I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.

But I tell you one thing, I don't want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that's just sad.

Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.

I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.

For scientists, growing cells took so much work that they couldn't get much research done. So the selling of cells was really just for the sake of science, and there weren't a lot of profits.

The sort of thinking at the time was, 'Well, we're giving you access to medical care which you wouldn't otherwise be able to get, so your payment is that we get to use you in research.'

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.