![]() I was a kid who’d failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn’t understand, like “MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations.” He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons-an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. I’m pretty sure that she-like most of us-would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. ![]() I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever-bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells- her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.” Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her-a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.
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