Henrietta Lacks and Black guinea pigs

All right, man. So, peace.

So, now this, this was a great segment that was on the CBS morning news about Mrs. Henrietta Lacks. Uh, she was very integral in a lot of the medical and scientific advancements that have been made in the 20th century due to the, the peculiar way in which her cells constantly multiplied, even though she's, you know, even though she's been dead for what, almost 70 years. All right.

So, they're going to go through this story. Oprah's on the show. She produced the film. And, uh, as they talk about the story, I'm going to chime in here and there. I just wanted to include this little preamble where they introduce Oprah because you're going to, you're going to notice Oprah's going to do a couple of hand signs where she's going to put her hands in a downward arrow in between her legs. That's a, uh, that's one of those, you know, Cabala occult signs where she's trying to, uh, channel certain energies for the mother goddess. All right. So, watch what she does. She's going to look at the camera and then she's going to purposefully fold her hands down into a downward pointing arrow between her legs later on.

And Oprah, hot off the presses. Oprah just pulled up and just ran and said, "Hello, Oprah." Yes, I heard you talking about me in a taxi. When's the last time you took one? Last time you were in a taxi, sir. He's talking smack, huh? Early night. Good morning. Good morning. So good. Well, thank you all last night. You did. Oh, I loved it. I want to know where you cried. Okay. The white woman told Oprah, you know, the movie was so good. I cried. Oprah said, "Oh yeah, I want to know why you cried." In other words, you're full of [ __ ]. Okay, good. You know what I think is interesting that it's very rare to hear Oprah say she was, she just didn't want to embarrass herself. Cuz when do you ever do that? And that you were intimidated by this role. I was mostly intimidated, but you can explain. You see what she just did? She looked in the camera to make sure that she, that she knew what camera she was on and then she opened her legs and put her hands down in between her legs. She's going to do it again later on. Explain that later when we come back to the set. Do you two want to be left alone? Norah and I are here. Would you mind giving us a few moments? Oh, please. Charlie already done hit that. Charlie didn't hit that six ways to Sunday. All right. Charlie didn't hit up all three of these broads. But she's about to do it again. You're watching CBS This Morning. You see that? She looked in the camera and then she did it again. That's like a downward pointing, uh, I believe it's called like the spirit of longness or something along those lines. It's like some priority, some Priory of Zion hand sign. Oprah's deep into the Cabala and the, uh, that Jewish mysticism, all that nonsense, but she's the MK Ultra asset. Anyway, Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Rose. We'll be back right after Charlie. Yeah, they always all up on Charlie. Council of Foreign Relations. Charlie. Charlie didn't hit all three of them broads.

Now, here's the actor Danny Glover, uh, doing the same hand sign. I just wanted to include this so that people understand what I was getting at by highlighting Oprah's hand sign. Right? These are little hand signs that they do in the entertainment industry to signify to those in the know that they are channeling the energies, that they are, uh, that they are part of the program, that they're executing the game plan. All right. Danny Glover is a, uh, so-called Marxist, meaning he's a, uh, he's a pawn of the super liberal aspect of the, uh, you know, the international bankers, the communists, and all, and all those other things. All right. That's what he's down with. That's why he's always, that's why he's always trying to promote who, uh, Hugo Chavez. All right. So, but that's how they get down. And then, and like I said, that also goes back to the god Pan, the god of bisexuality. That's why you'll see Danny Glover, uh, always kissing men on the lips. All right. Like he was making out with what's his name? What's this guy's name from the Caribbean? Harry Belafonte. Yeah, those guys. They're all down with the program. Notice Harry Belafonte was with, uh, Martin Luther King, with the, with the communist movement known as the Civil Rights Movement. All right. So, I just wanted to throw that in there. All right.

So, now we're back with the Henrietta Lacks story. Uh, this story is very, very important and, uh, like I said, as they go through it, I'm going to chime in with certain things in, in regards to the, uh, medical experimentation practices used in America in the 20th century and, uh, how they systematically tested on so-called black people throughout the, uh, throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th century to make most of their gains in advances in medicine and science. All right. So, let's see what they have to say about this story.

