The Smithsonian: Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor, who turned out to be Henrietta Lacks, remained a mystery for decades. Read FULL story