Serendip is the old Arabic name for Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka.The origin of the word “serendipity” is in a Persian fairy tale,The Three Princes of Serendip, whose traveling heroes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” In the 16th century, the tale was translated from Persian to Italian, and from Italian to French. Horace Walpole (1717-1797), an English man of letters, encountered it in a collection of oriental tales in French, and coined the English term “serendipity” in a letter to his friend, Horace Mann, dated June 28, 1754.
Today, the word “serendipity” is a word that is used in everyday language.The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident,” and Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary as “the faculty of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.”
According to the Doctor Out of Zebulon column in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “serendipity signifies a mental state in which serenity and stupidity are blended,” as for example, “the serendipity of a cow chewing its cud under a shady tree,” or “the sort of thing that happens to you when on a dull day collecting fossils you find instead a beautiful woman who proves to be neither geologist nor archeologist.” However, this definition is erroneous, at least insofar as scientific discoveries are concerned.No scientific discovery has ever been made by pure luck.All happy accidents in science have one point in common:
“each was recognized, evaluated and acted upon in the light of the discoverer’s total intellectual experience.”
“Chance favors the prepared mind,” as Pasteur (1822- 1896) said, or more precisely: “Dans les champs de l’observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.”Indeed, it is hard to think of a better expression of “serendipity” as one reviews the incredible concatenation of intentional and chance events in medicine’s happy accidents.Salvador Luria, a Nobel
laureate in medicine, deemed it “the chance observation falling on the receptive eye.” I have the answer. What is the question? Turning an observation inside out, seeking the problem that fits the answer, is the essence of creative discovery. Such circumstances lead the astute investigator to solutions in search of problems and beyond established points of view
Many scientists, including the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon and, later, the British immunologist Peter Medawar, liked to emphasize how much of scientific discovery was unplanned and even accidental. One of Cannon's favorite examples of such serendipity is Luigi Galvani's observation of the twitching of dissected frogs' legs, hanging from a copper wire, when they accidentally touched an iron railing, leading to the discovery of "galvanism"; another is Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery of electromagnetism when he unintentionally brought a current-carrying wire parallel to a magnetic needle. Rhetoric about the sufficiency of rational method was so much hot air. Indeed, as Medawar insisted in The Art of the Soluble, "There is no such thing as The Scientific Method," no way at all of systematizing the process of discovery. Really important discoveries had a way of showing up when they had a mind to do so and not when you were looking for them. Maybe some scientists, like some book collectors, had a happy knack; maybe serendipity described the situation rather than a personal skill or capacity.
As Robert Root‐Bernstein, physiology professor and author of Discovering, observed,“We invent by intention; we discover by surprise.” In other words, accidents will happen, and it’s a blessing for us that they do.
Serendipity is the way to make discoveries, by accident but also by sagacity, of things one is not in quest of. Based on experience, knowledge, it is the creative exploitation of the unforeseen.
Quinine
The story behind the chance discovery of the anti-malarial drug quinine may be more legend than fact, but it is nevertheless a story worthy of note. The account that has gained the most currency credits a South American Indian with being the first to find a medical application for quinine. According to legend, the man unwittingly ingested quinine while suffering a malarial fever in a jungle high in the Andes. Needing desperately to quench his thirst, he drank his fill from a small, bitter-tasting pool of water. Nearby stood one or more varieties of cinchona, which grows from Colombia to Bolivia on humid slopes above 5,000 feet. The bark of the cinchona, which the indigenous people knew as quina-quina, was thought to be poisonous. But when this man's fever miraculously abated, he brought news of the medicinal tree back to his tribe, which began to use its bark to treat malaria.
Since the first officially noted use of quinine to fight malaria occurred in a community of Jesuit missionaries in Lima, Peru in 1630, historians have surmised that Indian tribes taught the missionaries how to extract the chemical quinine from cinchona bark. In any case, the Jesuits' use of quinine as a malaria medication was the first documented use of a chemical compound to successfully treat an infectious disease. To this day, quinine-based anti-malarials are widely used as effective treatments against the growth and reproduction of malarial parasites in humans.