[Music]

The name Henrietta Lacks may not be well known, but her impact on the medical community is long-lasting. Lacks was a mother of five diagnosed with cervical cancer. Doctors took her cancer cells without permission before she died. The cells became known as HeLa. They are the basis for advances in modern medicine like the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, and in vitro fertilization.

Now, to be quite honest with you, if I be a betting man, uh, not only did they take her, her, uh, cells without her permission, they probably injected the, the, uh, cancerous cells into her in the first place. All right. I'm not saying that they did, just my opinion. All right. Allegedly, but it would not shock me at all.

And the new HBO film, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will share her story. It is based on Rebecca Skloot's best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. Now, in the film, Oprah, as in Winfrey, there's only one, plays Lacks' daughter, Deborah, who goes on a mission to learn about her mother. Rose Byrne as a reporter, Rebecca Skloot, and Hamilton star Renée Elise Goldsberry portrays Henrietta Lacks.

Now, my brother's all upset 'cause everybody come around make money off our mama's sales, but I don't care nothing about that. Is there, is there a worse actor on the planet than Oprah? Every movie she's in, she plays a, she plays a damn slave. The movie takes place in like the 1970s or 80s and she's still playing a slave. Come on, man. What I care about is knowing about my sister and knowing about my mother. And you got to promise me no matter what, you ain't going to lie. And you ain't going to keep nothing from me. I promise. You can tell this movie is really about the love story between a liberal, uh, black woman and a liberal white woman. That's really what this is going to be about. They're going to band together and find justice for Henrietta. You better get yourself ready, girl, 'cause you have no idea what you're getting yourself into. You have no idea what you say that. Yeah, I know what she's getting herself into. A very poorly acted movie. Say that again, Oprah. You got no idea what happened to. Did you have any idea? Literally, we are pleased to welcome 60 Minutes' new special contributor, that's Oprah, along with Rose Byrne, Renée Elise Goldsberry to Studio 57. Welcome back to the table. This is the thing, Oprah. Even I, who know you so well, I lost all the openness when I was watching you, and I didn't think that that was possible. Oh, that's good. You can lose the openness. That is good. But everybody who has seen that is saying that. It's not just me. But it's interesting to hear you say that you were intimidated. I remember when you took the role, you said, "I just don't want to embarrass myself." I didn't want to embarrass myself, but I, uh, surrendered to the hands of George Wolfe, the one and only George Wolfe, director, director George Wolfe, and, uh, uh, being able to work with these wonderful women, although we never had a scene together. I know. Which makes it so beautiful when she's playing your mother. This is what I love on the cover of Essence. She's my mama. And I'm so proud. So proud. She's my mama. And, uh, you know, just get to the goddamn movie, please. You know, I'd never heard of the story after all those years working in Baltimore and have carried it since 2010. Since she's based in Baltimore, since she was born and raised and died in Baltimore, and that's, that's erroneous. So already Oprah's full of [ __ ]. You know, I became aware of this story a couple years ago. I think a brother forwarded this story, this, this story to me a couple of years ago. So, when I saw that they made a movie about her life, that was, uh, that kind of amazed me because I had just heard about it maybe two or three years ago. And, uh, first off, she wasn't born and raised in Baltimore. She was born and raised predominately in Virginia. And Rebecca Skloot, as we all know, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the book, uh, brought the story to light. So, thank you, Rebecca, for doing that and making this possible for all of us. Underline the greatness of her in terms of what she contributed. Yes. Yes. Uh, her cells, which are still duplicating as we speak, replicating as we speak, uh, helps contribute to the polio vaccine, to the AIDS cocktail, to the AIDS cocktail. Well, first off, AIDS was a