Non-Exhaustive Work (2023)

KAJE

Is it possible to rethink how immortality is constituted when considering the HeLa cell line? How has the ongoing life of the HeLa cell (which is to say the living force beyond what is observed) complicated or proposed the idea of immortal work or non-exhaustive work? What if we understood the HeLa cell as both captive and fugitive to the conditions of a disembodied imperishable labor time? The etymology of immortality begins around the late 14th century; words that rub around its root are “deathless,” from the Latin immortalis which means “undying” (of gods), “imperishable, endless.”1 Henrietta Lacks’ disembodied self could be understood as imperishable and as such an entity that leans into a state of foreverness. It’s not that Henrietta Lacks the person is literally “undying” nor are the HeLa cells. 

However, the reproductive labor, behavior, and activity of the cell line are not only perpetually divisible but additionally uncontrollable, fungible, adaptable, ubiquitous, and deviate from capture. Using air as a vehicle the HeLa cell contaminated other cellular cultures across the globe. For instance, to demonstrate how “rugged” the HeLa cells are George Gey and his co-workers at the University of Minnesota sent twenty-nine live cultures, on a 2,500-mile trip by air, truck, and rail from Minneapolis to New York. This display of the cell’s resilience would eventually backfire since the HeLa cell was ubiquitous and take advantage of technicians carelessness making victim to nearby cultures in the lab. Neighboring cellular cultures in shared labs that were thought to be going through “transformations” were actually being taken over by the HeLa cell. The abrupt “transformations” altered the normal cells’ biological clocks and doubled their lifetime. In 1968 the HeLa cell took over twenty-four out of the thirty-four cell lines at the American Type Culture Collection, and in 1973 a group of German scientists discovered that a HeLa culture permeated a culture of monkey cells, eradicating the monkey cells but inheriting a colony of viruses that had infected them. Perhaps, we can understand the activity of the HeLa cell as a demonstration of deathlessness or undying disembodied labor and survival. The disembodied labor and survival of the HeLa cell infinitely rearrange, barter, and propagates the value of blackness.