Is a Biobank a Home?

Is a freezer or tank of liquid nitrogen that stores our cells and bodily fluids a home? Or a computer that archives our data? Are we “at home” in these places? Or are we ill at ease? Do we even know which of these sites house and protect our bodily materials? Perhaps most importantly, what would make us feel at home in this physically fractured situation?

Many people are unaware that every time you have blood drawn, have a biopsy performed, urinate in a cup, or have your nose or cheeks swabbed, these fluids, cells, and data can have a long afterlife. They can live on in a deep freeze, submerged in vats of liquid nitrogen, or as data, with the potential to be used in scientific research indefinitely. In some cases, they can be bought and sold for profit and turned into commercial products.

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken by a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore without her permission in 1951. These cells went on to become the world’s first successfully immortalized cell line. These cells, called HeLa after her first and last name, are the workhorses of in vitro medical research; every biology laboratory performing tissue culture uses them. HeLa cells were used in developing the polio and COVID-19 vaccines and have been used in studies for AIDS, leukemia, and cancer treatments. For many years, they were the only cell line used for experimentation and have become the default cells for molecular biology because they are so easy to work with. The HeLa cells genome was sequenced in 2013 and is publicly available in scientific databases.

Lacks’s story became more widely known following an article by Rebecca Skloot published in the New York Times in 2001 and following her 2010 nonfiction publication, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which was the basis for a film released in 2017. But what most people do not know is that what happened to Lacks is just the first example of what has become an increasingly common practice: making use of the scraps and detritus of medical waste as research material.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)