Accomplished journalism scientist, Rebecca Skloot tells the story about Henreitta Lacks, known as HeLa, “a poor black tobacco farmer who’s cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951,” writes Skloot in the prologue of her book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
“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. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him,” writes Skloot in the prologue of her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
“Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory,” writes Skloot in the prologue of her book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” …show more content…
Her professor responded by telling her he knows nothing about her writes
“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. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him,” writes Skloot in the prologue of her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
“Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory,” writes Skloot in the prologue of her book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” …show more content…
Her professor responded by telling her he knows nothing about her writes