Does make you wonder how much of this shit went on and how many contributions of black folk was really hidden by whites and / or given to other whites to take the credit for over the centuries. Some sad shit to be honest. So in a nutshell they stole this black woman's cells hid it from the public for decades, created a vaccine for Polio with them but wouldn't tell white people it came from a black person because they feared those white people would have chosen to die rather than accept the black contributed vaccine. Mapping of the human genome, in-vitro fertilization, whole multi-billion dollar medical industries were created off the back of this black womans cells and her family got ZERO compensation. I wonder how many successful doctors in the majority are practicing today because of the industries her cells paved. Man I tell ya; God's day of recompense can't come fast enough for these religious devils.
In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.
Who was Henrietta Lacks?
She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. No one knows why, but her cells never died.
Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah’s brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry.http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...cells-6421299/
