While I had read book reviews of �The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,� by Rebecca Skloot." (you can order it thru the Amazon link on OCF) about how as CBS news describes it

[quote]By the late 1940s scientists were on the brink of a golden age of medicine, Jonas Salk was racing to develop the polio vaccine, but his work - and that of countless others - was hampered because they lacked a critical tool: human cells for testing.

Scientists had been trying for years to keep human cells alive in the lab, but none of them lasted very long, until Henrietta Lacks showed up at Hopkins.

"With her under anesthesia, they just took this small piece of her tumor, without her knowing, and they put it in a dish and sent it down the hall to George Guy, who was the head of tissue culture research at Hopkins," said Skloot. "He had been trying to grow human cells for decades, and it had never worked. And hers just took off."

"Took off" doesn't begin to describe it. For the first time in history, human cells could be grown and infinitely replicated, outside the body.
"We know, mechanically, that the cells stay alive because they have this enzyme in them that rebuilds the ends of their chromosomes, so the cells just never get old, they don't die," Skloot said. "But why her cells did that when all the other cells didn't is still a little bit of a mystery."

To this day, "HeLa" cells - named by combining the first two letters of "Henrietta" and "Lacks" - are a cornerstone of modern medicine.

"To tick off all the way HeLa cells have been used, we would be sitting here for weeks," Skloot told Axelrod. "Hundreds and thousands of studies. They were used to help test the polio vaccine so that it could be approved for use in people. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Hers were the first cells ever cloned, some of the first genes ever mapped. They've been used to create some of our basic cancer drugs, like tomaxiphin.

"I mean, the range of things that HeLa cells has been used for is, kind of, incomprehensible."

"It sounds like it's hard to imagine science in the last half-century without Hela cells," said Axelrod.
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Well, last night on the Colbert Report, Ms Skoot was promoting her book and added that she thinks the special immortality factor was HPV.
Talk about a two edged sword
charm