George Otto Gey
Taking a step back before the year of 1951 lets learn a little about Dr. George Otto Gey and the world of medicine at the time. George Otto Gey was originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he grew up with two parents from Germany and no siblings. George went on to school at the University of Pittsburgh and the to John Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Finney-Howell Cancer Research Lab that later in life did George and his wife, Margaret, started doing intensive research on cancerous cells. Before Henrietta, the biggest concern of doctors and scientists all over the world when trying to discover treatments and medicines were the cells. In order to prove that their discoveries worked, they needed to do tests on cells. The problem was, without a host body, cells would die quickly after being removed from the body. This made things difficult in a laboratory, because tests sometimes could not be counted as reliable or recordable and the amount of cells would run out quickly.