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If it’s ugly to see, look closer
My partner has thousands of books in his basement. The other day, I sat on his rowing machine, sliding aimlessly while I edited a piece of writing while he sorted through the books, making donate piles and keep piles. Every few minutes or so, he would exclaim, then come to me with a book in hand, smiling.
One of the books he brought me was just hundreds of gorgeous, full-color pages of microscopies. Images from human cells, animals, and plants magnified beyond recognition and into abstract art pieces. I spent an hour flipping through that book, feeling the rods and cones in my eyes vibrate from sheer joy.
One image in particular captured my imagination. I held the book open in my lap and traced the image with my finger. I held the book up to my face and breathed deeply. I laid my whole hand over the page and shifted my fingers around to get different little slices of the image. I wanted to burn it into every sense I had. Were the basement slightly less dusty, I might have licked the page.
The image was HeLa cells, magnified 1475x and stained to show all the parts of the cell. HeLa cells are the ever-living cells that were first taken from Henrietta Lacks in 1951, without her knowledge or consent. She died of cervical cancer 8 months after the cells were taken. The story of Henrietta Lacks is a compelling and sometimes heartbreaking tale…