Health Check

Henrietta Lacks was only 31 years old when she died from cervical cancer in 1951. While she was in hospital in the USA, her cells were harvested without her knowledge which, since being replicated infinitely, have gone on to enable research into cancer, dementia and Parkinson’s. As well as contributing to the development of vaccines for polio and COVID-19. Her family have fought for decades to get justice for the “stolen” cells, and this week reached a settlement with Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. The United Nations says we now live in the era of "global boiling". As temperatures continue to soar across the southern USA, the BBC’s Health and Science Correspondent James Gallagher heads to a high-tech heated chamber in the UK, on a mission to find out how hot is too hot for our bodies to cope with. In Sweden, dentist Dr Nivetha Natarajan Gavriilidou tells Claudia Hammond about her work using the bone structure of the jaw to predict how we might get shorter as we age. Could it lead to dent