genetically, uh, created or a scientifically created disease anyway. So, I don't understand how, how her cells were used in the AIDS cocktail that's used to fight the so-called AIDS virus when they already have, they already know what cures the AIDS virus because they created it. All right. Not to digress, but AIDS, AIDS was, uh, formerly created by a, a scientist named Robert Gallo. All right. You can look that up. Robert Gallo created the AIDS virus in the early '70s. This was after a long series of trials in the creation of the AIDS virus going back to the late 1800s. All right. Rockefeller Institute, the Rockefeller Institute and, uh, a lot of other high-level agencies were involved with the creation of the AIDS virus for population control. It was just formally, uh, solidified as a, as a viral agent in the early 1970s by a doctor named Robert Gallo. Practically every piece of medicine that now is in existence has some form of HeLa. HeLa has contributed to it. Talk about that, Renée. Yeah, they has some form of HeLa because all of these doctors took cells and they, uh, they engage in experiments on people without their permission, engaging on experiments with her, if I be a betting man, without her permission. Cuz you were Henrietta Lacks. Her contribution is amazing. The story that most of us, allegedly, most of us have never heard of. And it's a, it's a story that we can get so caught up in the science of it because it's still so controversial. But I love to talk about the beauty of, uh, just a woman who was so young and seemingly so disenfranchised and the, the impact that she had and especially when you look at her family today and see, um, all the things that they're, they continue to contribute two generations, three generations later. Um, I think it's just really an empowering story that should inspire all of us. I think it's a very unfortunate story. I think it's a story that was very indicative of the time when, uh, so-called black people were, were having experiments done on them without their knowledge, without their permission. All right. Henrietta Lacks went to the doctor. She was complaining about pains in her abdomen. She thought she was pregnant and, um, you know, they took a biopsy. I believe her doctor's name was Howard Jones and, uh, came back and they, and they told her that she had cancer. All right. Now, Howard Jones went on to become a very, very prominent doctor. He was one of the first doctors to, uh, to do, uh, sexual reassignment surgeries, all right, on children. Uh, he was one of the doctors that they used to promote the transgenderism from back in the '60s and they tried to use that to prove that, uh, that gender is a learned behavior. All right. So, there's a lot of different aspects to this story. A lot of these doctors that became famous off of the use of her cells were used, were, uh, became prominent through other diabolical means. All right. But we'll, we'll touch on that a little later. Us to tell our stories to our children. I, I thought the same thing. And Rose, you play Rebecca Skloot, the author, the journalist who her dogged pursuit to tell this story, to form this friendship with Deborah, to help her discover her mother. It's such a beautiful story. What did you learn? I told you this story was all, it's going to be all going to concentrate on was a liberal white woman coming together with a liberal black woman and they, they hold hands and they solve all these issues. They solve all these problems. Bunch of [ __ ] instead of getting to the real nitty-gritty. And meeting with Rebecca, Rebecca's really a force of nature. She's incredibly smart, but incredibly determined, and if she has her mind on something, she will get it. And, uh, she's an, she's a very impressive person and I got to spend quite a bit of time with her. She was very candid with me. I appreciate you. There we are. And, you know, she, she's very candid and shared a lot of stuff with me that's not in the book about her own, you know, personal life. Rose, I love how Norris says formed this friendship with Deborah 'cause Deborah was a little crazy and you guys had a real bumpy journey to get to get to a place where, which is understandable. She was paranoid. She'd been, you know, 14 different medications. Yeah, it's interesting because there were a couple of times when we were really sitting together and being friendly and George, no, no, no, no. Too friendly, too friendly. See, this