On January 29, 1951, 30-year-old Henrietta Lacks visited the nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, because she had been bleeding abnormally after the birth of her last child. The physician found the reason for the bleed- ing: a tumor the size of a quarter on her cervix. A piece of the tumor was sent to a pathologist in a clinical laboratory, who reported that the tumor was malignant. A week later Lacks was back at the hospital, where physi- cians treated her tumor with radiation to try to kill it. But before the treatment began, they took a small sample of cells and sent them to the research lab of George and Margaret Gey, two scientists at the hospital who had been trying for 20 years to coax human cells to live and multiply outside the body. If they could do so, they thought, they might find a cure for cancer. The Geys hit pay dirt with Lacks’ cells; they grew more vigorously than any cells they had ever seen. Unfortu- nately, they also grew fast in Lacks’ body, and in a few months they had spread to almost all of her organs. On the day she died, October 4, 1951, Dr. George Gey appeared on national television with a test tube of her cells, which he called HeLa cells. “It is possible that, from a fundamental study such as this, we will ... learn a way by which cancer can be completely wiped out,” he said. Because of their robust ability to reproduce, HeLa cells quickly became a staple of cell biology research. In controlled settings they could be infected with viruses, and they were instrumental in developing the supply of polioviruses that led to the first vaccine against that dread disease. HeLa cells have been used for important basic and applied research ever since. Although Lacks had never been outside Virginia and Maryland, her cells have traveled all over the world and even into space on the space shuttle. Over the past 60 years, tens of thousands of research articles have been published using information obtained from Lacks’ cells. Her cells grow so well in the lab that they have sometimes contaminated and taken over cell cultures of other cell types. If they aren’t careful, researchers who think they are studying, say, kidney cells may be studying HeLa cells instead.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 12:55:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015