Sixty years ago this week, James Watson and Francis Crick unveiled their model for the structure of DNA in the journal Nature. It was a revolutionary event, but it wasn’t built on their work alone.

Rebecca Skloot discusses the life and legacy of Henrietta Lacks, a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. Her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of the Lacks family, the dark history of experimentation on ...