Metamorphosis and Resurrection of Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta’s Life

Henrietta was born in a small farm shack in Virginia. Her mother died during the birth of her 10th child. Henrietta, only 4 years old, was sent to live with her grandfather, who was already raising another grandchild named David Lacks. Henrietta and David spent their days working on the farm; neither would finish school. At 14, Henrietta gave birth to their first-born son, Lawrence. His sister Elisa, born with what is now known as epilepsy was born 4 years later. Henrietta and David officially married when Henrietta was 20. They moved to Baltimore, so David could work in the steel factories. Henrietta stayed home and cared for their growing family.

On January 29, 1951, Henrietta’s life would change forever. Her husband drove her to Johns Hopkins Hospital. She pulled her jacket over her head and scurried into the hospital, past the “colored” bathroom. Henrietta would see Dr. TeLinde, a top cervical cancer expert. TeLinde “used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge” (Skloot, 2010, p. 29). Scientists at the time believed that “since their patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment” (Skloot, 2010, p. 29). TeLinde sent Henrietta to be “tested for syphilis . . . then a piece of her biopsy material was sent to the Gey’s laboratory without her knowledge or permission” (Landecker, 2007, p. 128).

Henrietta’s Extinction

George Gey had been working to grow cells outside the body in cell culture. “In culture” means attention was given to the “fluids, gases, nutritional substances, and surrounding apparatus that kept cells alive in a laboratory” (Landecker, 1999, p. 12). The test tubes, filled with a life-giving medium, were incubated at body temperature and kept in constant motion. In previous attempts, cells might grow for a few hours, but Henrietta’s cells kept growing. From this time forward, Henrietta’s cells would be only known as HeLa, He for Henrietta and La for Lacks. Researchers met and decided that Henrietta’s identity should be kept a secret. Why erase her identity? Was this decision made because Henrietta was Black and a woman? Researchers claim that it was to protect the privacy of the family. At this point, Henrietta Lacks became extinct. She was “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” months before her physical death (Foucault, 1970/1994, p. 387).

Henrietta’s Death

On October 4, 1951, Henrietta died an extremely painful death. She was one of 10,000 women to die of cervical cancer that year. Her “tumor was biologically unique . . . a peculiar appearance and a neoplasm which was to prove quite resistant to radiation” (Jones, McKusick, Harper, & Wuu, 1971, p. 945). Her body was moved from the public ward, to a cold “stainless-steel table in the cavernous basement morgue. For research purposes, samples were cut from Henrietta’s body: bladder, bowel, uterus, kidney, vagina, ovary, appendix, liver, heart, and lungs” (Skloot, 2010, p. 90). Her abdomen was black and charred from radium treatments, and “tumors the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder and uterus . . . her other organs were so covered in small white tumors. It looked as if someone had filled her with pearls” (p. 90). Henrietta was taken from that cold table in the morgue and carried back to Virginia to be buried in an unmarked grave. Mourned by her family and friends, her children—Lawrence, Elsie, Sonny, Deborah, and Zakariyya—were left to live life without their mother. Elsie, Henrietta’s oldest daughter, who was institutionalized, died in deplorable, crowded conditions at the Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane. Deborah and Zakariyya suffered physical abuse at the hands of their aunt and uncle who were given guardianship. Deborah, being her mama’s only living daughter, just knew she was destined to die of cancer like her mom when she was 30.

HeLa Cells’ Immortality

Henrietta’s HeLa cells are still alive in laboratories all over the world today. Normal cells do not have the ability to live and reproduce outside the body indefinitely. The human papilloma virus (HPV) transformed Henrietta’s cells, giving them “the potential to become immortal” (Skloot, 2010, p. 217). HeLa “reconceptualized cells as we know them” (Landecker, 1999, p. 18). This single conceptual change afforded practicing scientists opportunities to observe cells undergoing their natural processes outside the confines of a living being. These cells “produce large volumes of viruses, survive freezing, and fuse with other somatic cells” (p. 25).

HeLa cells, shipped to laboratories all over the world, were used to test and develop the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization. They have become very important in testing drugs to treat herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease.

