New games! PlayTrivia andBirthle.

BIOLOGIST

Henrietta Lacks

1920 - 1951

Photo of Henrietta Lacks

Icon of person Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant; August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951. These cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey, who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still used for medical research. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Henrietta Lacks has received more than 8,086,343 page views. Her biography is available in 33 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 32 in 2019). Henrietta Lacks is the 202nd most popular biologist (down from 56th in 2019), the 2,116th most popular biography from United States (up from 2,421st in 2019) and the 41st most popular American Biologist.

Memorability Metrics

  • 8.1M

    Page Views (PV)

  • 56.85

    Historical Popularity Index (HPI)

  • 33

    Languages Editions (L)

  • 2.78

    Effective Languages (L*)

  • 4.39

    Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Page views of Henrietta Lacks by language


Among BIOLOGISTS

Among biologists, Henrietta Lacks ranks 202 out of 841Before her are Howard Martin Temin, Carl Gustav Carus, Pierre André Latreille, John Boyd Orr, Jeffrey C. Hall, and Charles M. Rice. After her are Waldemar Haffkine, Hugo Gunckel Lüer, Jérôme Lejeune, Albert von Kölliker, Robert Gallo, and Hideyo Noguchi.

Most Popular Biologists in Wikipedia

Go to all Rankings

Contemporaries

Among people born in 1920, Henrietta Lacks ranks 101Before her are Meliton Kantaria, Väinö Linna, Jaan Kross, Hans Blumenberg, Ricardo Montalbán, and Cornelis Johannes van Houten. After her are Saul Bass, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, Luisa Cuesta, Roberto Calvi, DeForest Kelley, and Jack Warden. Among people deceased in 1951, Henrietta Lacks ranks 44Before her are Soh Jaipil, Erich Naumann, Kijūrō Shidehara, Nikolai Medtner, Katarzyna Kobro, and Agrippina Vaganova. After her are Serge Koussevitzky, Ernst von Weizsäcker, Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov, Kim Chaek, Artur Schnabel, and François Georges-Picot.

Others Born in 1920

Go to all Rankings

Others Deceased in 1951

Go to all Rankings

In United States

Among people born in United States, Henrietta Lacks ranks 2,116 out of 18,182Before her are Steve Morse (1954), Charles M. Rice (1952), Frank Bunker Gilbreth Sr. (1868), Leonard Kleinrock (1934), Karl Guthe Jansky (1905), and Frank Jack Fletcher (1885). After her are Saul Bass (1920), Jane Jacobs (1916), Kevin Mitnick (1963), Michael Emerson (1954), Paul Revere (1735), and Roberta Flack (1937).

Among BIOLOGISTS In United States

Among biologists born in United States, Henrietta Lacks ranks 41Before her are Leland H. Hartwell (1939), George Wald (1906), George Smith (1941), Howard Martin Temin (1934), Jeffrey C. Hall (1945), and Charles M. Rice (1952). After her are Robert Gallo (1937), David Baltimore (1938), Michael Rosbash (1944), Michael W. Young (1949), Bruce Beutler (1957), and H. Robert Horvitz (1947).