Just came across an interesting tidbit about our city, Atlanta. While reading Matt Ridley's excellent best seller Genome, I learned that most cancer cells used in laboratories can trace their way back to a woman, Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. They've been keeping her cancer cells -- now commonly referred to as HeLa cells -- alive since then, and replicating them. The estimated biomass of all her cells in labs around the world comes to more than 400 times what she ever weighed during her life. Atlanta has designated October 11 to be Henrietta Lacks Day. I had never heard of it or her before. Digging around a bit, I found that there are even more interesting things about this story.