My dad, a geneticist, told me this story. It's all true, although there are some folks who hotly debate the Blue Whale claim: It makes for a good song though! It contains lots of little "in" jokes: I apologise to those who aren't cell biologists.

Henrietta Lacks was a African-American woman from Baltimore (USA) who died of cervical cancer in 1953. The biopsy of cells from her cancer was found to be extraordinarily fast dividing, so the scientists at John Hopkins University began using her cells for cancer and genetic research, giving them the name HeLa, derived from Henrietta's names. The HeLa cells were then shared freely amongst other like minded researchers, but a false name, Helen Lane, was made up to protect anonymity and/or cover tracks. Being cancerous, the cells are immortal and HeLa cells are still routinely used in research, so much so that some chap at the journal Nature calculated that if you gathered all the HeLa cells from all the laboratories around the world, it would be bigger than a blue whale, making it the biggest biomass in the world*. HeLa cells are so active that if they are being used somewhat carelessly in a laboratory, other cell cultures may be taken over by them, like a weed. Back when dad told me about HeLa cells, he was unaware that the name Helen Lane was false. Finding it particularly lilting, I made it the chorus of my song. which was long finished when I learnt the truth. Rather than changing everything, I decided to let life imitate art and add a verse that exposes the real name as a bit of an afterthought. Whether that was clever or dodgy I'm not sure, but hey, it's done. Arabidopsis and Drosophila are, respectively, a little plant and a little fruit fly. They were the subjects of my sister Mary's and my dad's PHD theses (respectively). My dad, Graham Webb, has had a long, fruitful and wide ranging career as a geneticist and it was indeed a honour to write this song with his help. Still, when I sent what I considered the finished song for his perusal, he posted it back to me with corrections in red pen! One thing he had corrected was the line "She's quick frozen, colour-fast", which he changed to "She can be frozen fast". When I rang to protest the change, he asked: "But what's the colour fast bit?" "Well", I replied, "you know how you stain the slides before you put them under the microscope?" And that's when dad and I really bonded. Prior to that, I think he never quite had a handle on what I did as a songwriter. Onya dad, love, Mal

P.S. Henrietta Lacks' family found out about the whole thing and tried to sue John Hopkins University. But the suit was successfully defended as the university didn't sell the HeLa cells, they just gave them away. I've heard talk of trying to get a sainthood for Henrietta (which I didn't know when I wrote my song...ooh, spooky). Check out www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0400web/01.html for more about her life.


*the world's biggest animal biomass maybe: There's a fungus somewhere in the US that's said to be bigger and when you consider nearly all the edible banana plants in the world are cuttings from a mutant one several centuries ago...