Immortal Cells

“No one knows why, but her cells never died… It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. It became an enormous controversy.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html#ixzz0eL58qKeJ

Scary yet significant (to science) at the same time. How did that part of her cells turned immortal while she died at an early age? The word immortal appeared many times in the article, giving me strange creeps that scientists will discover the key to immortality.