the immortal life of henrietta lacks answer key

#The immortal life of henrietta lacks answer key code#

#The immortal life of henrietta lacks answer key code#

When the cells were taken, they were given the code name HeLa, for the first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. There has been a lot of confusion over the years about the source of HeLa cells. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. No one knows why, but her cells never died. 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. She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30.

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.

Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research-though their donor remained a mystery for decades. 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. The cell lines they need are “immortal”-they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases.