Meryam Shershaby
What if you could live on forever?
Humans have always pondered the idea of immortality. The idea of creating a legacy that never dies. HeLa cells, are the closest we have come to that immortality. In order to understand HeLa cells, we have to go back to 1951 to a woman called Henrietta Lacks.
Who is Henrietta Lacks?
She is an African American, tobacco farmer in southern Virginia and a mother of 5 children. She is also known as the “the mother of modern medicine”. In 1951, at 30 years of age she visited a doctor at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. At the time, this was one of the only hospitals to treat poor black people.
She was subsequently diagnosed with late-stage cervical cancer. She passed away 10 months later after a course of radium; the only treatment available for her at the time.
But not before a biopsy of her cancerous cells was taken. The biopsy was sent to the lab of a cancer researcher who had been collecting cells from all patients who came to The Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer.
Mrs. Lacks' cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours in the lab and they kept doing so. This was the first time any cells had lived longer than a couple days.
These rapidly dividing cells came to be known as HeLa cells (First two letters of her first and last names). This revolutionized medicine and allowed us to study living human cells in vitro.
The significance of HeLa cells.
To this day these cells live on in labs around the world. HeLa cells were the driving force behind so many advances in medicine; from the polio vaccine, to studying the human genome to actually going to outer space to test what it would do to these cells. As well as studying many diseases as leukemia, AIDS and most recently COVID-19.
The bioethical issues surrounding HeLa cells.
Even though the cells themselves became a celebrity among scientists. No one knew of their origin for a long time. Henrietta’s own family didn’t even know of the existence of these cells until researchers at John Hopkins approached her children for blood samples to learn more about the HeLa cells. They receive no recognition or compensation.
The cells themselves were acquired at a time when black people were experimented on without their consent. One of those infamous experiments was the Tuskegee Syphilis study; the aim of which was to observe the course of untreated syphilis.
Black men were told they were going to receive free healthcare but were never treated. Despite penicillin (the drug of choice) being widely available at that time. Thankfully such heinous acts are not permitted anymore but there is continued need to abolish racism completely.
Thank you Henrietta Lacks -and all the unnamed victims of unlawful experimentation- , for your contribution to science and medicine.
References
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ( book by Rebecca Skloot, 2010).
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henriettalacks/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z
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