Great post….very few people know this.
: )
Henrietta Lacks
“Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—
HeLa cell, a cancerous cell belonging to a strain continuously cultured since its isolation in 1951 from a patient suffering from cervical carcinoma. The designation HeLa is derived from the name of the patient, Henrietta Lacks. HeLa cells have been widely used in laboratory studies, especially in research on viruses.
via Wiki
