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Immortal Tobacco Farmer Helped Cure Polio, Flew With Astronauts  

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in a “colored” hospital ward in Baltimore in 1951. She would have gone forever unnoticed by the outside world if not for the dime-sized slice of her tumor sent to a lab for research eight months earlier.

Lacks’s cancerous tissue was divided by technicians at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore into dozens of one- millimeter squares, cultured in test tubes in a witch’s brew of chicken blood and cow fetus and labeled “HeLa,” short for Henrietta Lacks.

Taken without Lacks’s knowledge or consent, the HeLa cells changed medical history: They were the first human cells found to be “immortal,” able to reproduce indefinitely outside of the human body, writes Rebecca Skloot in her riveting book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

“Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intensity,” Skloot writes. “They kept growing like nothing anyone had ever seen, doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours.” . . .

Lacks was born in Roanoke, Virginia, on Aug. 1, 1920. Motherless by age 4, she grew up picking tobacco at her grandfather’s farm in Clover, Virginia, and later moved with her husband and family to Turner Station in Baltimore County, Skloot tells us. Lacks was 31 when she died, leaving behind five children

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