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.

Why are her cells so important?
Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever
grown in culture. They were essential to developing the
polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to
see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many
scientific landmarks since then have used her cells,
including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.

There has been a lot of confusion over the years about
the source of HeLa cells. Why?
When the cells were taken, they were given the code name
HeLa, for the first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. Today,
anonymizing samples is a very important part of doing
research on cells. But that wasn’t something doctors
worried about much in the 1950s, so they weren’t terribly
careful about her identity. When some members of the press
got close to finding Henrietta’s family, the researcher who’d
grown the cells made up a pseudonym—Helen Lane—to
throw the media off track. Other pseudonyms, like Helen
Larsen, eventually showed up, too. Her real name didn’t
really leak out into the world until the 1970s.