That name probably doesn't ring a bell for you. You won’t find her in a textbook or the newest hit blockbuster film, but you can find her all around you. You will find her when you go to get your flu shot or your polio vaccine, when you’re up reading about Ebola, thinking about how far cancer treatment has come, or if you want to be a doctor or a nurse. Henrietta Lacks is a name that should never leave the back of your mind.

Most don't know the story of Henrietta Lacks, but you might know her as HeLa; her name isn't on the pages of our textbooks as those who often do great things and make important discoveries do. That is not the only difference between the two, though; Henrietta did not know what she was doing was going to impact the medical industry so much. She didn't know she was doing anything at all.

In 1951, Henrietta was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital complaining of intense abdominal pain. The attending physician diagnosed her with advanced cervical cancer and gave her the usual treatment of radiation until she died in October of the same year. During her stay, doctors took two cervical cell samples without her consent.

After her death, these samples, that weren't supposed to be taken in the first place, fell into the hands of medical researcher Dr. George Otto Gey. After intense studying of Lack's cells, he noticed an abnormal, yet amazing quality in them; they could survive much longer in lab conditions than any other human cell sample ever tested. Gey then isolated a single cell and replicated it until he had a living colony of human cells in a petri dish, giving us an immortal human cell line.

This corrupt event served as the catalyst for the medical revolution that characterizes the late twentieth century and into the modern era. Due to Lack’s cells, countless medical boundaries were broken and numerous vaccines were synthesized. These cells are now the “standard” human cells from which researchers and doctors can draw from for their experiments. I have even worked with them in my undergraduate laboratory, which was amazing, yet bittersweet, to say the least.

Of course, there is debate regarding the medical ethics that surround this issue. The HeLa case has raised questions about the legality of using genetic materials without permission. Neither Lacks nor her family granted permission to harvest her cells, which were then cloned and sold. During the time of Henrietta’s treatment, no consent was required to take tissue samples following a medical procedure, so there was no malpractice, but the issue is still ethically concerning.

It took almost twenty years following her death before her family learned the truth, even so, it had continued to be "swept under the rug" until decades later. The case of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa gained new visibility when the BBC screened an award-winning documentary in 1998 and Rebecca Skloot wrote a popular book on the subject, called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010.

Organizations that have profited from HeLa cells have since publicly recognized Henrietta Lack’s contributions to research. The Lacks family has been honored at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. Morgan State University granted Lacks a posthumous honorary degree. In 2010, Dr. Roland Pattillo of Morehouse donated a headstone for Lack’s unmarked grave.

Also in 2010, Johns Hopkins finally released a statement admitting their involvement with the HeLa cells. While the Lacks family had limited success in gaining control of the HeLa strain, in late 2013 an agreement between the family and the National Institute of Health granted the family acknowledgment in scientific papers and some oversight of the Lacks genome.

Could you imagine being dead for so long, yet a part of you is still alive? Not just a memory, but actual living things, being used over and over. Learning about the disrespectful nature of how the cells were obtained is absolutely appalling, right? If that’s so, why isn’t she known worldwide?

The cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she continues to remain virtually unknown. Henrietta Lacks continues to play a key role in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, genetic mapping, in vitro fertilization, cancer genetics and treatment, and much more. Remember to give recognition to the one woman who made the possibilities, realities.