Henrietta Lacks was born in Roanoke Virginia in 1920. She went into the Johns Hopkins hospital in January 1951 because she felt something was not right in her belly. Johns Hopkins was her only viable choice since it was the only hospital nearby that treated black patients. (Crownsville State Hospital at the time was the Hospital for the Negro Insane.) On examination, her doctor, Howard Jones, found a large lump in her cervix unlike any he had seen before. He cut off a small piece of the tumor and sent it to the patholo-gy lab. The pathology report confirmed Hen-rietta had malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix Stage 1. Henrietta was treated with radium tube inserts but her condition did not improve. She returned to the hospital on August 8, 1951, and remained there until her death on October 4, 1951. She was 31 years old.Two samples of Henrietta’s cervix were removed without her permission during her radiation treatments: one healthy sample and a cancerous one. These samples were given to Dr. George Otto Gey, head of tis-sue culture research at Johns Hopkins. Gey and his wife, Margaret, had been trying to find a tool for the study of cancer: they were looking for a line of human cells that would live indefinitely outside the body. If success-ful, they could observe and test human cells in ways that could not be done in humans. Gey found that some cells in Lacks’s tissue sample behaved differently than the others. They multiplied like nothing anyone had ever seen. They reproduced an entire generation every 24 hours and were the first immortal cells ever to be grown in a laboratory. Guy was able to isolate one specific cell, multiply it, and start a cell line. In order to protect her identity, Gey named the sample “HeLa,” after the initial letters of Henrietta Lacks’s nameOn the day Henrietta died, George Gey appeared on national television with a vial of her cells and said, “It is possible that, from a fundamental study such as this, we will be able to learn a way by which cancer can be completely wiped out.” The nation was introduced to Gey’s hopes of curing can-cer while Henrietta’s body lay in the hospi-tal morgue. Her family knew nothing of any cells. Her family didn’t know that shortly after Lacks’s death, Gey and his colleagues used her cells to grow the polio virus that was infecting children throughout the world. Her cells were the foundation of developing the polio vaccine as well as developing gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, chemothera-py, and many other medical advances. HeLa cells were in nuclear test sites from America to Japan and were sent in a space shuttle far above the Earth. It is estimated that scientists have grown 20 tons of her cells. There are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells. Her husband, David Lacks, and her children had no idea any of this was happening. It took more than 20 years before her family found out. HeLa cells currently live by the trillions in laboratories and biological com-