Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

We must not see any person as an abstraction.

Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets,

with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish,

and with some measure of triumph.

—Elie Wiesel

"Her real name is Henrietta Lacks. 

I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body."