Henrietta Lacks

The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks

2011-11-16T13:44:00.000-08:00

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the astonishing biography of a poor tobacco farmer whose cells, first grown in culture in 1951, are still ubiquitous in the laboratory world today. The author, Rebecca Skloot, dedicated nearly a decade to researching the science and, perhaps more interestingly, getting to know the Lacks family. Skloot is a science journalist whose name is familiar in the corridors of my own institution, the New York Academy of Sciences, because she did freelance work for us, writing about our scientific symposia. With this book, she presents an unforgettable story that reads like a novel.

Henrietta Lacks was a 29-year-old mother when doctors at Johns Hopkins diagnosed her with aggressive cervical cancer. At that time, Hopkins was the only hospital nearby that would admit and treat African American patients. Without her consent, as was commonly done in that time, doctors removed a sample of her cancerous tissue and gave it to a laboratory that had been trying for years to grow an immortalized human cell line. They named the cells HeLa, consistent with their practice of abbreviating the first and last names of the patient, and without informing her or her family put them in a dish.

Anyone who has come from a basic science laboratory knows where the story is going. Of course, the heartiness of HeLa cells in culture and their ability to be grown in suspension, easily freeze-thawed, and shipped provided the scientific community for the very first time with a consistent and reliable tool for experimentation that revolutionized the way we do research. HeLa cells have been used in so many groundbreaking studies that it would be hard to overstate their importance to science and medicine. The cells were used to launch the field of virology, to create the polio vaccine, to do gene mapping and cloning, and to study the effects of zero gravity in outer space and in a slew of other studies that add nearly 300 new publications each month to a library that now totals about 60,000.

The rest of the review.

The famous Hela cells

2010-06-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Skloot showed early hints of her future vocation when confronted by a scientific mystery with an intriguing backstory at a community college in Portland, Ore. The then-16-year-old was taking a basic biology class and was told about the so-called HeLa cells, which had been alive since 1951 and been mysteriously growing in laboratories around the world. They've been used to uncover secrets of cancer, help develop a polio vaccine and even blasted off into space.

The future science writer was intrigued. Her science side was interested in the medical mystery behind why the cells continued to live for 60 years after the host died of cancer. Her writer side was interested in Henrietta Lacks, the poor southern tobacco farmer who had the cells taken from her without her permission in 1951. Her story was sad, topical and infuriating. Henrietta's tissues have generated billions, but she was buried in an unmarked grave in the tiny town of Clover, Va. Her descendants dants have often been unable to get access to health care in the U.S. Read more

'Henrietta Lacks': A Donor's Immortal Legacy

2010-06-06T10:50:00.001-07:00

n 1951, an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. She was treated at Johns Hopkins University, where a doctor named George Gey snipped cells from her cervix without telling her. Gey discovered that Lacks' cells could not only be kept alive, but would also grow indefinitely.

For the past 60 years Lacks' cells have been cultured and used in experiments ranging from determining the long-term effects of radiation to testing the live polio vaccine. Her cells were commercialized and have generated millions of dollars in profit for the medical researchers who patented her tissue. Read More

* Culture * Books * Science and nature The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2010-06-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

In old-fashioned museums you can see the unconscious benefactors of mankind, trapped in glass cases: the freaks and monsters of their day, the anomalies, sometimes skeletonised and entire, sometimes cut into parts and labelled. When we look at them, fascination and repulsion uneasily mixed, we bow our heads to their contribution to knowledge, but it is hard to locate their humanity. The thread of empathy has frayed and snapped. They have become objects, more stone than flesh: petrified, post-human.

Henrietta Lacks is a medical specimen of quite another kind. No dead woman has done more for the living, and yet we can imagine her easily from her photograph, a vivacious woman who was only 31 years when she died in 1951 in a "coloured ward" in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Beloved by her family, a lively, open-hearted woman, Henrietta died in intractable pain, and at the autopsy her body's interior was pearled by tumours. Towards the end she had been given only palliative treatment, but no one had explained this to her family, who still hoped she might be cured. She left behind a husband and five children, the youngest only a baby. But she also left behind a slice of tissue, a piece excised from the cervical cancer that was her primary tumour. From this sample her cells were cultured. Read More

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks- The book

2010-06-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a book about the imbalance between the needs of medical science and the individual impacts of medical ethics (or the lack thereof). At its heart is the story of a woman—whose fatal cancer led to some of the major scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century—and the family who suffered through her death, then found out 30 years later about her afterlife in a petri dish.

