‘I just need somebody I can trust, somebody that will talk to me and don’t keep me in the dark.’ [Deborah] asked me to promise I wouldn’t hide anything from her. I promised I wouldn’t.

This quotation from Chapter 31 marks the moment when Deborah agreed to work with Skloot on the biography and establishes the foundation of respect and trust that drove the creation of this book. While Skloot is not the first journalist who has written on Henrietta Lacks, other journalists focused on telling the story of HeLa cells without sharing what they learned with the Lacks family. In the most egregious example, Michael Gold published pieces of Henrietta’s medical records, exposing things about Henrietta that her own family hadn’t known. This history causes Deborah to mistrust journalists because they have objectified her mother and her family as sources of material rather than human beings. Skloot’s promise of transparency led her to make sure the family got to hear from Lengauer and finally see the cells after so many years. These intimate, interpersonal interactions signify Skloot’s commitment to treat Deborah and her family as worthy of respect and dignity, instead of dismissing, ignoring, or mocking them because of their poverty and lack of formal education.