Sunday, June 20, 2010

The story of HeLa cells


Nature's podcast has a fascinating talk about the history of HeLa cells, the human element behind all the science. What surprises me is how the African American community viewed Johns Hopkin's Hospital as "a scary white tower where people would capture you from the streets, take you in and do research on you, and you never come back out again".

For people not in research, this is a story of how cells taken from a cancer patient has been growing in every lab in the world more then half a decade after the patient has died.

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