Not long after Henrietta’s death, planning began for a HeLa factory—a massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio.
By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio epidemic in history. Schools closed, parents panicked, and the public grew desperate for a vaccine. In February 1952, Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh announced that he’d developed the world’s first polio vaccine, but he couldn’t begin offering it to children until he’d tested it on a large scale to prove it was safe and effective. And doing that would require culturing cells on an enormous, industrial scale, which no one had done before.
The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)—a charity created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d himself been paralyzed by polio—began organizing the largest
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