Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who was born in the state of Virginia in 1920. At the age of twenty-one, she and her family moved to the Baltimore, Maryland. This is when Mrs. Lacks life forever changed the world of science and never even knew it. During this time in the United Stated history, scientist were working hard on trying to make human cells grow outside of the body unsuccessfully. This changed on February 1, 1951 when Henrietta went to see a gynecologist about some irregular bleeding. There during the examination Dr. Howard Jones noticed a small lesion that was located on her cervices that was purple and if touched bleed too easily. This lesion did not look like cancer, so he cut off a small tissue sample and sent it to Dr. George Gey, who was working on the cell growth research. It was there that Dr. Gey's assistant would cultivate that tissue sample of Henrietta Lacks, and turn the scientific world upside down. .
When looking at the case of Henrietta Lacks the demographics is a bit complicated. According to Merriam-Webster (2015), demographic means "relating to the study of changes that occur in large groups of people over a period of time." When Henrietta's cell tissue sample was being cultivated, it did something that none of the other cultivated cells have done anywhere in the world. They started to grow and multiply, and for the first time in history the ability to grow human cells outside the body was successful. Dr. George Gey named these Henrietta Lacks cells the HeLa cells, sense he could not name them after her because no one knew they cultivated them from her body. Now that these human cancer cells were growing outside the body it would set in motion some amazing and some catastrophic results. .
The cell growth research had many different purposes and now that the HeLa cells have grown outside the human body successfully, the research abilities sky rocketed.