Henrietta Lacks's "Immortal" Cells - A Poor Black Tobacco Farmer Had A Groundbreaking Impact On Modern Medicine

Henrietta Lacks' cells were essential in developing
the polio vaccine and were used in scientific landmarks
such as cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.

Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book investigates how a poor Black tobacco farmer had a groundbreaking impact on modern medicine

By Sarah Zielinski
Smithsonian.com
January 22, 2010

Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.

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These HeLa cells were stained with special dyes
that highlight specific parts of each cell.
The DNA in the nucleus is yellow,
the actin filaments are light blue
and the mitochondria—
the cell's power generators—are pink.