In September 1966, a new character enters the story. Stanley Gartler, a geneticist who used HeLa cells in his own research, stood at the “Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture” to report a “technical problem in the field of cell culture” (Skloot, 2010, p. 152). Researchers at this conference were celebrating their newly created cell cultures, like HeLa. Gartler proposed that all these new cell cultures in their laboratories were testing positive for a marker only found in HeLa cells, suggesting that no other cell cultures had been created. Cells from “all 18 [cultures] had the same profile as the HeLa cell.” Gartler (1967) told the audience, “I have not been able to ascertain the supposed racial origin of all 18 lines; it is known, however . . . that at least one, HeLa, is from a Negro” (p. 173). George Gey quickly confirmed that Henrietta was Black. The researchers would soon learn that Henrietta’s cells were

transported through the air on particles of dust. These cells could travel from one culture to the next on unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers’ coats and shoes or through ventilation systems. (Skloot, 2010, p. 113)

If one tiny HeLa cell made its way to a test tube or petri dish, “it took over, consuming all the media and filling all the space” (Skloot, 2010, p. 153). Scientists had invested huge amounts of money and time in research that was now meaningless.

What followed was the “anthropomorphism of [HeLa] cells [showing] both how the race and gender of the donor permeated the public narrative and how cultural biases surface when scientific research yields new entities” (Wald, 2012, p. 250). Personifications of HeLa cells “change as time passes and the story evolves” (Landecker, 1999, p. 212). In the beginning when HeLa cells were depicted “as a miracle of modern science and part of the triumph over polio, HeLa was personified with the image of a beneficent young Baltimore house wife” (p. 212).

When Gartler made his announcement concerning HeLa contamination, Henrietta morphed into a “monster among the Pyrex” (Landecker, 1999, p. 191). Gartler addressed the group of molecular biologists by saying, “HeLa cells originally came from a ‘black’ donor and produced a protein from a gene allele that he said was specific to the ‘black population’” (Landecker, 1999, p. 213). When this protein specific to Henrietta’s HeLa cells was found in a cell line from a White person, scientists used the word contamination. The language used continued to deteriorate “with this announcement, the personification of HeLa changed instantly to that of Henrietta as a promiscuous, malicious black woman” (p. 213). “Unlike the writers in the 1950’s, these authors were not interested in the figure of the self-sacrificing house wife” (Landecker, 2007, p. 171). HeLa cells were now described as having an identifiable biological race due to their particular genetic structure as Black, female, “vigorous,” “aggressive,” “surreptitious,” “indefatigable,” “undeflatable,” “renegade,” “catastrophic,” and “luxuriant” (p. 171). The narrative of reproduction out of control was linked with promiscuity through references to the cells’ wild tendencies and their “colorful laboratory life” (p. 171).

Henrietta’s family entered the contamination entanglement in 1974, 23 years after Henrietta’s death. A researcher called David Lacks and asked him to gather all the children at his home, so she could take blood samples. The researchers were testing for specific human leukocyte antigen (HLA) markers that could be used to identify Henrietta’s HeLa cells in the laboratory. Henrietta’s family thought the researchers were coming to draw blood to test for cancer. No attempt was made to obtain informed consent. Deborah had been preoccupied with her mother dying of cancer at age 30. Following the visit, Deborah kept calling, asking for the results of the cancer test.

The Black Patient

Skloot’s inquiry brings attention to the racism experienced by Henrietta. How humiliating for a woman, to leave her home and go into a place with a colored water fountain, a colored restroom, a “colored ward” (Skloot, 2010, p. 31). Henrietta was “wheeled into the small colored-only operating room on the second floor, with stainless-steel table, huge glaring lights, and an all-white medical staff dressed in white gowns, hats, mask, and gloves” (Skloot, 2010). In Baltimore in 1951, “segregation was the law, and it was understood that black people didn’t question white people’s professional judgement” (Skloot, 2010, p. 63). Black patients were “glad to be getting treatment, since discrimination in hospitals was widespread” (Skloot, 2010, p. 64).

