The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks   Tags: genetic engineering, hela, text-in-community  

Courtesy of the Lacks Family

"Who was Henrietta Lacks?
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. No one knows why, but her cells never died."

Rebecca Skloot,

Interviewed by Sarah Zielinski