Henrietta Lacks's Origin Story Nivi Nimmagadda

Every superhero has an origin story, but the one I stumbled across wasn’t in any ordinary comic book or Marvel movie. It was in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

My tenth-grade biology teacher loved to squeeze in tidbits of information wherever she could, in hopes that we would finally broaden our horizons outside of the syllabus. During a biology class, she mentioned the immortal cell line of Henrietta Lacks, I scribbled down a note reminding myself to give it a look. What I didn’t realise was that I was about to delve into an endless abyss of one of the most prominent discoveries in the medical field. I found myself on the fourth page of a Google search with a book by Rebecca Skloot and a weekend to finish it. Once the weekend was over and the book was finished, you could definitely say I was surprised. The polio vaccine, research in AIDS, chemotherapy, going to space, you name it, HeLa cells did it.

If I’d been asked about cells before reading this book, I would’ve started rambling about the functions of the organelles, meiosis, and biogenesis, but reading this book challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and read something other than a generic dystopian young adult novel. Reading this book made me realize that...