Open Thread

Mamdani attended Bronx High School of Science. It is a Public School (free) but extremely competitive to get.in.

So implies Mamdani is really high IQ

to quote
Bronx Science, another New York City exam school, is attended by students with average SAT scores at around the 99.9th percentile of the New York state distribution, and has produced more Intel Science Talent Search finalists than any other high school in the nation

To the extent that students benefit from social interactions with high-achieving peers, attending an exam school is likely to increase achievement for the typical applicant. Indeed, many argue that
the success of exam school alumni is prima facie evidence of the importance of attending a school
with high-achieving peers.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/dobbie_fryer_shs_07_2013.pdf

The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks (1920 – 1951)

Henrietta Lacks was African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line[B] and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.

Even though some information about the origins of HeLa’s immortalized cell lines was known to researchers after 1970, the Lacks family was not made aware of the line’s existence until 1975. 

In 1951 Lacks went to Johns Hopkins because she felt a “knot” in her womb. Soon after, Lacks was told that she had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix. In 1970, physicians discovered that she had been misdiagnosed and actually had an adenocarcinoma.

During her treatments, two samples were taken from Lacks’s cervix without her permission or knowledge; one sample was of healthy tissue and the other was cancerous. These samples were given to George Otto Gey, a physician and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins. The cells from the cancerous sample eventually became known as the HeLa immortal cell line, a commonly used cell line in contemporary biomedical research

George Otto Gey, the first researcher to study Lacks’s cancerous cells, observed that these cells were unusual in that they reproduced at a very high rate and could be kept alive long enough in culture to allow more in-depth examination

The ability to rapidly reproduce HeLa cells in a laboratory setting has led to many important breakthroughs in biomedical research. For example, by 1954, Jonas Salk was using HeLa cells in his research to develop the polio vaccine. To test his new vaccine, the cells were mass-produced in the first-ever cell production factory

HeLa cells were in high demand and put into mass production. They were mailed to scientists around the globe for “research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits”.[30] HeLa cells were the first human cells successfully cloned, in 1955, and have since been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other products.There are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks