An Uneven Tribute to <i>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</i>

In the first moments of the HBO film , you learn about the miraculous clump of cells that changed medical science forever before really learning about the person who made and was killed by them. In 1951, a 31-year-old African American woman named Henrietta Lacks learned she was dying of cervical cancer. She sought treatment from a then-segregated Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, where a piece of her tumor was removed without her knowledge for ongoing research. To their delight, doctors found that Lacks’s cells could do something they’d never seen before: They could survive and reproduce in a laboratory indefinitely. This immortal cell line, dubbed “HeLa” (for nrietta cks), allowed scientists to carry out experiments they couldn’t perform on a living person, effectively leading to the birth of the biomedical industry.