Black patients “were treated and hospitalized at later stages of their illness than white patients, and once hospitalized, they got fewer pain medications, and had higher mortality rates” (Skloot, 2010, p. 64). Racism in health care is not unique to Johns Hopkins. The Tuskegee Syphilis experiments allowed men to die once a cure had been found. “Unnecessary hysterectomies were performed on poor black women to stop them from reproducing, and to give young doctors a chance to practice the procedure” (Skloot, 2010, p. 50). “Black oral history is filled with tales of ‘night doctors’, who kidnapped black people for research” (Skloot, 2010, p. 166). History is filled with nightmarish accounts of doctors testing drugs on slaves, operations with no anesthesia, and bodies exhumed for anatomy courses.

In 1873, shortly before his death, Johns Hopkins donated $7 million to start a medical school and charity hospital. The purpose of the hospital was to provide medical treatment for “the indigent sick [Baltimore] and its environs, without regard to sex, age, or color” (Skloot, 2010, pp. 166-167). Although Hopkins had charitable intentions, Skloot recounts how the scientists working at the hospital had corrupted Hopkins’ vision. A week after Henrietta turned 31, she returned to Hopkins in so much pain she could hardly walk. She was rolled into the exam room, placed on the exam table, and her feet placed in stirrups, so George Gey could get yet another sample.

Skloot’s narrative depicts the story of a Black woman and her family living in a racist world, in life as well as in death. Racism saturates the public ward where Henrietta died and in the decision of scientists to hide her identity became extinct. Once Henrietta’s identity is again connected to her cells, the language used to describe the cells racializes the cells and further misogynizes Henrietta and her family.

Henrietta Lacks and the many other patients in that public ward at Johns Hopkins were deemed the same: poor, Black, and owing the doctors who used them for research a price they had to pay with their own suffering bodies. In the humanist narrative, an individual is seen simply as an “abstraction” (Wiesel, 1992, p. ix). Wiesel (1992) tells us “we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph” (p. ix). Such a perspective is worthy of survival. Colebrook (2014) contemplates “what is worthy or concern of survival, what of the human, the multitude, or the living would enable an ethos that was not the ethos of the present” (p.43). Henrietta remains extinct to many because they refuse to see her as an individual. The present humanist narrative “spells out a systematized standard of recognizability — of Sameness — by which all others can be assessed, regulated and allotted to a designated social location” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 26). How might Henrietta and HeLa cells break with this image of survival?

The announcement of contamination brings about the “coupling” of Henrietta and HeLa cells (Clarke, 2008, p. 3). The problem with this new coupling is that both Henrietta and her cells exist in a racist world. Henrietta’s cells were taken without permission because she was Black; Henrietta’s identity was erased because she was Black; and Henrietta died in a public ward where doctors insisted she owed them for her care. How can we create a third narrative, one that is “intrinsically embodied and in-the world-being” so that we might “act with respect and care, (rather than destructive dominance)” (Colebrook, 2014, p. 137)?

Henrietta and cell culture are iterations, forming a set of ever-returning elements. Miller (2001) tells us “as a consequence of the graphematics of iterability, each member of [the] set contains properties that are not applicable to other parts” (p. 101). “Iterability is the possibility for every mark to be repeated and still to function as a meaningful mark in new contexts that are cut off entirely, from the original context” relaying the message “of the original maker of the mark” (Miller, 2001, p. 78). Henrietta was cut off completely from her HeLa cells growing in cell culture when her name was erased, yet HeLa cells growing in culture and creating the possibility for cell culture are not possible without Henrietta Lacks. Through cell culture, Henrietta’s cells are created and recreated endlessly” creating a pathway for Henrietta’s immortality. Both iterations must enter history together, connected “for a new ethics and a new politics of what [Derrida] calls ‘the democracy to come’” (Miller, 2001, p. 106).

