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’When I saw those toenails . . . I nearly fainted . . . 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.’
In Chapter 12, Mary Kubicek, George Gey’s assistant, said this to Skloot when describing her participation in Henrietta’s autopsy. Her shock and panic reveals the extent to which Kubicek’s work and Gey’s research allowed them to ignore where the cells came from, and the ability of the doctor to forget the humanity of the patient. Notably, Kubicek created the HeLa cell culture while Henrietta was still alive, and yet had no contact with her until she was dead. The cell culture process had been set up to minimize Kubicek’s contact with her patients so she could focus only on the science. Importantly, it’s the red toenails that alert Kubicek to Henrietta’s humanity. Kubicek was able to ignore the personhood of a body, but the nail polish signifies the presence of a personality that had been lost in death. Her ability to depersonalize a body signals a disturbing aspect of her training as a medical researcher. Instead of noticing personhood, she was taught to forget it.
