Personalized medicine evokes “big science”- large research grants, geonomic and proteomic instruments, bioinformatics data mining, individually “tailored” therapeutics, a slew of economic, legal and ethical issues.  But there’s another side: “little science” based on what the patient brings to the science.  One patient of profound importance to personalized medicine was an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951.  Cells from her tumor became the first human cancer line maintained in tissue culture-“HeLa” cells, which are still alive and, in total, represent about 400 times Mrs. Lack’s original body weight.  It has only been a few years since researchers determined the molecular phenomena of her sickness and death.  Human papilloma virus-18 almost certainly triggered her cancer.  But on Chromsome 6, Mrs. Lacks had a mutation in her Human Leukocyte Antigen genes that made her peculiarly vulnerable.  Not only did the HPV inactivate the p53 tumor suppressor gene protein (not the gene itself), it ran like a grass fire in breaking and rearranging multiple chromosomes.  The pathology actually was more complicated, but it illustrates that this clinical case was a unique interaction between a human genome and a viral one.  It’s also worth noting that for almost a quarter of a century nearly everything researchers learned about the molecular biology of cancer was actually about Mrs. Lack’s cancer.  For more, read Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which Random House is publishing today.   See the Washington Post Review.