![]() ![]() ![]() Lacks, the Baltimore woman from whom HeLa cells were derived, other than that she was a young black patient in the segregated cancer ward at Johns Hopkins. Previously, very little was known about Ms. What you may not know is HeLa’s extraordinary origin story, which is the focus of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Countless discoveries have relied on HeLa, and if you have these cells growing in your incubator or stocked away in your lab’s freezer, you know firsthand how valuable they are. They were used to develop the polio vaccine, visualize and analyze chromosomes, and tease apart the choreography of mitosis. Dependable and hardy, these cells have been used for all manner of scientific research: They’ve been shot into space, exposed to radiation, and treated with cocktails of steroids, hormones, cosmetics, and infectious agents. If you are employed in a biomedical laboratory, it is likely that you have worked with HeLa cells. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |