pl by Rebecca Skloof There s a photo on my wall of a woman I
Last updated: 4/9/2023
pl by Rebecca Skloof There s a photo on my wall of a woman I ve never met its left corner torn and patched together with tape She looks straight into the camera and smiles hands on hips dress suit neatly pressed lips painted deep red It s the late 1940s and she hasn t yet reached the age of thirty Her light brown skin is smooth her eyes still young and playful oblivious to the tumor growing inside her a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine Beneath the photo a caption says her name is Henrietta Lacks Helen Lane or Helen Larson No one knows who took that picture but it s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks on blogs and laboratory walls She s usually identified as Helen Lane but often she has no name at all She s simply called HeLa the code name given to the world s first immortal human cells her cells cut from her body just months before she died Her real name is Henrietta Lacks A I ve spent years staring at that photo wondering what kind of life she led what happened to her children and what she d think about cells from her body living on forever bought sold packaged and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world I ve tried to imagine how she d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine the polio vaccine chemotherapy cloning gene mapping in vitro fertilization I m pretty sure that she like most Us would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body W 29 How does the photograph support an important detail in the excerpt A By demonstrating how important Henrietta would become 8 By showing the cells came from Henrietta who lived a normal life ed By revealing what Henrietta was like as a mother By displaying an image of Henrietta before her cells were taken 30 Which phrase from the excerpt provides context that supports the meaning of the word immortal in paragraph 2