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.”
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