When Henrietta Lacks had cervical cancer, it was a ‘death sentence.’ Her cells would help change that.

April 22, 2017 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

A portrait of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951 just before advances cut the disease’s death rate by almost 70 percent. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Henrietta Lacks probably didn’t seem so immortal to doctors when she was first diagnosed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951.

The poor 31-year-old African American woman — the subject of a best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” and a new HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey — was suffering from cervical cancer.