A book appeared a couple of years ago in the US called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, L-A-C-K-S, a black lady, very poor, who developed a cancer of the cervix in 1950 or '51, and the... she was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where they took pieces of the tumour out for examination, which was customary. And one of the scientists who was there took that tissue and developed a cell line from it called HeLa – capital H, small E, capital L, small A. You may have heard about it because it's very well known. It was the first immortal human cell population. And she never received compensation. It is questionable whether she should have. People don't receive compensation today for tissue that they donate or have surrendered in one way or another in operations that are then used for research. And this poor, poverty-stricken family, tobacco farmers in Virginia, I believe, felt they had been cheated, that doctors were... and those HeLa cells became very useful in research, and during the development of the polio vaccine became very, very important, not for the development of the vaccine itself, but for important tests that were done to test the safety of the vaccine.

So they felt that people and companies were making a fortune with these cells. There were some companies that actually were making a lot of money from these cells because these companies' goal was to grow cell cultures and sell the cultures to researchers and to industry, so they made not billions, maybe a few million. So they felt very, very cheated by this. Along came Rebecca Skloot, her name is, a young science writer, who decided, after hearing about HeLa cells, to write... to do a book about this family and to uncover the entirety of the story. So Rebecca began to write this book, and because I knew all of the... all of the people involved with the HeLa cell – the people who discovered it, who distributed it, they're all close friends of mine so I knew the history intimately – she got in touch with me and I spent at least 12 or 15 hours on the telephone with her over a period of several months as she was writing this book to correct some of the errors that she had already made and to provide her with additional information about which she had no information. And so she was very grateful and in fact has acknowledged my help in her book.