Science Rewritten

Skloot’s telling of Henrietta’s metamorphosis is an example of technology and life intersecting and creating a violent implosion “of germinal entities,” or more simply cells surviving and becoming surrogates for the whole human body (Haraway, 1997, p. 14). The narrative of these cells demonstrates a “densely packed condensation of worlds, shocked into being from the force of the natural and the artificial, and nature and culture” (Haraway, 1997, p. 14). Skloot traces scientific researchers’ work with Henrietta’s cells from the first biopsy to the publishing, and subsequent removal of Henrietta’s genome, on the Internet. Her work demonstrates how science intersects with society and how societal issues influence science in the making. A racist society intersecting with science yields a racist science. The scientific researchers did not want the world to know that their advances and cures came about because a poor Black woman had cervical cancer. People who would not have shared a water fountain or restroom with Henrietta would not think scientific advances made due to a Black woman’s cells would be valid science. Packaged as an anonymous cell line, HeLa cells were mass-produced and sent around the world for profit, while the Lacks family could not even afford to take their children to the doctor. While researchers and pharmaceutical companies have profited from Henrietta’s cells, the Lacks family had a nightmarish life without medical care and without understanding of how Henrietta’s cells were still alive. While researchers continued to come calling and asking for more tissue samples and more cells.

These plot twists and turns rewrite science, as we know it by demonstrating practical examples of how culture, money, lives, and reality influence science. Science is not an isolated entity. Henrietta’s cells with technology created by George Gey defy nature by growing outside the body. We as researchers should contemplate HeLa cells on multiple levels. Are cells surviving outside the boundaries of the human body a posthuman phenomenon? Using these cells in the field of biotechnology, researchers save and extend lives, beginning with the testing and mass production of Jonas Salk’s Polio Vaccine and more recently with advances in cervical cancer research. Do the cell’s subsequent immortality make Henrietta Lacks posthuman? Without the disruption of nature that occurred in Gey’s laboratory, there would be no HeLa cells; HeLa cells killed Henrietta and took her from her family. Skloot’s work offers us a way of thinking about biotechnology as it incorporates lived experience. The work allows us to see that we must move beyond posthuman thinking. It is not enough to examine how technology changes the living; we must continue to examine the implications of the cells interfacing with the world. Artificial interfacing with nature, culture, the physical body, economics, and all living participants of science.

When we think about scientific advances that push humans beyond their natural capabilities such as a prosthetic, or an application that pushes the human beyond what is naturally human, we see a simpler explanation of posthumanism. Entering a realm of discussion where we must consider Henrietta and Henrietta’s cells as posthuman is much more complicated. Are the cells human, even though they do not exist within the normal realm of a human body? The creation of HeLa cells merges Henrietta and the technological, making Henrietta posthuman. This seems to be another contradiction. How can she be part of the posthuman realm, when she is not human enough to be part of Humanity? Henrietta’s cells growing with the assistance of biotechnology are indeed a posthuman entity. The cells together with technology create a hybrid. If we stop here, we create a binary. Binaries are troublesome. When describing Henrietta with simple binaries, she can only be Black or White, living or dead, good or bad, killer or savior. For Henrietta to be resurrected and invited to be part of humanity, we must enter the in-between spaces between each of the aforementioned binaries.

Lingering

Skloot’s narrative about Lacks and her cells reveals institutional racism, implemented by White male doctors; using Henrietta as an experimental subject in the public ward at John’s Hopkins brings attention to Henrietta’s story but will not bring about the resurrection of Henrietta Lacks. This racism in science and medicine is not isolated to George Gey’s laboratory, Johns Hopkins, or the Tuskegee Institute. Skloot’s book includes a second narrative that demonstrates racism extending beyond the boundaries of medicine and science and the exclusion of Henrietta as a member of humanity due to her race. What we see when these two narratives are coupled is a racist humanity. Henrietta a nameless, faceless, Black woman, forced to barter for medical care with her own body and denied admittance to hospitals designated for Whites because society deemed her less than human. Institutional racism coupled with a racist society create a racist humanity that continues today as our government continues to deny all individuals equitable health care. Neither narrative will bring about the changes needed for Henrietta’s resurrection.

