Transgressive Danger: HeLa, Purity, and Contamination

• In Event: Black Feminist Health Science Studies: Exploring New Possibilities

Abstract

This paper explores the ways HeLa continues to transgress the social, laboratory, and environmental boundaries that circumscribed the life of Henrietta Lacks. I examine efforts of the University of California to establish a Reagent Resource Identification (RRID) Program to address the problem of ≅70% irreproducibility in the biological sciences (Baker, 2015). However, the unique variance and morphology of the HeLa cell line poses problems for reliable RRID. Drawing from theorists such as Mary Douglas, Richard Hyland, Saidiya Hartman, and Orlando Patterson, I seek to make legible notions of purity, danger, the afterlife of slavery, and social death to tell a story about the ways scientists view and seek to guard against HeLa “contamination” in their laboratories. I situate these theoretical orientations spatially within a black feminist technoscientific analytic to illuminate the intersections of race, gender, and caste that both HeLa and Henrietta Lacks represent inversely, in the laboratory and society respectively.

Author

• James Doucet-Battle, University of California, Santa Cruz