Feb 2, 2010: Henrietta Lacks

[xoxoxoBruce]

Here's my contribution to Black History Month.
The picture, taken in 1945, is Henrietta Lacks and her husband David.
You, I, we, owe Henrietta... bigtime!

Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research.

A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. No one knows why, but her cells never died.

So why do you and I owe a debt to Henrietta?

Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.

I find it disturbing that "immortal" cells came from a tumor.
But anyway, things got complicated later on.... link

Via

[ZenGum]

Relating to this bit :

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.

from Bruce's link, I've read elsewhere that not only can the cells drift around a laboratory surprisingly easily, if one does settle into any other culture, the HeLa will take over as fast as it can grow and divide, and then spread on, so for a while there was a big problem with laboratories not being sure if any of their cultures were what they thought they were. Some speculate that this invasiveness (as well as its immortality) is related to it being a cancer.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Relating to this bit :



from Bruce's link, I've read elsewhere that not only can the cells drift around a laboratory surprisingly easily, if one does settle into any other culture, the HeLa will take over as fast as it can grow and divide, and then spread on, so for a while there was a big problem with laboratories not being sure if any of their cultures were what they thought they were. Some speculate that this invasiveness (as well as its immortality) is related to it being a cancer.

Eventually they are going to take over the world.

[newtimer]

(Overheard in the petri dish)

"Gee, Hela. What are we going to do tonight? Narf!"
"The same thing we do every night. Try to take over the culture!"

[Kolbenfresser]

So a postdoc called Henrietta’s husband one day, to ask for additional tissue samples. The way the husband 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.”

Anyway, some postdocs can easily scare the hell out of any given human being...

[Pie]

I'm pretty sure that's not what the postdoc said.

[squirell nutkin]

Yes. earlier in that paragraph they pointed out that her husband only had a 3rd grade education. However they didn't say whether or not he had a 3rd grade intellect.

The article is worth reading.

[toranokaze]

Cancer is a disorder of endlessly replicating cells ie immoral cells. So it only makes sense that the cells that are preserved by endless replication are cancerous.

[monster]

Originally Posted by toranokaze

Cancer is a disorder of endlessly replicating cells ie immoral cells.

just like humans then

[richlevy]

Well, no Nobel Prize for me then. I've spent my life looking for immoral cells.

Wait...there's one now....

Uh oh..looks like an epidemic

[richlevy]

Getting serious for a moment, one of mankind's greatest gifts is the ability to salvage some good from tragedy.

[Pie]

There's a disease in dogs called canine transmissible venereal tumor that's essentially a cancer that's morphed into a std.

Although the genome of CTVT is derived from a canid (probably a dog, wolf or coyote), it is now essentially living as a unicellular, asexually reproducing (but sexually transmitted) pathogen. Sequence analysis of the genome suggests it diverged from canids over 6,000 years ago; possibly much earlier.

Good thing HeLa hasn't turned into the same sort of thing!

[busterb]

Merc. That damn Kudzu?

[Juniper]

This was just on NPR - I heard it on the way home from school just now.

[SPUCK]

So what happens when one of these HeLa cells floats up some researcher's nose?