I've just read an article on The Guardian, called Hanrietta Lacks: the mother of modern medicine, talking about this woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 and whose cells have since been used in medical research to provide cure for many diseases.

Henrietta was poor and black. All her children suffered poor health and didn't have medical insurance to cover the treatment of their conditions. But more significantly, they didn't know how important their mother had been to many thousands of patients all over the world for the past fifty or so years.

Rebecca Skloot, who became fascinated by Henrietta since a biology class in her college years, decided to investigate the life of the woman hidden behind the simple acronym HeLa cells. She investigated the case and finally had to unfold Henrietta's children the story after their mother's death.

The point Rebecca has tried to make referred to the fact that so often in medical research, there is a tendency to approach cells and tissues as mere tools to experiment with. Rarely, the life of the people who provided those cells and tissues is taken into account.

I had the same feeling two weeks ago when I went to the exhibition Skin at the Wellcome Trust: a powerful exhibition exploring the anthropological, sociological, artistic and medical meaning of the tissue that protects us from the outside world and puts us in contact with it at the same time: the skin.

Many memories and flashes from my life and my family sprang to mind: the skin condition at the elbows of which I suffered once at 16, the fungis that my father has on his back, a photo of wrinkled hands reminded me of my grandfather.

And then there was this photo: a magnified photo of a cancer cell. It was blueish, like a little bubble of foam, it looked soft and light. Yet, it was a cancer cell. Yet, it belonged to someone whose life might have ended by the time I was looking at the photo.

I thought at how impersonally we can look at the photo of an ill cell. We have already seen the image in a science book, perhaps. But there's an entire universe behind that cell. There's a life, there are relationships, there are feelings. I am reassured to know that other people have my same thoughts.