Henrietta Lacks was a poor Black woman from Baltimore who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and without her knowledge doctors at Johns Hopkins kept a sample of her tumor. Those cells refused to die in the lab, multiplying indefinitely when every other human cell sample had failed, and became the HeLa line that built modern biomedicine. Adam Curtis traces what happened next: HeLa cells shipped worldwide, used to test the polio vaccine, sent into orbit to study radiation, and eventually mass-produced as a commercial product while Henrietta's family lived in poverty, unaware for decades that any of it had happened. The film follows how the cells got pulled into Cold War science politics, into civil rights arguments about Black exploitation by medicine, and later into anti-abortion rhetoric about the sanctity of tissue. Archival footage and interviews carry the account rather than a tidy narrated timeline, in Curtis's usual style of letting contradictory threads sit next to each other unresolved. The consent Henrietta never gave remains the unanswered question running under every scientific triumph the film lists.