What things were discovered accidentally?
This lady’s death saved literally billions of people from becoming crippled, limbless and dead.
这位女士的死拯救了数十亿人，使他们免于残疾、无肢和死亡。
In 1951 Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American farmer and mother to five visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the few places in Maryland willing to treat African American patients. Henrietta Lacks complained to the doctors about random bleedings and pain in her groin and how she was worried it was going to affect her work.
1951年，亨丽埃塔·拉克斯(Henrietta Lacks)，一位贫穷的非裔美国农民，也是一位有5个孩子的母亲，来到了约翰霍普金斯医院，这是马里兰州为数不多的愿意治疗非裔美国病人的医院之一。亨丽埃塔·拉克斯向医生抱怨她腹股沟的不时出血和疼痛，她担心这会影响她的工作。
Upon examination by gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones, the doctors found a massive malignant tumor on her cervix; because of this Henrietta started undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer (which back then was the best medical treatment available for this terrible disease).
在妇科医生霍华德·琼斯检查后，医生们在她的子宫颈上发现了一个巨大的恶性肿瘤；正因为如此，亨丽埃塔开始接受镭治疗她的子宫颈癌(这在当时是治疗这种可怕疾病的最佳药物疗法)。
Alongside the treatment, a sample of her cancer cells was sent to Dr. George Gey's nearby tissue lab. For years, Dr. Gey, a cancer and virus researcher, had been collecting cells from patients who came to The Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer, but each sample taken quickly died in Dr. Gey’s lab, all apart from Henrietta Lacks’. Henrietta Lacks’ cells did not die, in fact they would replicate every 24 hours.
除了治疗,她的癌细胞的样本被送到乔治 · 格什温博士附近的组织实验室。多年来,格什温博士，一位癌症和病毒研究员，一直在收集细胞来自约翰霍普金斯医院的患者们的宫颈癌细胞，但每个收集来的样本在博士的实验室里都很快死去，除了亨丽埃塔的细胞。亨丽埃塔·拉克斯的细胞没有死亡，事实上它们每24小时就会复制一次。
This was an amazing medical breakthrough, for decades whenever anyone tried to experiment on human cells to find a cure for a disease they would simply die within hours, but with Henrietta Lacks’ cells, they survived and could grow again and again meaning that there was now nearly an infinite amount of these perfect cells alive if used correctly.
这是一个神奇的医学突破，几十年来，每当有人试图在人类细胞上做实验找到治愈疾病的方法，这些细胞都会在数小时内死亡，但因为亨丽埃塔的细胞存活了下来而且一次又一次分裂，这意味着研究者们现在拥有几乎无限数量的这些完美的活细胞，如果方法得当的话。
The first things these cells were tested on was polio, and instead of dying straight away like most cells they survived. This allowed scientists to experiment on Henrietta's cells until they found a vaccine for one of the biggest children killers of the early 20th century: polio.
首先对这些细胞进行测试的是用于脊髓灰质炎，它们没有像大多数细胞一样立即死亡，而是存活了下来。这使得科学家们能够在亨丽埃塔的细胞上进行实验，直到他们发现了一种疫苗，可以治疗20世纪早期最大的儿童杀手之一：小儿麻痹症。
Curing polio was only the beginning of Henrietta Lacks’ cells’ career -- by the end of the century her cells were used to create the first human-animal hybrids in 1965, Human Papillomavirus vaccines (also saving millions of lives), better hygiene improvements and better understanding of cells in general. Today scientists have grown as much as 50 million metric tons of her cells and they are being used to find cures/vaccines to things such as ebola, cancer and Typhoid.
治愈小儿麻痹症只是亨丽埃塔·拉克斯“细胞”事业的开始。到本世纪末，她的细胞在1965年被用于制造第一个人--动物杂交疫苗，人类乳头瘤病毒疫苗(也挽救了数百万人的生命)，卫生条件得到了更好的改善，对细胞的总体理解也得到了更好的理解。如今，科学家们已经培育了多达5000万公吨的她的细胞，这些细胞正被用于寻找治疗埃博拉、癌症和伤寒等疾病的方法或疫苗。
Henrietta Lacks unfortunately never found out about her contribution to science as she died only a couple of weeks after her treatment; her cells were also taken without her knowledge and her family only found out about what she did for medicine and science 20 years later.
不幸的是，亨丽埃塔·拉克斯从未发现自己对科学的贡献，她在接受治疗后仅仅几周就去世了;她的细胞也在她不知情的情况下被取出，直到20年后她的家人才知道她在医学和科学方面做了什么。
Writer: Alex Foster.
作者：亚历克斯·福斯特。
