Henrietta Lacks achieved a kind of immortality on February 9,
1951. On that day a sample of cancerous cells from her cervix
was transferred to a culture dish, doused with nutrients, and
left to grow. Lacks, a 30-year-old mother of four from
Baltimore, had one of the most aggressive cervical cancers her
doctors had ever seen, and the cells culled from her tumor grew
avidly, doubling their number each day. Then they escaped. Small
spills are always happening in laboratories; what distinguished
Lacks’s cells was their ability to survive after they were
somehow spilled. They were so hardy that if just one of them
fell on a petri dish it would outgrow and overwhelm anything
else living on that dish within a month. Soon Henrietta Lacks’s
cells were traveling from lab to lab, either deliberately sent--
many cancer researchers had taken to using them in their
experiments--or as an unseen contaminant tagging along in
another cell line. Some researchers who thought they were
looking at something completely different--a