Oprah Stars in 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'

Toward the end of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the best-selling book and now an HBO movie, a woman stands in a science lab, holding in her hands a frozen vial. “She’s cold,” says Deborah Lacks, played by Oprah Winfrey. She says that because the vial contains cells directly descended from tissue taken from Deborah’s mother more than 50 years earlier. For Deborah, holding it is like holding her mother, who died when she was just 2. “You famous,” she says to the vial. “Just nobody knows it.”

Nobody knew it because nobody was told. Medical research has long followed the principle of anonymity. Tissue removed during surgery or other procedures can be examined, shared, discussed and put through all manner of poking and prodding without the original owner’s consent, as long as the identity is stripped from the sample. Even if the cells lead to lifesaving vaccines and medications, the person they were taken from never needs to be disclosed. That’s the law.

But in , that tissue, that bit of a woman’s body, is more