In the autumn of 1951, within the austere confines of a hospital ward in Baltimore, a woman was lying on an operating table when unbeknown to her a small segment of her body was about to alter the trajectory of medical history.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks. She was 31 years old, a Black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, the mother of five children, and—though she didn't know it yet—the unwitting donor of the most important cells in modern science.
The doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the few institutions at the time that treated Black patients, had diagnosed her with an aggressive case of cervical cancer.