In 1951, a 31-year-old Black mother of five named Henrietta Lacks was in medical distress and went to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer.
Despite treatment, she passed away eight months later. Unbeknownst to Lacks or her family, cells retrieved during a biopsy were sent to a tissue lab, where researchers made a remarkable discovery: unlike similar cell samples, which died quickly, Henrietta’s cells doubled every day.
Over the past seven decades, these so called “HeLa cells” have continued to multiply. They’ve been used in more than 75,000 studies around the world, helping scientists “study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans,” says the Johns Hopkins website.