A third narrative will need to be written to help engender a different kind of future. This third narrative can be written as we as researchers/teachers/students allow ourselves to linger on the complexities of situated scientific practices. Robert Coles (1997) writes, “One can get some ‘news’, make some ‘observations’, obtain some ‘data’, conduct some ‘interviews’ . . . wrap up one’s project and leave” on time and on budget or “one can linger and try to learn something other than the answer to one’s original inquiry” (p. 75). Rebecca Skloot lingered for 10 years to write The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She spent time with Henrietta’s family. ¹ She lingers her way through Henrietta’s medical records and hundreds of scientific papers concerning Henrietta’s HeLa cells. When reading her book, we see Skloot position herself between researching the life of Henrietta Lacks and researching the implications of HeLa cells gaining immortality. We also witness her desire to write a story about Henrietta Lacks and finding it necessary to write the story of Henrietta’s family. Readers of Skloot’s text find themselves in similar in-between spaces. Readers select the text thinking they will be reading a miraculous story of science and technology, and they find themselves in a public ward where scientific practices include using patients as research subjects. Students of science find themselves between textbook representations of scientific method and a real-life story of science research filled with subjectivities including racism and a disregard for human beings.

Does lingering in the awkward space between Henrietta Lacks and Science curriculum help us understand racism? I look to my experience as a high school science teacher to find evidence to answer this question. Each year, when it is time to teach standards concerning cells to 9th- and 10th-grade biology students, I turn to Skloot’s text and provide time for my students to linger beyond the required curriculum, on the story and the importance of cell science. Instead of simply contemplating mitosis and meiosis, students witness science in George Gey’s laboratory, where they can see how cell culture was invented, and how students learn about cells because they can grow outside the body. I explain to my students that lingering is a deliberate act required if one is hoping to find opportunities that lead to change or to new ideas. I share Aoki’s (1996) vision of “a beautiful bridge in an Oriental garden, one with aesthetically designed decorative railings, pleasing to our eyes . . . on this bridge, we are in no hurry to crossover; in fact, such bridges urge us to linger” (p. 3). Lingering offers a very different approach than current standardized practices in education.

Schwab (1978) warns “To give a simple picture of a complicated world is not to give the scientist’s picture of that world. By so doing we make the picture not only inadequate (which it will always be) but false” (Schwab, 1978, p. 99). Skloot’s text complicates what students think of science by showing them that racism existed in science, in hospitals, and in the lives of Henrietta and her family. We explore these complications through what Weaver (2010) suggests as a “process of discovery and intellectual debate” (p. 20). Skloot’s narrative provides a path for a “democratic education” that will “deconstruct the common sense, taken-for-granted naturalness of humanism . . . while still maintaining the modernist and humanist projects of rights, justice, equity, and freedom” (Carlson, 2015, p. x).

Playwriting as Inquiry

The question then arises as to how best to teach the practice of science in all its complexity. How should 15 year olds learn about the story of Henrietta Lacks while they also learn about cell science? My own attempts have turned to playwriting, which affords opportunities to use the imagination in ways that conventional pedagogy cannot. Joe Norris (2010) calls playwriting an attempt “to take an organic approach to enter data generation” (p. 1). When writing a play “the tone of the data retrieval often resembles informal conversations” (Norris, 2010, p. 24). By creating fictional settings and dramatic performances, people from different time periods can meet and converse. In the case of a dramatic play, students can converse with multiple iterations of Henrietta. The following is an excerpt from a play co-written with my grade 9 students in Georgia, juxtaposing their poems and responses to the story of Henrietta Lacks with the words of Skloot and others involved in the story. The writing of this play is thus a collaborative effort with my students whose contribution is honored through my citation of their names after their poems. Through this collective effort, the play becomes a pastiche of voices that tell and retell the story of Henrietta Lacks.

Resurrecting Henrietta Lacks: A Play

A loud clap of thunder fills the theater and lightning strikes the stage. A neon pink sign flashes. A beaker tips over. The audience hears the glass break and a strange bubbling sound. As the light spreads, the audience can see a shadowy figure kneeling with arms wrapped around her knees. There is a gasp. A spotlight shines on the shadowy figure where the lightning struck, and the glass broke, Henrietta Lacks.

