatives said to me, “If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest. It’s taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves.” In.”

— Rebecca Skloot

21. “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. – ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code.”

— Rebecca Skloot

22. “And when the Lord chooses an angel to do his work, you never know what they going to come back looking like.”

— Rebecca Skloot

23. “Southam’s research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who’d injected children with hepatitis and others who’d poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam’s study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists’ fears, the ethical crackdown didn’t slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa.”

— Rebecca Skloot

24. “Field studies have shown that ravens “call” wolves to large animals they find dead. Why invite wolves to dinner? Because, unlike birds of prey, the raven lacks a bill or talons designed to open a carcass. Someone else – wolf or human hunter or motor vehicle – needs to do the job. Magpies have been observed working with coyotes in much the same way as ravens work with wolves, and the canine hunters have learned to listen when corvids call.”

— Rebecca Skloot

25. “She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells – her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.”

— Rebecca Skloot

26. “HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years,” Defler said. Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, “She was a black woman.” He erased her name in one fast swipe and blew the chalk from his hands. Class was over.”

— Rebecca Skloot

27. “Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge.”

— Rebecca Skloot

28. “Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus – and at the very same time – that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.”

— Rebecca Skloot

29. “Sometimes I wonder, if somebody taught her sign language, maybe she’d still be alive.”

— Rebecca Skloot

30. “But more than anything, they worried that since everyone was using different media ingredients, recipes, cells, and techniques, and few knew their peers’ methods, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate one another’s experiments. And replication is an essential part of science: a discovery isn’t considered valid if others can’t repeat the work and get the same result.”

— Rebecca Skloot

31. “Sonny had a quintuple bypass in 2003, when he was fifty-six years old – the last thing he remembered before falling unconscious under the anesthesia was a doctor standing over him saying his mother’s cells were one of the most important things that had ever happened to medicine. Sonny woke up more than $125,000 in debt because he didn’t have health insurance to cover the surgery.”

— Rebecca Skloot

32. “Lefkowitz wrote, “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”

— Rebecca Skloot

33. “My wife is a fire dragon without morning coffee,′ he said. ‘I better go make some.’ It was two in the afternoon.”

— Rebecca Skloot

34. “Genetically speaking, humans are terrible research subjects. We’re genetically promiscuous – we mate with anyone we choose – and we don’t take kindly to scientists telling us who to reproduce with.”

— Rebecca Skloot

35. “The sort of thinking at the time was, ‘Well, we’re giving you access to medical care which you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get, so your payment is that we get to use you in research.’”

— Rebecca Skloot

36. “A casual observer can testify only to the moment. And what one sees will always be colored by what one longs to see.”

— Rebecca Skloot

37. “In recent years, using tissue samples from themselves, their families, and their patients, scientists had grown cells of all kinds – prostate cancer, appendix, foreskin, even bits of human cornea – often with surprising ease. Researchers were using that growing library of cells to make historic discoveries: that cigarettes caused lung cancer; how X-rays and certain chemicals.”

— Rebecca Skloot

38. “The Geys were determined to grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample, cells that would constantly replenish themselves and never die.”

— Rebecca Skloot

39. “When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me years later, “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.”

— Rebecca Skloot

40. “Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.”

— Rebecca Skloot

41. “There are more than one hundred strains of HPV in existence, thirteen of which cause cervical, anal, oral, and penile cancer – today, around 90 percent of all sexually active adults become infected with at least one strain during their lifetimes.”

— Rebecca Skloot

42. “HeLa was a workhorse: it was hardy, it was inexpensive, and it was everywhere. And.”

— Rebecca Skloot

43. “Lillian converted to Puerto Rican,” Gladys said, holding the letter to her chest. I looked at Gary, who sat beside her. “Lillian’s skin was real light, even lighter than mom’s,” Gary explained. “She married a Puerto Rican somewhere in New York. Since she could pass, she disowned her blackness – converted to Puerto Rican because she didn’t want to be black no more.”

— Rebecca Skloot

44. “But when he instructed his staff to give the injections without telling patients they contained cancer cells, three young Jewish doctors refused, saying they wouldn’t conduct research on patients without their consent. All three knew about the research Nazis had done on Jewish prisoners. They also knew about the famous Nuremberg Trials.”

— Rebecca Skloot

45. “When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.”

— Rebecca Skloot

46. “You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. These days are spent in institutions – nursing homes and intensive-care units – where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life.”

— Rebecca Skloot

47. “For Deborah and her family – and surely many others in the world – that answer was so much more concrete than the explanation offered by science: that the immortality of Henrietta’s cells had something to do with her telomeres and how HPV interacted with her DNA. The idea that God chose Henrietta as an angel who would be reborn as immortal cells made a lot more sense to them than the explanation.”

— Rebecca Skloot

48. “Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see:.”

— Rebecca Skloot

49. “If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

— Rebecca Skloot

50. “But it’s exhausting to keep tabs on how much someone is feeling for you. It can make you forget that they feel too.”

— Rebecca Skloot