Though it has nothing at all to do with fossils or evolution, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is also a tale of contingency. In February of 1951 doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed cancerous cells from the cervix of a 30 year old African American woman who had come in complaining of a painful “knot” inside of her. She had no idea that the sample of her cells had been taken, but this small event of one woman’s life would end up changing the world in ways that no one expected.

This woman was Henrietta Lacks, and even though she died from the cancer in October of 1951 the descendants of the cells taken from