Henrietta is the French feminine diminutive of Henry — Old Germanic haim (home) + ric (power, ruler). **Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951)** — **African American tobacco farmer from Virginia whose cervical cancer cells, taken without her knowledge or consent at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, became the first immortal human cell line ever cultivated outside the body — known as HeLa cells**. **HeLa cells have been used in over 75,000 medical studies and contributed to the polio vaccine, in-vitro fertilization, gene mapping, AIDS research, and the COVID-19 vaccines** — yet her family received no compensation until a 2023 settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific. **The Henrietta Lacks Foundation now provides scholarships and medical aid**. **Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921)** — American astronomer; her period-luminosity relation enabled the measurement of the universe.
Subject of Rebecca Skloot's *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* (2010), 75 weeks on the NYT bestseller list.
Henrietta reduces to six — the number of HeLa.