New on HBO: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In 1951, at the age of 31, an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks died at Johns Hopkins Hospital of a particularly aggressive cervical cancer. Unbeknownst to her husband or her heirs, prior to her death, a biopsy of her tumor cells was harvested and transported to a lab, where they were kept alive and growing. The cells, the first to live outside a human body, were named HeLa — at a time when there was no established practice regarding consent for cell donation,