All 42 Uses

immortal
in
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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She's simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world's first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.†
Chpt Prol.
They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.†
Chpt Prol.
I looked up "cell culture" in the index, and there she was, a small parenthetical: In culture, cancer cells can go on dividing indefinitely, if they have a continual supply of nutrients, and thus are said to be "immortal."†
Chpt Prol.
The stories quoted her son Lawrence, who wanted to know if the immortality of his mother's cells meant that he might live forever too.†
Chpt Prol.

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
The Geys were determined to grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample, cells that would constantly replenish themselves and never die.†
Chpt 1.3
Soon, George told a few of his closest colleagues that he thought his lab might have grown the first immortal human cells.†
Chpt 1.4
For decades the press had been reporting that cell culture was going to save the world from disease and make man immortal, but by 1951 the general public had stopped buying it.†
Chpt 1.7
It all started on January 17, 1912, when Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon at the Rockefeller Institute, grew his "immortal chicken heart."†
Chpt 1.7
The prize had nothing to do with the chicken heart, but articles about his award conflated the immortal chicken-heart cells with his transplantation work, and suddenly it sounded like he'd found the fountain of youth.†
Chpt 1.7
...SCIENTISTS GROW IMMORTAL CHICKEN HEART ...DEATH PERHAPS NOT INEVITABLE Scientists said Carrel's chicken-heart cells were one of the most important advances of the century, and that cell culture would uncover the secrets behind everything from eating and sex to "the music of Bach, the poems of Milton, [and] the genius of Michelangelo."†
Chpt 1.7
But Carrel wasn't interested in immortality for the masses.†
Chpt 1.7

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
Through all of this, the press and public remained obsessed with Carrel's immortal chicken heart.†
Chpt 1.7
But the fear of tissue culture truly found its way into American living rooms in an episode of Lights Out, a 1930s radio horror show that told the story of a fictional Dr. Alberts who'd created an immortal chicken heart in his lab.†
Chpt 1.7
Either way, by 1951, when Henrietta Lacks's cells began growing in the Gey lab—just five years after the widely publicized "death" of Carrel's chicken heart—the public image of immortal cells was tarnished.†
Chpt 1.7
George told me he leaned over Henrietta's bed and said, 'Your cells will make you immortal.'†
Chpt 1.8
Tissue culturists around the world had been trying to create a library of immortal cells like Henrietta's, and Gey wanted samples from as many organs in her body as possible, to see if they'd grow like HeLa.†
Chpt 2.12
Watching HeLa cells divide on a screen, Davidson wrote, "was like a glimpse at immortality."†
Chpt 2.14

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
Cell number one in the ATCC's collection was the L-cell, the original immortal mouse cell line grown by Wilton Earle.†
Chpt 2.18
The media, it turned out, was far more interested in a bit of HeLa-related news that was almost as sensational as Alexis Carrel's immortal chicken heart.†
Chpt 2.18
He hoped that his cells, like Henrietta's, would become immortal.†
Chpt 2.22
The biopsy ...has secured for the patient, Henrietta Lacks as HeLa, an immortality which has now reached 20 years.†
Chpt 2.22

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
They wrote about her "unusual kind of immortality" in one article after another; they called her Helen Larsen or Helen Lane, but never Henrietta Lacks, because Jones and McKusick had published her name in a small science journal few people read.†
Chpt 2.22
That lady has achieved true immortality, both in the test-tube and in the hearts and minds of scientists the world over,
Chpt 2.22 *
Day wouldn't have understood the concept of immortal cells or HLA markers coming from anyone, accent or not—he'd only gone to school for four years of his life, and he'd never studied science.†
Chpt 3.23
Rogers told the Lackses that no, the cells being immortal didn't mean they'd become immortal too, or that they'd die of cancer.†
Chpt 3.24
Rogers told the Lackses that no, the cells being immortal didn't mean they'd become immortal too, or that they'd die of cancer.†
Chpt 3.24
It was called A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused.†
Chpt 3.26
The Secret of Immortality More than thirty years after Henrietta's death, research on HeLa cells finally helped uncover how her cancer started and why her cells never died.†
Chpt 3.27

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
Today it's possible for scientists to immortalize cells by exposing them to certain viruses or chemicals, but very few cells have become immortal on their own as Henrietta's did.†
Chpt 3.27
Around the time Van Valen suggested HeLa was no longer human, researchers began exploring whether Henrietta's cells might hold the key to human life extension—perhaps even immortality—and headlines once again claimed that scientists had found the fountain of youth.†
Chpt 3.27

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
In the early 1900s, Carrel's chicken-heart cells supposedly proved that all cells had the potential for immortality.†
Chpt 3.27
It was an epiphany: scientists had been trying for decades to grow immortal cell lines using normal cells instead of malignant ones, but it had never worked.†
Chpt 3.27
Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.†
Chpt 3.27
This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died.†
Chpt 3.27

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
It was this immortality, and the strength with which Henrietta's cells grew, that made it possible for HeLa to take over so many other cultures—they simply outlived and outgrew any other cells they encountered.†
Chpt 3.27
It was headlined THE IMMORTAL WOMAN!†
Chpt 3.29
When the body is buried, it is mortal; when raised, it will be immortal.†
Chpt 3.36
In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being.†
Chpt 3.36
If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense.†
Chpt 3.36

immortality = eternal life (to live forever)
For Deborah and her family—and surely many others in the world—that answer was so much more concrete than the explanation offered by science: that the immortality of Henrietta's cells had something to do with her telomeres and how HPV interacted with her DNA.†
Chpt 3.36
The idea that God chose Henrietta as an angel who would be reborn as immortal cells made a lot more sense to them than the explanation Deborah had read years earlier in Victor McKusick's genetics book, with its clinical talk of HeLa's "atypical histology" and "unusually malignant behavior."†
Chpt 3.36
But I tell you one thing, I don't want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that's just sad.†
Chpt 3.38

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Highlighting 2 Senses of the Word

Definitions:

(1) (immortal)
living or existing forever

or:

someone famous throughout history

or:

someone who will never die -- such as a mythological god
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
More rarely, "The Immortals" denotes a military corps of the Persian Empire. The Immortals were so-named because each time a member of the 10,000 man corps was killed or seriously wounded, he was replaced by another man. They are best remembered in western culture for their role in defeating the badly out-numbered Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae.

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immortal
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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