Character Analysis
Victor McKusick was a geneticist who worked at Johns Hopkins and worked with blood samples taken from Henrietta Lacks' children and husband. He may have been a brilliant scientist, but he wasn't too smart.
McKusick volunteered to help sort out HeLa contamination issues by testing the Lacks family's blood for genetic markers that would help the scientific community absolutely identify HeLa cells in culture just in case they got up in someone else's petri dish. But he didn't understand that the family didn't know anything about HeLa cells, or what it meant that Henrietta was "immortal." Hence, much confusion and anxiety.
His response to Deborah's panicked questions about HeLa cells and the possibility of having the same cancer as her mother's was to hand her a medical textbook he'd written about genetics. McKusick never thought about Deborah's ability to understand such a book. But hey, at least he signed it for her. What a sweetheart.