Do you know what HIV, Ebola, Polio, Measles and Mumps have in common?
It’s one woman- Henrietta Lacks
On August 1st 1920, Loretta Lacks Pleasant was born to African-American tobacco farmers in Roanoke, Virginia. At some point later in her life, she changed her name to Henrietta Lacks and grew up as a tobacco farmer in segregated America. In 1941, she married her cousin David Lacks and went on to have five children with him.
Sometime during her fifth pregnancy, she felt a growing pain in her womb and felt a “knot” forming in her womb. After giving birth to a relatively normal Joe Lacks, she experienced a severe haemorrhage causing her immense vaginal bleeding as well. Upon examination at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Howard Jones, the resident gynaecologist ruled out syphilis but did discover a large, malignant cervical cancer tumour growing inside of her.
As her official medical records show, Henrietta began undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer. This was the best medical treatment available at the time for this terrible disease. As was the custom during that time, a sample of her regular as well as her cancer cells retrieved during a biopsy were sent to the resident cell biologist- Dr. George Gey's tissue lab. These were taken without her permission as the concept of “informed consent” was not a mainstream issue for the Whites in America, let alone the Coloured.
For years, Dr. Gey, a prominent cancer and virus researcher, had been collecting cells from all patients who came to The Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer, but each sample quickly died in the lab, separated from the patient’s body. What he would soon discover was that Henrietta’s cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, hers doubled almost every 24 hours.
This unique capability of her cell line dubbed the HeLa cell line from the first two letters of her first and last names made it the first virtually “immortal” line of cells to exist. This discovery proved to be a boon at the time as it was in 1951, at the peak of America’s Polio epidemic, that Jonas Salk was testing his polio vaccine and required a cell culture which was mass producible and showed consistent properties to enable him to test and produce his vaccine on a large scale. But the unusual growth capabilities of the Hela cell line also contaminated many cell cultures and ruined years of research. Transmitted through unwashed hands, floating dust particles or used pipettes, these pervasive cells would overpower other cell cultures so exponentially that a single HeLa cell could completely take it over.
The HeLa cells have made significant contributions to the scientific field however- proving to be an asset in the discovery of the HPV vaccine, the development of genome mapping through the Human Genome Project as well as to study the behavior of cells under zero gravity in space.
If you would want to read more about this topic and about it’s implications on the concept of informed consent as well as how Henrietta Lacks’s family coped with the consequences after being informed of this fact in the 1970’s, I highly recommend- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
It is a mixture of part scientific thesis, which Skloot herself published as part of her final year college project, and part an inside look into the story of a young African American woman who changed the world of science forever.
“As of now, Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it”
-Rebecca Skloot
Comments