In 1954, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine to treat the ever increasing menace of Poliomyelitis. In 1955 the first human cells were successfully cloned. Within years, the discovery of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) was linked to the occurrence of cervical cancer in women. On surface, these remarkable medical accomplishments seem totally unrelated. But as you may have guessed, there is indeed a correlation between them, and it is one that rarely gets the credit it deserves. All these accomplishments were a consequence of medical testing done on the tumour cells of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were the first ‘immortal’ line of cells.

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