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HeLa Cells:
A Public Radio Commentary
by Bill Hammack
Listen using RealAudio
We owe a major step in the eradication of polio, and a host of
other diseases, to one unsung person. I'd say hero, but this
person never knew what they did. They never knew their own
contribution. In 1951, a thirty-one year old women named
Henrietta Lacks lay in a segregated ward of the Johns Hopkins
Hospital in Baltimore. Poor and African-American, born to tobacco
pickers from Virginia, Lacks herself was the mother of four. She
was dying of cervical cancer.
As the hospital's gynecologist sewed radioactive radium to her
cervix in an attempt to kill her cancer, he took, without her
knowing, a small sample of her tumor. He passed this on to Dr.
George Gey, pronounced "guy".
Gey headed a lab at Hopkins that specialized in growing tissue
samples - what we'd call human cells. For thirty years he'd been
trying to grow human cells in his laboratory. If he could do
this, then he could learn firsthand about human biology without
experimenting on human beings directly. His greatest hope was to
make and study long-living cultures of the most dreaded human
diseases, to have, as someone once put it "a tumor in a test
tube." The problem though, was that human cells wouldn't grow in
dishes.
Guy noticed that Henrietta Lack's reproduced in the dishes - even
thrived. Gey called them immortal because they were the first
human cells to live indefinitely outside the body. Their first
use was to develop the vaccine that wiped out polio. Today,
nearly every lab using tissue cultures uses Henrietta Lack's
cells. They call them HeLa Cells - spelled H-E-L-A - after the
initial letters of her first and last names. They are a standard
laboratory tool for studying the effects of radiation, growing
viruses, and testing medications. They've been used in Nobel
Prize winning work, have flown in the space shuttle missions, and
sat in nuclear test sites around the world to test for radiation.
In fact, they have been cultured so often the that the cells
combined weight exceeds many times that of her original body.
Within the scientific community the abbreviation "HeLa" for the
cells is often used. In fact, when I searched a database of
scientific papers I turned up nearly 1000 papers with the words
"HeLa cells", but only one when I type in "Henrietta Lacks", the
unwitting supplier of these cells. It's time we remembered.
Copyright 2003 William S. Hammack Enterprises
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