is why I'm, I'm not interested in a lot of these, uh, these, these, uh, biographical films because they take the, the truth and the crux of the story and they turn it into some [ __ ]. They should have been concentrating on Henrietta Lacks and, uh, what was done to her and how she's been used and how the majority of, of, uh, scientific experiments and medical experiments in the 20th century, uh, lot, most of the advances were made from the unwitting and unwilling participation of so-called black people. All right. You can go back all the way to the 1800s. Uh, the father of modern gynecology. His name was, uh, was it J. Marion? J. Marion Sims. All right. He was a gynecology. He's called the father of gynecology. All right. Now, he, what he did in the 1800s, he took black women who were slaves, so-called black women, and he performed gynecological experiments on them without anesthesia. He would perform vaginal, uh, surgeries on them without anesthesia. All right. That's what he used to do. Uh, Thomas Jefferson injected, uh, smallpox into, uh, most of the, most of the so-called blacks that were on his plantation. All right. As a trial, as a test to see, uh, how smallpox could be cured. All right. There was a guy named, uh, Cornelius Rhoads, who worked with the Rockefeller Institute. Cornelius Rhoads. He went down to Puerto Rico and his job down there was to, to test out cancer treatments on, on patients down there in Puerto Rico. But what he was doing was he was purposefully injecting cancer into the Puerto Ricans down there. And he got so frustrated one night when his car got broken into or his vehicle, something like he got robbed in some way. So he went and he wrote a letter. He was writing a letter to one of his friends in New York saying that he had killed eight people by injecting cancer into them. And somebody else found the letter and spread it around and he got in big trouble. Don't you know they investigated him and they fully exonerated him? But when they did a, they, they did a posthumous investigation years later and even the investigators confessed that there were other letters that he wrote that they found that, that were even worse than that first letter. All right. And Cornelius Rhoads, he had claimed at the time of the investigation that, that, uh, that he was just joking, but they said that they found other letters, uh, to the same effect that he was purposefully injecting cancerous cells into the Puerto Ricans down there to kill them and he was saying that they were the worst, uh, people on the planet and all this other nonsense. All right. So the point being, most of these scientific and medical advancements that, that have been made in this society have been made unwillingly by testing on so-called blacks. They had experiments during slavery, during slavery also where they would put, uh, blacks in a pit and they would pour boiling hot water on them to see how fast their skin would peel. All right. So do I believe that Henrietta Lacks was injected with cancer? It's a high probability in my mind. Yeah, I do. All right. There was another doctor named, um, some Klingman or Clingman, starts with a K.L. This guy was involved with testing, he, he did a lot of tests on black, black prisoners and in prison up there in Philadelphia. I can't remember the name of the prison. Holmesburg or Holsburg, something like that. You brothers could look it up. All right. He was injecting them with, he was injecting them with serums that were causing their skin to break out and, and, uh, something called super acne. All right. All type of growth and, and, uh, and, uh, just craziness was growing on their skin because of these tests that they were unwillingly participating in. All right. You brothers, y'all can get a book called Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington. It'll, it'll give you a list of a lot of the experiments that were done. But when you look at what was done to Henrietta Lacks, man, to me, in my honest opinion, she was probably injected with, with cancer, uh, into her uterus and, and because at first, you know, she thought that she was just pregnant. Then she came back and they, and they said that she had a, that she had cancer. So, man, I don't know. I'm not saying that it necessarily was the case, but it wouldn't shock me at all looking at the history of the medical field in America in the, especially in the early 20th century. Enough of that.

