The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

摘要

In 1951 a young black woman named Henrietta Lacks was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital and given a diagnosis of cervical cancer. During treatment, doctors removed a sample of her tumor and sent it to a research lab without her permission. Lacks died a few months later, but the sample lived on-and on and on. The strain, dubbed HeLa, was the first human tissue to be successfully kept alive as a culture. Since her death, Lacks' cells have been shot into space, infected with tuberculosis and zapped with radiation to test the effects of a nuclear bomb.