Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html#ixzz0eKgyrDYx

Flight ET409 Exposes Lebanon's Racist Underbelly

Patrick Galey, Reporter based in Beirut, Lebanon

Even though there were nine nationalities aboard the Boeing 737 jet which burst into flames and crashed into the sea minutes after taking off in a violent thunderstorm on Monday morning, the Lebanese, naturally enough, only concerned themselves with one.

54 Lebanese, almost all from the country's predominately Shiite southern region, are probably dead and the nation's outpouring of grief has been intense.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri declared Monday to be a national day of mourning for the victims; the education minister closed institutions for two days as a mark of respect.

The funeral of a southern businessman, who worked for a food import country in Angola, attracted international media attention, with veiled women throwing themselves on the coffin.

Distraught friends and relatives are still thronging a hospital in southern Beirut, waiting to identify mangled bodies being dragged from the eastern Mediterranean.

The search for the plane's black box is continuing, with families of victims waiting anxiously for clues on what befell flight ET409 in the seconds before disappearing off radar screens for good.

As with any air disaster in a post 9/11 world, terrorism has been raised as a possible cause, with several Lebanese dailies carrying uncorroborated allegations that the crash was the result of a "deliberate attack."

Whatever the cause of the disaster, it has exposed the uncomfortable and often unuttered truth that many Lebanese are still virulently racist.

23 migrant domestic workers from Ethiopia were onboard the ill-fated flight, along with at least seven airline crew members. The pilot was also Ethiopian.

In the absence of concrete facts, Lebanon's transport minister suggested that pilot error may have downed the plane, with the jet having undertaking "a very strange and fast turn" seconds before crashing...MORE