Again, Henrietta Lacks

We have been watching old Eureka episodes about one show per night during dinner at Anne's place.  The science on the show is really bad mumbo-jumbo, but the writers were good at picking up on the big keywords that were happening in science at the time -- wormholes, strangelets, quantum computing, AI memes, you name it -- and making them part of the story.

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Back at my place, I usually watch a few YouTube videos before bed.  A huge variety of topics, from short biographies, science bits, math puzzles, geography and history, Minecraft updates, D&D lore, board gaming, with subscriptions to Mathologer, ibxtoycat, Nerdist, Aphmau, Professor of Rock, Today I Found Out, and many others.  Let's just say that my main feed is weird.  And if I see something I think Anne would like, I make a mental note of it, and we go to my History page and find it a few nights later.  Over the weekend, I saw this video about Henrietta Lacks, who was not directly involved in science history, but she made a huge contribution to medical research starting in the 1960s.  The name was vaguely familiar so I tuned in to see where I knew it from.  Oh, right, THAT story.  Fascinating stuff.  I won't spoil it for you, since Thoughty2 does such a good job revealing and expanding on the story.  Let's just say there is a cell line called HeLa named after her, and it is still going strong today.   Maybe a little too strong.

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When I scroll through my YouTube history of those strange diversions, I usually have to give Anne a little pitch about why I think she would find a particular video interesting, and this time I said it sounded like something out of a Eureka episode.

Last night on Eureka (Season 5 episode 10, about 6 minutes into it), while they were trying to bring Holly back to life (again), Henry said, "Just like Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line."  Just like that, out of the blue.  A super obscure medical factoid gets mentioned the day after Anne first heard about it.  It didn't really fit what was actually going on in the show, because it's not a science show.  As I mentioned, they tend to throw out taglines to science stories, and this was a whopper.  But the show is fun to watch because of the great cast.  And sometimes, as thousands of writers try to boil down the thousands of directions of science into digestible bits, there is a convergence of waves in our Unlikely Times.

On a personal note, will they please stop killing Felicia Day??  Come on already.  ;-)