The Tobacco Farmer's Daughter Whose Cancer Cells Became the First Immortal Human Cell Line and Were Used Without Her Family's Knowledge for Sixty Years
Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins on 4 October 1951, aged 31. A tissue sample taken before her death became the HeLa cell line — the first human cells to grow indefinitely in laboratory culture. They have produced almost every major biomedical breakthrough of the subsequent 70 years. Her family did not know until 1973.
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