Henrietta Lacks was a thirty-one year old African-American woman who died of complications due to cervical cancer and the treatment she received. Not too many people know of her story or even her name, but in the science community she is best known as HeLa, the immortal cell line. HeLa cells were the first ever human immortal cell line to divide infinitely, it has been used in many medical advancements and achievements such as; helping to develop drugs to treat herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease and the cells have been used to study sexually transmitted diseases, gene mapping and sequencing, somatic cell fusion, and cloning. HeLa cells are still being used till this very day all over the world as the cells are still dividing effortlessly.
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