Smallpox vaccination
In 1796, Edward Jenner, a British scientist and surgeon, had a brainstorm that ultimately led to the development of the first vaccine. A young milkmaid had told him how people who contracted cowpox, a harmless disease easily picked up during contact with cows, never got smallpox, a deadly scourge.
With this in mind, Jenner took samples from the open cowpox sores on the hands of a young dairymaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with pus he extracted from Nelmes' sores. (Experimenting on a child would be anathema today, but this was the 18th century.) The boy developed a slight fever and a few lesions but remained for the most part unscathed. A few months later, Jenner gave the boy another injection, this one containing smallpox. James failed to develop the disease, and the idea behind the modern vaccine was born.
Though doctors and scientists would not begin to understand the biological basis of immunity for at least 50 years after Jenner's first inoculation, the technique of vaccinating against smallpox using the human strain of cowpox soon became a common and effective practice worldwide.
Allergy
Charles Robert Richet, a French physiologist, made several experiments testing the reaction of dogs exposed to poison from the tentacles of sea anemones. Some of the dogs died from allergic shock, but others survived their reactions and made full recoveries.
Weeks later, because the recovered dogs seemed completely normal, Richet wasted no time in reusing them for more experiments. They were given another dose of anemone poison, this time much smaller than before. The first time the dogs' allergic symptoms, including vomiting, shock, loss of consciousness, and in some cases death, had taken several days to fully develop. But this time the dogs suffered such serious symptoms just minutes after Richet administered the poison.
Though Richet was puzzled by what had happened, he realized he could not disregard the unexpected result of his experiment. Later, he noted that his eventual conclusions about the dogs' affliction were "not at all the result of deep thinking, but of a simple observation, almost accidental; so that I have had no other merit than that of not refusing to see the facts which presented themselves before me, completely evident."
Richet's conclusions from his findings came to form the theoretical basis of the medical study and treatment of allergies. He eventually proved that there was a physiological state called anaphylaxis that was the antithesis of prophylaxis: When an allergic subject is exposed to an allergen a second time, he or she is even more sensitive to its effects than the first time. Instead of building immunity to the substance through exposure (prophylaxis), the allergic subject's immunity becomes greatly reduced.
In 1913 Richet received a Nobel Prize for his discovery and articulation of diseases of allergy
Viagra
The telephone call from a doctor in Merthyr Tydfil was one of the first clues. He had been running a small clinical trial on a new drug that had been designed for treating patients with angina. With other trials showing little efficacy for treating the disease, the future for the compound known as UK-92,480 was looking bleak.
When the doctor gave Pfizer the results, he mentioned that there had been some side effects among the healthy volunteers on the trial at Merthyr Tydfil, including indigestion and back pain. And, he added, some of the men had involuntary erections when they took the drug.
Scientists quickly discovered the scientific reason for the erections, and five years later and after much research, Pfizer applied for marketing approval for the drug – not for angina, this time, but for male impotence. Ten years on, Viagra has been used by more than 30 million men worldwide for impotence, and researchers are still finding new uses. The drug that nearly didn't make it is currently being used or investigated for treating more than a dozen diseases and health problems.
Botulinum Toxin
In 1895, three members of a music club in Ellezelles, Belgium died and 34 fell ill, after eating a meal of raw salted ham. The culprit was eventually found to be Clostridium botulinum, which produces botulinum toxin, the most deadly poison of all. Work started in 1920, with researchers trying to isolate the toxin, but it wasn't until the 1950s that they discovered that the toxin could be used in tiny doses to treat "crossed eyes", spasms of the eyelids and excessive underarm sweating.
The cosmetically desirable effects of Botox were first discovered by Canadian surgeons Alastair and Jean Carruthers, a husband and wife team who noticed the softening of patients' frown lines following treatment for eye-muscle disorders.
"Its present cosmetic and non-cosmetic applications could certainly be considered a journey of serendipity,'' says Dr Arnold Klein of the University of California.
Later, Dr Richard Glogau, a dermatologist at the University of California, noticed a curious side effect when he injected Botox into the head and facial muscles of patients. The bacteria was being injected for cosmetic reasons, to temporarily get rid of wrinkles, but Glogau and his team noticed that patients who also had regular migraines were no longer getting them. Further research showed that botulinum toxin A injected into the muscles of the brow, eyes, forehead, side of the head and back of the head near the neck could induce immediate headache relief that may last for up to six months.
