- The HeLa cell line is named after Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose aggressive cervical cancer killed her in 1951.
- Researchers used cells sampled from that tumor to create the HeLa cell line, the first and now by far the most commonly used in cell biology laboratories.
- Recently a science journalist published a book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, that revealed how insensitively biomedical researchers have treated the family over the decades.
- HeLa genome has been “remarkably stable”, in spite of evolving for 6 decades in different laboratories around the world.
- Since then, these cells have been extensively used for a wide variety of biomedical research and played a part in several Nobel-Prize-winning scientific discoveries.
