Henrietta Lacks / Hela Cells

[Casey]

'Henrietta Lacks': A Donor's Immortal Legacy : NPR

Have a read of this article guys, I found it very interesting. Basically this black woman died of cancer in 1951 but the doctors kept part of her tumor and discovered that the cells were "immortal". They were commercialized and sold and it turned into a billion dollar industry. Her family didn't even find out until years later, and her cells have been used in medical research to test all kinds of things and find cures for lots of diseases.

They even sent them into space to do research on the effects of space environments on human cells.

It's really interesting. I might buy the book.

 

[S O F I]

For sure. What are Jokeyboy's thoughts on the matter? I'm sure he came across the name in his studies.

 

[Casey]

This article is good also - Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine - a good interview with the author of the book, Rebecca Skloot.

I'll see if I can find a good price on this book. It's really interesting that the family were unaware of all of this happening, and when they finally did find out, because they were poor and uneducated, they really couldn't comprehend what they were being told. Check out the following excerpt from that article.

When did her family find out about Henrietta’s cells?

Twenty-five years after Henrietta died, a scientist discovered that many cell cultures thought to be from other tissue types, including breast and prostate cells, were in fact HeLa cells. It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. It became an enormous controversy. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down Henrietta’s relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the family’s DNA to make a map of Henrietta’s genes so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which weren’t, to begin straightening out the contamination problem.

So a postdoc called Henrietta’s husband one day. But he had a third-grade education and didn’t even know what a cell was. The way he understood the phone call was: “We’ve got your wife. She’s alive in a laboratory. We’ve been doing research on her for the last 25 years. And now we have to test your kids to see if they have cancer.” Which wasn’t what the researcher said at all. The scientists didn’t know that the family didn’t understand. From that point on, though, the family got sucked into this world of research they didn’t understand, and the cells, in a sense, took over their lives.

How did they do that?

This was most true for Henrietta’s daughter. Deborah never knew her mother; she was an infant when Henrietta died. She had always wanted to know who her mother was but no one ever talked about Henrietta. So when Deborah found out that this part of her mother was still alive she became desperate to understand what that meant: Did it hurt her mother when scientists injected her cells with viruses and toxins? Had scientists cloned her mother? And could those cells help scientists tell her about her mother, like what her favorite color was and if she liked to dance.

I mean this kind of stuff seems sort of laughable to us, but I found it to be really profound. These people (and of course this is all fairly recent events in the last 40 years), poor and with little education, descendants of slaves, just had no grasp of something to do with their own flesh and blood that has helped to save literally millions of lives. They just don't have the means of comprehending it. I try to think about how I would attempt to understand it, if I was in their position and I just can't imagine seeing these events through their eyes.