Penicillin
The identification of penicillium mold by Dr. Alexander Fleming in 1928 is one of the best-known stories of medical discovery, not only because of its accidental nature, but also because penicillin has remained one of the most important and useful drugs in our arsenal, and its discovery triggered invaluable research into a range of other invaluable antibiotic drugs.
Alexander Fleming, who was notorious for having the messiest laboratory at London's St.Mary's Hospital. But the chaotic state of his surroundings did not bother Fleming in the least and in 1928 he took off on holiday leaving his lab in a particularly squalid state. On his return he noticed that some mold had contaminated a flu culture in one of his petri dishes. Instead of throwing out the ruined dish, he decided to examine the moldy sample more closely.
Fleming had reaped the benefits of taking time to scrutinize contaminated samples before. In 1922, Fleming had accidentally shed one of his own tears into a bacteria sample and noticed that the spot where the tear had fallen was free of the bacteria that grew all around it. This discovery peaked his curiosity. After conducting some tests, he concluded that tears contain an antibiotic-like enzyme that could stave off minor bacterial growth.
Six years later, the mold Fleming observed in his petri dish reminded him of this first experience with a contaminated sample. The area surrounding the mold growing in the dish was clear, which told Fleming that the mold was lethal to the potent staphylococcus bacteria in the dish. Later he noted, "But for the previous experience, I would have thrown the plate away, as many bacteriologists have done before."
Instead, Fleming took the time to isolate the mold, eventually categorizing it as belonging to the genus penicillium. After many tests, Fleming realized that he had discovered a non-toxic antibiotic substance capable of killing many of the bacteria that cause minor and severe infections in humans and other animals. His work, which has saved countless lives, won him a Nobel Prize in 1945.
X-Rays
X-rays have become an important tool for medical diagnoses, but their discovery in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had little to do with medical experimentation. Röntgen was studying cathode rays, the phosphorescent stream of electrons used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs. One earlier scientist had found that cathode rays can penetrate thin pieces of metal, while another showed that these rays could light up a fluorescent screen placed an inch or two away from a thin aluminum "window" in the glass tube.
Röntgen wanted to determine if he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard. While performing this experiment, Röntgen noticed that a glow appeared in his darkened laboratory several feet away from his cardboard-covered glass tube. At first he thought a tear in the paper sheathing was allowing light from the high-voltage coil inside the cathode-ray tube to escape. But he soon realized he had happened upon something entirely different. Rays of light were passing right through the thick paper and appearing on a fluorescent screen over a yard away.
Röntgen found that this new ray, which had many characteristics different from the cathode ray he had been studying, could penetrate solids and even record the image of a human skeleton on a photographic negative. In 1901, the first year of the Nobel Prize, Röntgen won for his accidental discovery of what he called the "X-ray," which physicians worldwide soon adopted as a standard medical tool.
Insulin
Frederick G. Banting, a young Canadian doctor, and Professor John J.R. MacLeod of the University of Toronto shared a Nobel Prize in 1923 for their isolation and clinical use of insulin against diabetes. Their work with insulin followed from the chance discovery of the link between the pancreas and blood-sugar levels by two other doctors on the other side of the Atlantic decades earlier.
In 1889, German physicians Joseph von Mering and Oscar Minkowski removed the pancreas from a healthy dog in order to study the role of the pancreas in digestion. Several days after the dog's pancreas was removed, the doctors happened to notice a swarm of flies feeding on a puddle of the dog's urine. On testing the urine to determine the cause of the flies' attraction, the doctors realized that the dog was secreting sugar in its urine, a sign of diabetes. Because the dog had been healthy prior to the surgery, the doctors knew that they had created its diabetic condition by removing its pancreas and thus understood for the first time the relationship between the pancreas and diabetes.
With more tests, von Mering and Minkowski concluded that a healthy pancreas must secrete a substance that controls the metabolism of sugar in the body. Though many scientists tried in vain to isolate the particular substance released by the pancreas after the Germans' accidental discovery, it was Banting and MacLeod who established that the mysterious substance was insulin and began to put it to use as the first truly valuable means of controlling diabetes.
