New Video: Secret Heroes of the Pandemic

New Video: Secret Heroes of the Pandemic

These 6 people deserve to be widely known and celebrated for their brave and ingenious contributions to battling the pandemic.



Kira Peikoff

Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.

Beyond Henrietta Lacks: How the Law Has Denied Every American Ownership Rights to Their Own Cells

A 2017 portrait of Henrietta Lacks.

Collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from Kadir Nelson and the JKBN Group LLC.

The common perception is that Henrietta Lacks was a victim of poverty and racism when in 1951 doctors took samples of her cervical cancer without her knowledge or permission and turned them into the world's first immortalized cell line, which they called HeLa. The cell line became a workhorse of biomedical research and facilitated the creation of medical treatments and cures worth untold billions of dollars. Neither Lacks nor her family ever received a penny of those riches.

But racism and poverty is not to blame for Lacks' exploitation—the reality is even worse. In fact all patients, then and now, regardless of social or economic status, have absolutely no right to cells that are taken from their bodies. Some have called this biological slavery.

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Bob Roehr
Bob Roehr is a biomedical journalist based in Washington, DC. Over the last twenty-five years he has written extensively for The BMJ, Scientific American, PNAS, Proto, and myriad other publications. He is primarily interested in HIV, infectious disease, immunology, and how growing knowledge of the microbiome is changing our understanding of health and disease. He is working on a book about the ways the body can at least partially control HIV and how that has influenced (or not) the search for a treatment and cure.
Is a Successful HIV Vaccine Finally on the Horizon?

The HIV virus (yellow) infecting a human cell.

Few vaccines have been as complicated—and filled with false starts and crushed hopes—as the development of an HIV vaccine.

While antivirals help HIV-positive patients live longer and reduce viral transmission to virtually nil, these medications must be taken for life, and preventative medications like pre-exposure prophylaxis, known as PrEP, need to be taken every day to be effective. Vaccines, even if they need boosters, would make prevention much easier.

In August, Moderna began human trials for two HIV vaccine candidates based on messenger RNA.

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Melody Shreiber
Melody Schreiber is a journalist and the editor of What We Didn't Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth.