George and Margaret Gey Timeline and Summary

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• Cervical cancer expert Richard TeLinde sends Henrietta's tissue sample to George Gey's lab at Hopkins.
• Margaret helps to run that lab, and to establish sterilization protocols to prevent contamination.
• We learn a bit of George's backstory: he's a poor man from Pittsburgh who worked his way through school as a carpenter and mason.
• He built the lab at Hopkins by himself (with Margaret's help). He built a camera that could record live cells, developed a roller drum to keep the cultured cells in motion and mixed his own cell "food."
• Once Gey's able to grow HeLa cells successfully, he offers them freely to other researchers.
• Gey appears on a T.V. show in 1951 to explain advances in cancer treatments.
• He develops a shipping method for live cells and sends them around the globe. Gey also visits other labs to observe their culturing techniques.
• It's possible that Gey visited Henrietta on her deathbed to tell her about her unique type of immortality.
• Gey sends HeLa cells to the Tuskegee Institute so they can be mass-produced for trials of Salk's polio vaccine.
• He realizes that he's lost control of HeLa cells and how they're used in the lab since he gave them away so hastily.
• The media begins contacting Gey to learn Henrietta's name. He refuses and allows errors to stand.
• He's diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1970 and hopes that his own cancer cells will establish the immortal "GeGe" cell line, but it doesn't happen.
• Instead, he volunteers to test a new chemo drug, which makes him very sick.
• Before he dies, he tells his lab assistant Mary Kubicek that it would be okay to release Henrietta's true name.