Isaac Newton, who came up with his theory of gravitation while walking in his garden under an apple tree. We would not have Velcro if it was not for engineer Georges de Mestral taking his dog for a walk and becoming intrigued by the Burdock (Arctium lappa)) seeds that stuck to his dog's coat. Examining the seeds more closely, he saw the possibility of using hooks and loops to bind two surfaces reversibly in a simple fashion. He subsequently developed the hook and loop fastener and patented Velcro in 1951.The baldness drug Minoxidil (marketed as Rogaine) was first developed to treat high blood pressure. But when balding male subjects in a clinical trial starting sprouting new hair, the researchers changed tack and produced a topical treatment for baldness and hair loss. And tretinoin (marketed as Retin A), an acne treatment with a long list of side-effects, is now primarily known for its smoothing effect on wrinkles.
Despite all the examples given, mainstream medical research stubbornly continues to assume that new discoveries will follow exclusively from a predetermined research path.Many in fact,will.Others ,if history is an indication,will not.They will not come from a committee or a research team but from an individual,a maverick who views a problem with fresh perspective.Serendipity will strike and be seized upon by a well trained scientist or clinician who also dares to rely upon intuition,imagination, and creativity.Unbound by traditional theory, willing to suspend the usual set of beliefs,unconstrained by the requirement to obtain approval or funding for his or her pursuits,this outsider will persevere and lead the way to a fascinating breakthrough.Eventually, once the breakthrough becomes part of accepted medical wisdom,the insiders will pretend that the outsider was one of them all along.
As John Barth wrote in the Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor,”You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it.You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously”.The challenge for educational institutions, government policy,research centers,funding agencies will be how to recognize scientists to lose their bearings creatively.What they discover may just save our lives!
Sunday, March 13, 2011
The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks through her immortal cells
HeLa cells are known globally as one of the greatest medical discoveries of our time, and allowed for many - if not all - important medical advances that have occurred during this century.
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—though their donor remained a mystery for decades.
Henrietta Lacks, née Loretta Pleasant, was born on August 18, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia to Eliza (1886–1924) and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969).
Sometime after his wife's death, John Pleasant took the children back to where their maternal relatives lived, and they were raised there by their mother's relatives. Henrietta ended up with her grandfather in Clover, Virginia.John worked as a brakeman on the railroad.
Pleasant married her first cousin, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002), in Halifax County, Virginia. David had already been living with Henrietta's grandfather when she moved there at age 4. Their marriage in 1941, after their first two children were born, (the first when Henrietta was just 14) surprised many in the family as they had been raised like brother and sister.
After convincing David to go north to search for work, Henrietta followed in 1943, bringing their children with her. David found work at the Sparrow's Point shipyards and found a house for them on New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turners Station, now a part of Dundalk, Baltimore County, Maryland. This community was one of the largestand one of the youngest of the approximately forty African American communities in Baltimore County.
Day and Henrietta had five children together: Lawrence (b. 1935), Elsie (b. 1939), David "Sonny" Jr. (b. 1947), Deborah (b. 1949), and Joseph (b. 1950, later changed name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman). Joseph Lacks, Henrietta's last child, was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in November 1950, just four and a half months before Henrietta was diagnosed with cancer.Elsie was described by the family as "different", "deaf and dumb" and eventually died in the Crownsville State Hospital in 1955. Years later, the family learned Elsie had been abused there and may have had holes drilled in her head during experiments[citation needed]. Elsie had been placed there about 1950, around the same time Henrietta discovered that she had lumps and unusual bleeding.
On February 1, 1951, just days after a march for a cure for polio in New York City, Lacks visited Johns Hopkins because of a painful "knot" in her cervix and a bloody vaginal discharge. After a biopsy, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The appearance of the tumor was unlike anything that had ever been seen by the examining gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones who, with his wife Georgeanna, would go on to found the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine at Norfolk, Virginia's Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Prior to receiving treatment for the tumor, cells from the carcinoma were removed for research purposes without her knowledge or permission, which was standard procedure at that time. During her second visit eight days later, Dr. George Otto Gey obtained another sample of her tumor. These cells would eventually become the HeLa immortal cell line, a commonly used cell line in biomedical research.
