The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks

Kicking off the week with a biological thriller. Without this woman's extraordinary cells there would be no polio vaccines; nor would there be any IVF babies.

Scanning electron micrograph of just-divided HeLa cells. Credit: National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant in 1920) was an African American tobacco farmer and mother of five, whose cells – harvested without her knowledge during treatment for cervical cancer in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore – became the first…