Henrietta Lacks

AWU WOD: Henrietta Lacks (August 18, 1920 – October 4, 1951) She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. The cells from her cancerous tumor, called HeLa cells, were cultured to create an immortal cell line for medical research. No one knows why, but her cells never died.

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