Two choruses appear on both sides of the stage. A teenage boy steps forward from the chorus:

Boy #1:

There once was a man named George Gey

He started doing science like Bill Nye

He was stealing cells from people on the sly

He could’ve asked but I guess he was too shy

Stealing cells? He’s up to the task

Opens up the door and puts on a doctors mask

Took the cells, then it’s back to the lab

Making money off HeLa, yeah, he’s rolling fat

HeLa was on Earth but gone too fast

Looked on her different because she was black

Don’t believe me, well it’s a matter of the fact

See this is the part that I detest

He took her cells and you know the rest. (Fields, 2015)

A girl steps forward from the chorus: [I] wanted to run out of the morgue and back to the lab, but instead, [I] stared at Henrietta’s arms and legs—anything to avoid looking into her lifeless eyes. Then my gaze fell on Henrietta’s feet, and [I] gasped: Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish (Skloot, 2010, p. 90):

When I saw those toenails, I thought, oh jeeze, she [is] a real person. [I] started imagining her sitting and 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. (pp. 90-91)

I could not imagine how much she had suffered. If I had been sick, I would have been treated in the private patient ward with no expense spared. She was a real woman. Not just HeLa. Not just another woman in the public ward. She was Henrietta Lacks.

It appears that Henrietta is rising from the puddle of HeLa cells. Henrietta is on her knees now, with her arms stretching over her head, like someone waking up in the morning, taking in deep breaths.

A second girl steps forward: “All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control” (Skloot, 2010, p. 3).

Henrietta’s arms fall. She begins to support her weight with her hands.

A boy steps forward from the chorus:

Little girl born in Virginia,

Just a little bit north of Carolina,

She grew up as a nobody

She died a nobody

But was later found as an everybody

Being diagnosed with cancer,

She donated cells without asking why

She died with a silent cry.

However sad, she became our answer,

Mankind’s solution

To all the diseases and illnesses,

Henrietta Lacks is our evolution.

She made vaccines and medicine possible

She made life plausible.

HeLa, the immortal cell line,

Population still in the incline.

HeLa, the nobody,

Became HeLa the everybody,

That HeLa saved mankind

Now we see that she is not just HeLa

She is Henrietta Lacks

Forever and ever etched in my mind. (Yang, 2014)

Henrietta is standing, ready to take a step.

A third girl steps forward (playing Deborah Lacks): Looks at her notes, and then looks out to the audience. She begins slowly, perhaps angrily.

cancer

checkup

can’t afford

white and rich get it

my mother was black

black poor people don’ have the money to

pay for it

mad yes I am mad

We were used by taking our blood and lied to

We had to pay for our own medicine can you believe that?

Johns Hopkin Hospital and all other places,

That has my mother cells, don’t give her

Nothing. (Skloot, 2010, p. 280)

Girl (Deborah Lacks) turns to the others on the stage, a shift in emotion:

[My] mother was on the moon, she been in nuclear bombs and made that polio vaccine. I really do not know how she did all that, but I guess I am glad she did, because that mean she helpin lots of people. I think she would like that. (Skloot, 2010, p. 9)

Henrietta is standing now. Music begins. Owl City’s Fireflies. Henrietta dances to the music on the dimly lit stage. She comes forward and speaks:

With open eyes I see, everything being done to me

As I lay unconnected and detached from reality

I feel their piercing sharp needles press against my anatomy

I’m being robbed of my identity

These “miracle cells” are a part of me

“You can’t take them away!” I wish I could say,

But I have no choice

Why must I go through so much agony?

It is already hard enough being a black woman in society

I must stay strong for my family.

They are all that’s left of me

I did not consent to this,

So why must I be forced to face this fatality?

I’ve been kept in the dark, for what seems like an eternity

And still nothing has changed

No one has heard of me

I’m a real human being, not just a cure for disease

At least share my story if you’re going to steal a piece of me

Doctors kept me a secret,

While my cells were healing the rest of humanity

Covering up who I was

To patronize their unrighteous acts of thievery

What they did will never be right

However, this new generation can put up a fight

You can keep my story alive,

By simply whispering my name,

I will live on. (Holland, 2015)

Why won’t you all call me HeLa like those scientists? This story cannot have a happy ending. No matter how many times you say . . . Henrietta is a real person with a real family, it will not change what has happened. Don’t you understand that I am not the only person this happened to? My family is not the only family that has witnessed a family member’s exploitation for the sake of science. This could happen to you and your family.

Henrietta looks at the audience and runs offstage. The curtain falls.