Are you more than just your cells? It's a question A Brush With Immortality puts to every visitor who passes through it, and one that Henrietta Lacks's own story answers in the most literal way possible. Cells taken from her body without her knowledge in 1951 went on to outlive her by decades, quietly underpinning huge swathes of modern medicine while her name went largely unrecognised. Helen Wilson Roe's exhibition sets out to give that legacy a face, combining graphic elements, three-dimensional forms and painting to trace Henrietta's journey from unwitting donor to one of science's most enduring figures.
The exhibit found a fitting home in the Science Museum's Wellcome Wing, opening to the public on 12 October 2013 as part of the Who Am I? gallery — a space already built around questions of identity. Placing Henrietta there let visitors meet her not as a footnote in a biology textbook, but as a woman whose cells, and whose likeness, are still very much in circulation.