There's a great scene where she grabs you, Deborah grabs you and throws you up against the wall and you tell her to shut the [ __ ] up. Oprah, has anybody ever said that to me? I got a kick out of that scene. Nobody's ever said that to me in real life. Shut the [ __ ] up. And you know when you get told [ __ ], that's what I was wondering. There's a moment where you just come. Somebody has told your ass to shut the [ __ ] up. Like stop acting like you such a big boss. Like you was a hoe back in the '60s. Like get out of here. Nobody ever told you to shut the [ __ ] up. Please. You going somebody a white man going to call your phone up that very day and tell you to shut the [ __ ] up. One of your handlers. That [ __ ] with that fake, that fake big boss woman [ __ ]. Nobody's ever told me to shut the [ __ ] up. Everybody's been told that in their life at some, at some point in time. Cut the [ __ ] out, Oprah. Amen. Who you talking to? Yeah. I wondered that about you 'cause number one, you were so convincing when you said it. Yeah. And I thought, God, I wonder how she's taking that in. We did that many times. It's a long day, in the long day. We shut the [ __ ] up all day long. We did. George was a, he was a great leader. We all kind of lent on him. Yes. I'm going to just ask what he added to this. Yeah. I mean, he's, he's a genius. He's a national treasure. He's, you know, a Broadway Tony Award-winning iconic director and writer. And it's actually the first time I got to work with him. And I heard a quote that you said that Audrey McDonald told you that you're, you would become a better actor from. Yes. Audrey McDonald and I had done a table read for Night Mother with George Wolfe and Scott Sanders that never came to be. But, uh, uh, Audrey McDonald said to me, "If you ever get a chance in life to be directed by George Wolfe, take it because he will change you as a person and as as an actress." Well, because you weren't even going to be in this because you wanted to work with George. Yeah. I wanted, I did this because I wanted to work with George. And I did this because when I first heard the tapes that Rebecca, the author of the book, had of Deborah, she had hours and hours and hours of tapes of Deborah. Deborah actually wanted me to play her. Oh my gosh, I just got the chills. Well, because she watched the Oprah show, girl. That's what they did on Oprah today. So, I can hear her voice saying that and I could hear her saying that she wished that I would, first she wanted me to play her mother and then realized I was too old to play her mother and that would be better playing her. So, and it's prophetic. Yes, it feels prophetic. I feel like, you know, this coming into fruition is a part of her dream. And we always felt on set anytime something would go right or wrong. Henrietta was there. Henrietta. Yeah. More, more worship of, of, uh, spirits. That's what they do in Hollywood. They worship ghosts and spirits. All right. They want to attribute everything. Most of them are nothing but a bunch of damn necromancers. Yes. Thinking about this, telling the story too, is the immense contribution that Henrietta Lacks has made to science that nobody knew about. But it's also a story of abuse. Yes. The abuse of her and her contribution. Not only taking her cells without her knowledge, which has now been changed. You have to get permission. But also then not even, not even acknowledging her. They tried to change her name, call her Helen Lane. It was HeLa because they didn't want anybody to know that those were her cells and then wanted to be identified as this African-American woman. I mean, I think you think of all the people who had benefited from her cells, um, through, you know, medical science, a lot of them not knowing that this was an African-American woman's contribution that, you know, led to their own personal healing. So, we feel it's a victory to get the story made. Are you acting more and enjoying it more? It seems like I am. You acting right now? Are you, you acting like you can act? And, you know, it wasn't an intentional thing, Charlie. I, you know, this, I, I'd held this, uh, as a producer and had thought of other people who should have played the role and it is because of George and Linato from HBO who said, "You need to do it." And then when I heard the tapes of Deborah, I said, "Okay, I'll do it." But I, it was, I was very much intimidated because everyone has done more films than I have. So, I'm not accustomed to stepping into a situation where, you know, I'm the person on, in, in the room who is the least experienced. Was she any good, Rose? I would love, I would love to be on the set with her acting. We had a, She was fantastic. And all, and, and stop lying. And very. We had a lot of late night scenes. We did have a lot of late night scenes. Like. And, um, Yeah, I'm sure y'all did. Oprah, Oprah is a pansexual. I'm sure y'all did have a lot of late night scenes. Um, and not, you know, very conserving your energy and meditative about the whole process and very, you know, which I totally respect. You had a huge undertaking physically and Rose, Rose would come in in the morning because she'd been up with the baby all night and that's right. All right, this is starting to go a little too much in the girl talk. But the point being is that, um, Henrietta Lacks, they took her cells and they, you know, in my honest opinion, to take it to the next level, the doctors most likely injected her with the cancer. All right. Like I said, the same guy who was treating her, Howard T. Jones, he went on to become one of the former, one of the foremost physicians involved with sexual reassignment surgery. So he, he, point, he's not scared to push the envelope. All right. A lot of experiments were being done on people during that time period without their, uh, permission and, uh, particularly on so-called black people. You know, everybody knows about the, the Tuskegee experiments. Uh, like I said, especially in the, uh, prison system, there were experiments being done on black prisoners. You know, they were also testing, they were also testing the effects of radiation, uh, on, on so-called black cancer patients. I mean, the list goes on and on, man. I think it was, uh, I'm trying to remember the name of it. Was it, was it Agent Orange? One of those type, one of those experiments. But, you know what? You brothers could look it up for yourself. I just wanted to, uh, to highlight what was done here to, uh, Miss Henrietta Lacks and the fact that they basically, they were lucky to find a, uh, a cell structure that, that, that adapted and adapted to what was done to it in that way. Really, she had a super cell structure and Lord knows how many so-called black people they injected with cancer to, to just find her. All right. Allegedly. But anyway, peace.