THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING MRS. LACKS

This monument honors Henrietta Lacks and her famous HELA cells. Mrs. Lacks was an African-American tobacco farmer in Virginia who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. Her immortal cells were taken without her consent to help medical research in some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization, just to name a few. Today, scientists have grown 20 tons of her cells, and there are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells to date.