Immortal (Season 20, Episode 21)
Premise: A Bronx father’s fatal stabbing exposes a drug company’s hunt for the descendants of a Black man whose cancer cells it has sold for decades without ever paying his family.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 21
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson), Lt. Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Doug E. Doug as Michael Reed, David Costabile as Glen Dolan, Jacinto Taras Riddick as Joseph Hernandez, Adella Gautier as Dora Reed, Seth Gilliam as Michael’s attorney
- Ripped from the headlines
- The story resembles the case of Henrietta Lacks, the African American woman whose cancer cells, taken without her knowledge in 1951, became the HeLa line, the first immortalized human cell line.
- Director
- Jim McKay
- Writers
- Richard Sweren & Julie Martin
Summary
The Investigation
“Immortal” opens with a fatal stabbing: Jerome Turner, a Bronx father, is dropped at a Midtown emergency room from an old blue car and dies of a liver wound. He had hidden from his wife, Gayle, that his factory hours were cut, and was driving a rented cab without a license while telling people a windfall was coming. That day he took his son, Jaden, out of school; the boy says a big man swabbed his cheek and mentioned Nathan’s, like the hot dogs.
Phone records lead to private investigator Joseph Hernandez, an ex-cop forced out for breaking a suspect’s jaw. His assistant mentions a lost DNA sample from a Nathan Robinson, whose cells grow in university labs; Robinson, Jerome’s grandfather, died of cancer in 1959. Jerome’s cousin Michael Reed denies owning a car, yet his mother Dora’s blue Cordoba was junked the day after the stabbing. Michael admits driving Jerome to the hospital but blames Hernandez, complaining that white people have taken his family’s blood for years, and is charged with murder.
Rubirosa learns that Nathan’s son Eddie, who has cerebral palsy, had blood drawn for years by the oncologist who founded Hema Labs in 1959. Hema’s lucrative Na-Ro cell line, the first human cells to live on indefinitely in culture, came from Nathan’s tumor, sampled without his knowledge in a segregated ward. Relatives in New Jersey say Hernandez offered cash for their blood and Michael urged them to refuse.
The Trial
Hernandez says Hema offered him $100,000 to find a great-grandchild; Michael turned him down, so he paid Jerome to have Jaden tested. The prosecution calls Hema executive Glen Dolan, who says the cells revealed a new lung cancer gene and that the family would have received $10,000, and confronts him over consent and Tuskegee to explain Michael’s anger at his cousin. Cutter also asks Van Buren about the Hema drugs in her cancer treatment; she voices gratitude to Nathan but says his family was denied justice, and later accuses Cutter of using her as Hema used the Robinsons.
Dora insists her son was never angry at Jerome, but on cross she erupts at Hema herself. As the jury deliberates, the prosecutors offer a plea to first-degree manslaughter with ten years, which the defense rejects. They then threaten Dolan with an assault charge over Eddie’s blood draws, and the payment on offer for Nathan’s heirs climbs to $10 million.
Spoiler, the ending: Warned that his mother could die while he is in prison, Michael admits stabbing Jerome with a knife from the glove box when his cousin would not back out of the Hema deal, then driving him to the hospital. He takes the plea, so no verdict is returned.
Why it stands out
- Van Buren’s cervical cancer becomes part of the trial when Cutter asks about her chemotherapy drugs without warning her, and she tells him he violated her privacy.
- The prosecution calls the drug company’s executive as its own witness and raises the legend of “night doctors” to explain the defendant’s motive.
- The prosecutors use the threat of a decades-late assault charge, for blood taken from a man unable to consent, to push the company toward a $10 million payment to the Robinson heirs.