Lacks was treated with radium tube inserts, which were sewn in place, a common treatment for these types of cancers in 1951. After several days in place, the tubes were removed and she was released from Johns Hopkins with instructions to return for X-ray treatments as a follow up. Lacks returned for the X-ray treatments. However, her condition worsened and the Hopkins doctors treated her with antibiotics, thinking that her problem might be complicated by an underlying venereal disease (she had neurosyphilis and presented with acute gonorrhea at one point as well).
In significant pain and without improvement, Lacks returned to Hopkins demanding to be admitted on August 8 and remained until her death. Though she received treatment and blood transfusions, she died of uremic poisoning on October 4, 1951 at the age of thirty-one. A subsequent partial autopsy showed that the cancer had metastasized throughout her body.
On the 4th October 1951, Henrietta Lacks passed away, and on the same day George Gey appeared on national television with a vial of his “HeLa” cells, stating “It is possible that, from a fundamental study such as this, we will be able to learn a way by which cancer can be completely wiped out.”
Soon after this statement was made in front of the American nation, the HeLa cell-line was used to propagate poliovirus, which then lead to the development of vaccines against polio, a medical triumph that saved thousands of lives, and one that could not have occurred where it not for the unique nature of HeLa cells. In this scenario, we can indeed classify HeLa cells as a “medical blessing” - the fact that Gey and his team managed to propagate the poliovirus so quickly lead to a surge of global interest in the HeLa cell line, and facilities to enable mass-production of HeLa cells was established by the National Foundation for Infantile paralysis. Soon samples of Henrietta’s cells were being bought and sold by millions world-wide, and even went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity.
Henrietta Lacks was buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery in Lackstown, a part of Clover in Halifax County, Virginia. Her exact burial location is not known, although the family believes it is within feet of her mother's gravesite.Lackstown is the name of the land that has been held by the (black) Lacks family since they received it from the (white) Lacks family, who had owned the ancestors of the black Lackses when slavery was legal. Many of the black Lacks family were also descendents from the white Lacks family. A row of boxwoods separates the graves of white ancestors from those of the black ancestors. For decades, Henrietta Lacks' mother has had the only tombstone of the five graves in the family cemetery in Lackstown.
The cells from Henrietta's tumor were given to researcher George Gey, who "discovered that [Henrietta's] cells did something they'd never seen before: They could be kept alive and grow. Before Henrietta, the cells would only survive for a few days. Gey named the sample "HeLa", after the initial letters of Henrietta Lacks' name, to protect her identity. As the first human cells that could be grown in a lab and were "immortal" (did not die after a few cell divisions), they could then be used for conducting many experiments. This represented an enormous boon to medical and biological research.
As reporter Michael Rogers stated, the growth of HeLa by a researcher at the hospital helped answer the demands of the 10,000 who marched for a cure to polio just shortly before Lacks' death. By 1954, HeLa was being used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio. To test Salk's new vaccine, the cells were quickly put into mass production in the first-ever cell production factory.
Demand for the HeLa cells quickly grew. Since they were put into mass production, Henrietta's cells have been mailed to scientists around the globe for "research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa cells have been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other products. Scientists have grown some 20 tons of her 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.
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.
Deborah’s brothers, though, didn’t think much about the cells until they found out there was money involved. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah’s brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry. Henrietta’s family has lived in poverty most of their lives, and many of them can’t afford health insurance. One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially. It consumed their lives in that way.
For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind. For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies—they’re just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation.
In a ceremony , Johns Hopkins honored the contributions of Henrietta Lacks and others who have participated in scientific research.
Administrators say they think the medical center’s role in Lacks’ story often has been misrepresented. Dr. Daniel Ford, director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Johns Hopkins, said the hospital’s critics are applying modern rules to a different era.
Patient consent, now a medical standard, wasn’t even considered in 1951. Ford noted that Lacks’ tissue was given away by researcher Gey and that the hospital never patented HeLa cells or sold them commercially.
“Gey’s whole goal was to find a human cell line that would reproduce,” Ford said. “It would be a platform, a model that scientists could learn human cell function from.”
Gey had no idea what would happen.
Over the years, HeLa cells have multiplied to the point that they could weigh 400 times Lacks’ adult body weight. Doctors still have not discovered the reason for HeLa cells' unique vigor, but suspect that it is due to altered telomerase function. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, there are close to 11,000 patents involving HeLa.The cells are so prevalent that they can be ordered by the vial on the Internet.
