In February 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks checked into the Johns Hopkins Hospital, suffering severe pain and bleeding. She said she felt a "knot" in her womb.
When gynaecologist Dr Howard Jones examined her, he found a large, malignant tumour on her cervix. He prescribed a course of radiation treatment using radium tube inserts, with follow-up X-ray treatments.
In August 1951, she was again admitted to hospital with severe abdominal pain. The cancer had metastasised and she died in October.
During these procedures, samples were taken from Lacks without her knowledge and sent to the cell biologist George Otto Gey at Johns Hopkins*.
Until then, nobody had been able to keep human cells alive for more than a few days, making it difficult to run experiments using human tissue.
Gey soon found that the cancer cells were exceedingly easy to grow in a culture.
Henrietta's cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours. In fact, they were so virulent, they were put into mass production to meet the high demand.
Even in death, Henrietta Lacks was being sold to labs around the world and the "HeLa" cell line is still in use today. They have been important in many medical breakthroughs, such as by Jonas Salk, who used HeLa cells to develop the polio vaccine in 1954.
One virologist even injected HeLa cells into people to learn whether cancer could be transmitted or whether cancer immunity was possible. Cell cultures are mailed to other labs for a huge range of research such as AIDS, cancer and the development of a wide variety of household products. Nearly 11,000 patents involving her cells have been registered.
Then, in 1971, US president Richard Nixon declared a "war on cancer", in which HeLa cultures were to play a major role. Unfortunately, nobody realised just how prolific the cells were.
Millions of dollars of research were invalidated when laboratory equipment and other cultures became infected by the HeLa strain.
In one sense, Henrietta Lacks is still alive today, and it's remarkable to think the total weight of her cells now is greater than when she was living.
Through all this, nobody thought to mention to Henrietta's family that she'd become a significant tool of medical research - or to even ask their permission. They only realised it was happening after repeated calls from researchers asking for more information.
In October 2021, the family filed a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc for the nonconsensual use and profiting of Henrietta's cells.
* Johns Hopkins state they have "... never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line".
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