HeLa Cells

The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks, Finally Her Own

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A Family Consents to a Medical Gift, 62 Years Later Henrietta Lacks was only 31 when she died of cervical cancer in 1951 in a Baltimore hospital. Not long before her death, doctors removed some of her tumor cells. They later discovered that the cells could thrive in a lab,…

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New Eugenics: The Continuing Saga of HeLa Cells

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“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel”, NY Times Last week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They…

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