The family tries to concentrate on all the good that’s come from them. On Memorial Day weekend in Lacks Town, they installed their mother’s headstone, made of granite with a rose-colored tint that hints of flowers – sweet, like Hennie, and growing, like her cells.
Her grandchildren came up with the words that will be carved into the stone:
“In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife and mother who touched the lives of many. Here lies Henrietta Lacks (HeLa). Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.”
Aiyana Rogers, one of Sonny’s granddaughters, flopped down at the dining table in Baltimore where the Lacks brothers talked about the memorial. She brought out a family portrait .
Aiyana’s intrigued by the science and by the cures, but mostly she’s just proud of her great-grandmother.
“I just like that the world knows her now,” the 11-year-old said, with a wide, welcoming smile. “And that she is the most important woman in the world.”
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—though their donor remained a mystery for decades.
Henrietta Lacks, née Loretta Pleasant, was born on August 18, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia to Eliza (1886–1924) and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969).
Sometime after his wife's death, John Pleasant took the children back to where their maternal relatives lived, and they were raised there by their mother's relatives. Henrietta ended up with her grandfather in Clover, Virginia.John worked as a brakeman on the railroad.
Pleasant married her first cousin, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002), in Halifax County, Virginia. David had already been living with Henrietta's grandfather when she moved there at age 4. Their marriage in 1941, after their first two children were born, (the first when Henrietta was just 14) surprised many in the family as they had been raised like brother and sister.
After convincing David to go north to search for work, Henrietta followed in 1943, bringing their children with her. David found work at the Sparrow's Point shipyards and found a house for them on New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turners Station, now a part of Dundalk, Baltimore County, Maryland. This community was one of the largestand one of the youngest of the approximately forty African American communities in Baltimore County.
Day and Henrietta had five children together: Lawrence (b. 1935), Elsie (b. 1939), David "Sonny" Jr. (b. 1947), Deborah (b. 1949), and Joseph (b. 1950, later changed name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman). Joseph Lacks, Henrietta's last child, was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in November 1950, just four and a half months before Henrietta was diagnosed with cancer.Elsie was described by the family as "different", "deaf and dumb" and eventually died in the Crownsville State Hospital in 1955. Years later, the family learned Elsie had been abused there and may have had holes drilled in her head during experiments[citation needed]. Elsie had been placed there about 1950, around the same time Henrietta discovered that she had lumps and unusual bleeding.
On February 1, 1951, just days after a march for a cure for polio in New York City, Lacks visited Johns Hopkins because of a painful "knot" in her cervix and a bloody vaginal discharge. After a biopsy, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The appearance of the tumor was unlike anything that had ever been seen by the examining gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones who, with his wife Georgeanna, would go on to found the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine at Norfolk, Virginia's Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Prior to receiving treatment for the tumor, cells from the carcinoma were removed for research purposes without her knowledge or permission, which was standard procedure at that time. During her second visit eight days later, Dr. George Otto Gey obtained another sample of her tumor. These cells would eventually become the HeLa immortal cell line, a commonly used cell line in biomedical research.
Lacks was treated with radium tube inserts, which were sewn in place, a common treatment for these types of cancers in 1951. After several days in place, the tubes were removed and she was released from Johns Hopkins with instructions to return for X-ray treatments as a follow up. Lacks returned for the X-ray treatments. However, her condition worsened and the Hopkins doctors treated her with antibiotics, thinking that her problem might be complicated by an underlying venereal disease (she had neurosyphilis and presented with acute gonorrhea at one point as well).
In significant pain and without improvement, Lacks returned to Hopkins demanding to be admitted on August 8 and remained until her death. Though she received treatment and blood transfusions, she died of uremic poisoning on October 4, 1951 at the age of thirty-one. A subsequent partial autopsy showed that the cancer had metastasized throughout her body.
On the 4th October 1951, Henrietta Lacks passed away, and on the same day George Gey appeared on national television with a vial of his “HeLa” cells, stating “It is possible that, from a fundamental study such as this, we will be able to learn a way by which cancer can be completely wiped out.”
