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  • Immortal Cells of the Mortal: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

    Many people have heard of the famous HeLa cells that helped advance medical research, from the development of the polio vaccine to research on zero gravity and cancer, but the story behind these cells is what is most fascinating to me. In general, a cell will die after a certain number of replications. Cancer cells,

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  • Dignified Butchers? The Butchering Art

    If you are curious about how medicine evolved alongside scientific discoveries, the eerie and illuminating book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsay Fitzharris is a must-read. It takes you, the curious readers, on a journey to a nineteenth-century hospital where you feel like you are experiencing the

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  • Youngest Stem Cell Donor at Johns Hopkins Hospital

    In a few hours, the tiny pink stem cells I donated were going to save another person’s life. For that, I, a 13-year-old, became the youngest stem cell donor at Johns Hopkins Hospital. For around six hours, I underwent a procedure called apheresis. For a fancy name, apheresis is actually pretty simple: blood is extracted

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