On one of the walls hangs a portrait of Henrietta Lacks, made especially for the exhibition. Henrietta was an African-American woman who died in 1951 from cervical cancer. A few cells were taken from her. Wijnia: “Those cells turned out to have a kind of revolutionary property that people had been looking for for a long time. They continued to divide rapidly outside the body. As a result, a lot of research can be done with them to this day. It is sad that Henrietta Lack never gave permission there. And her family did not know that that was the case for a long time. But the great thing is that the family now sees those cells in an almost religious way as almost sacred, as life after death. So that because of those cells Henrietta Lacks is still present in the world.”
Faith and research, do they go together? Science and religion through the centuries in the Catharijneconvent