Soon after this statement was made in front of the American nation, the HeLa cell-line was used to propagate poliovirus, which then lead to the development of vaccines against polio, a medical triumph that saved thousands of lives, and one that could not have occurred where it not for the unique nature of HeLa cells. In this scenario, we can indeed classify HeLa cells as a “medical blessing” - the fact that Gey and his team managed to propagate the poliovirus so quickly lead to a surge of global interest in the HeLa cell line, and facilities to enable mass-production of HeLa cells was established by the National Foundation for Infantile paralysis. Soon samples of Henrietta’s cells were being bought and sold by millions world-wide, and even went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity.
Henrietta Lacks was buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery in Lackstown, a part of Clover in Halifax County, Virginia. Her exact burial location is not known, although the family believes it is within feet of her mother's gravesite.Lackstown is the name of the land that has been held by the (black) Lacks family since they received it from the (white) Lacks family, who had owned the ancestors of the black Lackses when slavery was legal. Many of the black Lacks family were also descendents from the white Lacks family. A row of boxwoods separates the graves of white ancestors from those of the black ancestors. For decades, Henrietta Lacks' mother has had the only tombstone of the five graves in the family cemetery in Lackstown.
The cells from Henrietta's tumor were given to researcher George Gey, who "discovered that [Henrietta's] cells did something they'd never seen before: They could be kept alive and grow. Before Henrietta, the cells would only survive for a few days. Gey named the sample "HeLa", after the initial letters of Henrietta Lacks' name, to protect her identity. As the first human cells that could be grown in a lab and were "immortal" (did not die after a few cell divisions), they could then be used for conducting many experiments. This represented an enormous boon to medical and biological research.
As reporter Michael Rogers stated, the growth of HeLa by a researcher at the hospital helped answer the demands of the 10,000 who marched for a cure to polio just shortly before Lacks' death. By 1954, HeLa was being used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio. To test Salk's new vaccine, the cells were quickly put into mass production in the first-ever cell production factory.
Demand for the HeLa cells quickly grew. Since they were put into mass production, Henrietta's cells have been mailed to scientists around the globe for "research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa cells have been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other products. Scientists have grown some 20 tons of her 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.
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.
Deborah’s brothers, though, didn’t think much about the cells until they found out there was money involved. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah’s brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry. Henrietta’s family has lived in poverty most of their lives, and many of them can’t afford health insurance. One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially. It consumed their lives in that way.
For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind. For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies—they’re just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation.
In a ceremony , Johns Hopkins honored the contributions of Henrietta Lacks and others who have participated in scientific research.
Administrators say they think the medical center’s role in Lacks’ story often has been misrepresented. Dr. Daniel Ford, director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Johns Hopkins, said the hospital’s critics are applying modern rules to a different era.
Patient consent, now a medical standard, wasn’t even considered in 1951. Ford noted that Lacks’ tissue was given away by researcher Gey and that the hospital never patented HeLa cells or sold them commercially.
“Gey’s whole goal was to find a human cell line that would reproduce,” Ford said. “It would be a platform, a model that scientists could learn human cell function from.”
Gey had no idea what would happen.
Over the years, HeLa cells have multiplied to the point that they could weigh 400 times Lacks’ adult body weight. Doctors still have not discovered the reason for HeLa cells' unique vigor, but suspect that it is due to altered telomerase function. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, there are close to 11,000 patents involving HeLa.The cells are so prevalent that they can be ordered by the vial on the Internet.
The family tries to concentrate on all the good that’s come from them. On Memorial Day weekend in Lacks Town, they installed their mother’s headstone, made of granite with a rose-colored tint that hints of flowers – sweet, like Hennie, and growing, like her cells.
Her grandchildren came up with the words that will be carved into the stone:
“In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife and mother who touched the lives of many. Here lies Henrietta Lacks (HeLa). Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.”
Aiyana Rogers, one of Sonny’s granddaughters, flopped down at the dining table in Baltimore where the Lacks brothers talked about the memorial. She brought out a family portrait .
Aiyana’s intrigued by the science and by the cures, but mostly she’s just proud of her great-grandmother.
“I just like that the world knows her now,” the 11-year-old said, with a wide, welcoming smile. “And that she is the most important woman in the world.”
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