Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta is a footnote because she is known for nothing but her cells.... no one knows anything about the woman, only the contribution her cells made to medical science.

After class, I ran home and threw myself onto my bed with my biologytextbook. I looked up “cell culture” in the index, and there she was, a small
parenthetical: In culture, cancer cells can go on dividing indefinitely, if they have a continual supply of nutrients, and thus are said to be “immortal.” A striking example is a cell line that has been reproducing in culture since 1951. (Cells of this line are called HeLa cells because their original source was a tumor removed from a woman named Henrietta Lacks.)
That was it. I looked up HeLa in my parents’ encyclopedia, then my dictionary: No Henrietta.