90 Quotes by Rebecca Skloot

When it came to growing viruses – as with many other things – the fact that HeLa was malignant just made it more useful.

Many doctors tested drugs on slaves and operated on them to develop new surgical techniques, often without using anesthesia. Fear.

Field studies have shown that ravens “call” wolves to large animals they find dead. Why invite wolves to dinner? Because, unlike birds of prey, the raven lacks a bill or talons designed to open a carcass. Someone else – wolf or human hunter or motor vehicle – needs to do the job. Magpies have been observed working with coyotes in much the same way as ravens work with wolves, and the canine hunters have learned to listen when corvids call.

Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

1953 and moved into a house of his own – he had no idea what.

Sometimes I wonder, if somebody taught her sign language, maybe she’d still be alive.

But normal human cells – either in culture or in the human body – can’t grow indefinitely like cancer cells. They divide only a finite number of times, then stop growing and begin to die. The number of times they can divide is a specific number called the Hayflick Limit, after Leonard Hayflick, who’d published a paper in 1961 showing that normal cells reach their limit when they’ve doubled about fifty times.

The Way of All Flesh.

I saw his broad head, with a dollop of hair on its crown, silhouetted by the stars and moon out the window behind him.