1. In 2010, author Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the story of a Black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. The book, an immediate bestseller, examines the roles of race, class, gender, and ethics in medical research and considers the Implications, both positive and negative, of Henrietta Lacks's remarkable but inadvertent role in some of the most significant medical advances of the twentieth century.
2. In 1951, Lacks, a 30-year-old wife and mother of five, went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatment of cervical cancer. She was unable to pay for treatment and stayed in a segregated ward. During a procedure to place radium on her tumor, Lacks's doctor cut a sliver from the tumor, placed it in a petri dish, and handed it off to the lab assistant of George Gey, a Johns Hopkins cancer researcher. Sadly, cervical cancer is a particularly pernicious disease, and Henrietta succumbed in October 1951 after a brief but terribly painful struggle, leaving behind her young children.
3. George Gey had been trying unsuccessfully to grow human cells in culture-until Henrietta's cells arrived, Labeled HeLa, Henrietta's cancer cells doubled in culture within 24 hours - and they never stopped. Hela cells multiplied so rapidly and persistently, Gey eventually began giving them away to other researchers, According to Skloot, HeLa became the "workhorse" of research labs everywhere. They were used to test the polio vaccine and in the development of HIV medications and cancer treatments. HeLa cells were central to the development ofthe HPV vaccine and were some of the first human cells sent into space to determine how zero gravity affected human cellular activity.