The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

Van Valen explained this idea years later, saying, “HeLa cells are evolving separately from humans, and having a separate evolution is really what a species is all about.”

There are more than one hundred strains of HPV in existence, thirteen of which cause cervical, anal, oral, and penile cancer—today, around 90 percent of all sexually active adults become infected with at least one strain during their lifetimes.

If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

It turned out Henrietta’s cells could float through the air on dust particles. They 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. And they were strong: if just one HeLa cell landed in a culture dish, it took over, consumi

That accidental discovery was the first of several developments that would allow two researchers from Spain and Sweden to discover that normal human cells have forty-six chromosomes.

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.

But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?

Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.