HeLa cells
There are several bizarre aspects of this story. One is the whole immortality through death by cancer thing. HeLa is an immortal cell line derived from cancer cells taken from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. This means, if I understand it correctly, that researchers can keep this line of cells alive indefinitely, and they are all derived from the original cancer cells in Henrietta Lacks’s body. The cancer killed her in 1951, but in a sense, it also made her immortal.
The other thing is that the HeLa line is commercial. Under California law, at least, you have no right to proceeds from or any ownership of tissue taken from your body. When I’m writing this blog post, you can’t use this text commercially without my explicit permission, but if a bunch of cells grew in my body, if I carried a disease and someone later made lots of money on those cells, I’m not entitled to anything. Isn’t that weird?
