A few quotes from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
"cells from her cervix living on forever-bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero grav ity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she-like most of us-would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.
There's no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta's cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all Hela cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons-an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they'd wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime,
Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall."
"If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we'd probably find millions-if not billions-of Henrietta's cells in small vials on ice.
Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating her- pes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease; and they've been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted dis- eases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the nega- tive cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scien- tists know their every quirk"
Taken from the prologue
