Born in 1920, Henrietta Lacks suffered a severe hemorrhage after giving birth to her fifth child. At Johns Hopkins, the only hospital in the area that treated Black patients at the time, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and died nine months later at the age of 31. During her treatments, two samples, one of healthy tissue and the other cancerous, were taken from Lacks’s cervix and given to cancer researcher George Otto Gey. He later created the first immortalized human cell line in history, known as HeLa, which is…
