portrait of Henrietta Lacks with lines building on her image to a grid of connected dots

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

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HeLa Cells' Scientific Contributions

Summary:

HeLa cells, derived from Henrietta Lacks in 1951, were the first human cells to survive indefinitely in vitro, revolutionizing scientific research. These immortal cells facilitated significant advancements, including the development of the polio vaccine, gene mapping, and cloning. They remain invaluable for genetic research due to their ability to proliferate endlessly. Despite their scientific contributions, ethical issues arose from the lack of informed consent and the Lacks family's exclusion from the benefits, as highlighted in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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What first did HeLa cells enable for scientists?

HeLa cells are cervical cancer cells taken from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks in 1951. The cells were taken from Ms. Lacks without her knowledge or consent while she was undergoing radiation treatments at Johns Hopkins. Ms. Lacks died from cancer less than a year after her diagnosis.

Ms. Lacks's cells were the first line of human cells to survive in a test tube. A cell biologist named Dr. George Gey was able to isolate one cell that continued to divide and divide. Typically, cells in laboratories experience preprogrammed cell death after about fifty divisions. However, Dr. Gey realized that Ms. Lacks's cells were immortal and continued to divide into perpetuity.

HeLa cells have impacted science in many ways. These immortal cells, which will divide an unlimited number of times as long as they are maintained in a suitable environment, were used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio. They were also the first human cells to be successfully cloned, in 1953. By 2010, HeLa had been mentioned in more than sixty thousand scientific studies, and fifty million metric tons of these cells had been grown by scientists.

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What contribution did HeLa cells make to the field of genetics?

The HeLa cell line is a line of cells used in cell cultures worldwide. Cells grown in culture (ie, in petri dishes or in tubes) generally only can be grown for a limited time before they "age" enough that they no longer reproduce. Because growing cells from a single line enables all sorts of testing on a genetically identical set of cells and gives extremely valuable information, the HeLa line became the most widely used and valuable cell line in the world. These cells did not "age out" like other lines. In fact, they are so strong and viable that they infect other cell lines despite extreme care being taken to not contaminate other lines with HeLa; scientists who have done research on what they thought were other cell lines found they had actually been using HeLa. HeLa cells have been used for gene mapping, development of vaccines (polio, for example), development of treatments for diseases, and the process of aging. Because it is so well mapped, the HeLa line is used for genetics research on what gene sequences do, and how they can be manipulated.

The HeLa cells are named for Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black woman who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. The first two letters of her first and last names were used in naming the cells, and for over twenty years the cells taken from her cervical tumor were not properly attributed to her. The reason given for keeping her identity a secret was to protect her identity. This is true, but she and her family were not told anything about the sampling. Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty, and not have the monetary means to access any of the health advances that were made using Henrietta's cells--advances that made other people a lot of money. There are about 11,000 patents that have been issued based on use of HeLa cells. This irony is detailed in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksThe Lacks family now has some say in the research, thanks to awareness raised as a result of Skloot's book.

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