OurTupelo

Last year was interesting, joyful, heartbreaking, surprising and life-changing. Looking back, I should have been prepared for a wild year, but I walked into 2019 with blind faith that it would, somehow, be a good year. Despite a few ups and downs, I think I can say it was one for the books, at least for my family.

Perhaps the most monumental event of 2019 for me was purchasing my first home with my husband. We’ve been together for 11 years, and for the better part of our married years, we’ve lived in my husband’s grandmother’s home in Guntown, Mississippi. At the beginning of 2019, we never would have guessed that by September we would be purchasing and moving into a new home in Tupelo.

You see, as Mama Gay’s aging home grows older, it comes with more problems. Some of those problems were just too expensive for our budget and we were really outgrowing the home anyway.

Around spring, my husband and I started weighing our options. Did we want to find temporary housing and completely renovate Mama Gay’s home — which we still loved dearly? Did we want to try to build a house? Where would we buy or build a home?

We ruled out renovating the home we were in, as well as building a new one pretty quickly for a few reasons. We didn’t want to figure out temporary housing and we also didn’t want to deal with the hassle of construction. So we decided to start looking for a home to buy. 

At first, we just assumed that we would stick around the Saltillo / Guntown area because our son was in school there and finally thriving after having a difficult time at his previous school. He has autism and dyslexia, and we’ve seen firsthand what being in the wrong environment can do to a child with special needs and learning disabilities, so we weren’t too eager to pull him out of his school.

But we had difficulty finding a good home in our budget that wasn’t in a flood zone, so we started thinking about the other surrounding towns. We knew that we had to stay close by in the area, since neither my husband nor I planned to change jobs. 

My first choice was Tupelo, particularly East Tupelo. I had lived there in my early twenties and had always wanted to move back to the area. I felt a special connection to it because I lived here as an infant and my dad’s family is from the Eastside. However, my husband is from Baldwyn and it took some convincing to get him to consider leaving the country for city life — but when he saw how many homes were available in our price range, he opened his mind to the possibility.

Now, everybody has their preferences on faith, and to each his own, but I’m a believer and the praying type. When I find myself faced with a difficult decision, I bring it to the Lord. So I began praying about where the Lord thought we should have a house.

In the meantime, we spent hours on the weekends driving all over Lee county looking for homes for sale and checking out houses we’ve seen online and usually coming up with nada. We also weighed the pros and cons of what it would be like to live in each community around the Lee county area. 

After weighing the pros and cons of each little town and the county, we realized it wasn’t really helping our decision. So we started making a list of what we wanted out of the town that we lived in instead.

We wanted great schools, a community that constantly offers things to do for the entire family, a town on the move that loves progress but doesn’t forget tradition. 

We wanted a unique, thriving town, one that celebrated many walks of life. We wanted access to entertainment, art, and local color. We wanted our kids to have access to the best schools in the area. We wanted a city that promoted healthy living for the whole family with walkable streets and nearby parks. 

Most importantly, my husband and I wanted a town we both felt truly connected to — and when it came down to it, Tupelo fit the bill.

The best part? We found a home that hit all of our needs (and a good bit of our wants) in the exact area I wanted, just down the road a piece from the birthplace of the King. 

Life in Tupelo hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been pretty good so far. Sure, life’s thrown us some curveballs. But we’ve also had some truly beautiful times together in the short time we’ve been here.

Since we’ve moved here, we’ve listened to live music downtown, played on the playground, walked around Veterans’ Park, celebrated our first holiday season in our new home, rang in the new year with fireworks, a ball drop, and music at Fairpark, strolled through the Christmas lights at Ballard Park, and enjoyed many car rides throughout the town sharing stories of Elvis and other histories of Tupelo.

We’re just five months in, and Tupelo is already reshaping our lives. And as we settle into our first full year of living here, I’m more excited than ever about our choice to move back “home.”

There isn’t a person reading this who hasn’t benefited from her cells, code named HeLa, which were taken without her knowledge in 1950.

No one knows who took this picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells — her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) was a black tobacco farmer from Southern Virginia who got cervical cancer and died when she was 31. Before her death, a doctor treating her at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her — because he realized that her cells, unlike everyone else’s, never died.

These cells (named HeLa after Henrietta Lacks) have been replicated millions of times to create an endless supply of “immortal cells.”

Before HeLa cells, scientists spent more time trying to keep cells alive than performing actual research on cells.

In 1952, the worst year of the polio epidemic, Dr. Jonas Salk used HeLa cells to develop a vaccine for Polio.

Other HeLa cells have been used as the basic cells that established the process of cloning and in vitro fertilization.

HeLa cells were also used to determine that humans have 46 chromosomes and provided the basis for making several types of genetic diagnoses.

HeLa cells have been used to repair DNA and have been used in anti-cancer drugs.

Her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. They helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

Although pharmaceutical companies have made billions of dollars from replicating & selling HeLa cells, Henrietta’s family has never been compensated. It wasn’t until recently that they even knew her cells were being used.

In 2010, Rebecca Skloot wrote the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” detailing her life. In 2013, a settlement with the family has given them some control over the use of HeLa cells, but still no financial reward.

There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons — an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

Henrietta died in 1951 from an aggressive case of cervical cancer, but before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: They reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory, and led to the beginning of the modern field of virology.

She is arguably the most influential person in medicine that the world doesn’t even know.

Adapted from “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Skloot. Published by The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.