Henrietta Lacks was a black woman, born on land left to her ancestors by the former slave owners who'd fathered them. She married, moved to Baltimore, had five children. When she was 31, Henrietta died, the victim of a frighteningly fast-moving cervical cancer. That was 1951.

But not all of Henrietta had been laid to rest. Cancer cells, taken before and after her death by doctors at Johns Hopkins, had become the first human cells to grow and thrive in the lab, living and multiplying indefinitely in test tubes around the world. Known as the HeLa cell line, little parts of Henrietta Lacks helped develop the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, in vitro fertilization and more. Read more

Marking the magnificent memory of Henrietta Lacks

2010-06-06T10:45:00.001-07:00

For those who are not regular readers, Henrietta Lacks was a rural tobacco farmer, mother, wife, daughter, sister, and friend from southern Virginia who developed an unusually aggressive case of cervical cancer while living in Baltimore in 1951. While being treated at Johns Hopkins University, surgeons excised pieces of her tumor in an ongoing effort by the laboratory of Dr. George Gey to establish a continuously growing human tumor cell line in culture, a feat that had only been previously accomplished with mouse cells. Ms. Lacks's cells are today known by the name, HeLa (hee-luh), and have been used from the fifties in testing the effectiveness of the original Salk polio vaccine up through today providing the basis for the new cervical cancer vaccines. I would not be overstating the case to say that most biomedical scientists have at one time or another worked with HeLa cells. Read More

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

2010-06-06T10:43:00.001-07:00

Henrietta Lacks was only 31 years old when she died on October 4, 1951.

Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

2010-06-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

Who was Henrietta Lacks?
She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. 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.

Why are her cells so important?
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. Read More

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html#ixzz0q60eAFBE

The Life, Death, and Life After Death of Henrietta Lacks

2010-06-06T10:40:00.001-07:00

On Feb. 1, 1951, Henrietta Lacks--mother of five, native of rural southern Virginia, resident of the Turner Station neighborhood in Dundalk--went to Johns Hopkins Hospital with a worrisome symptom: spotting on her underwear. She was quickly diagnosed with cervical cancer. Eight months later, despite surgery and radiation treatment, the Sparrows Point shipyard worker's wife died at age 31 as she lay in the hospital's segregated ward for blacks.

Not all of Henrietta Lacks died that October morning, though. She unwittingly left behind a piece of herself that still lives today. Read More

Henrietta Lacks's cells

2010-06-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

On 4 October 1951, a young black woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins hospital. The mother of five children, Henrietta was 31 and, although poor, was remembered as being strikingly pretty. Apart from that, there seemed to be nothing special about her life.

But in death Henrietta was transformed. Cells removed from her body – without her family's permission – were subsequently used by doctors to revolutionise medicine. By mixing them with special plasma, they succeeded in growing her tumour cells in the laboratory. It was the first time that a human cell line had survived outside the body. Read more

What’s left of Henrietta Lacks?

2010-06-06T10:37:00.001-07:00

I don’t know where I heard of her first: a woman whose cells are bred in culture dishes in labs all over the world; a woman whose cells were so prolific that there is more of her now, in terms of biomass, then there ever was when she was alive.

It seems to me that she is one of the saints who multiplied in reliquaries after their death, to produce, as Ian Paisley’s website reminds us (in an essay called ‘The Errors of Rome’), the many prepuces of the infant Jesus, and the variously coloured hair of His madly trichogenous mother. Perhaps, in these days of cloning, or in future days of cloning, we will look to the evangelical Protestants and say that they were right all along: no miracles please, scientific or otherwise, no icons, and a Just Say No approach to reproduction. Read More

The Story of Henrietta Lacks: A Lesson in Biology and Ethics

2010-06-06T10:36:00.001-07:00

Henrietta Lacks was only 31 years old when she died on October 4, 1951. But thanks to one of the more shameful, yet at the same time scientifically beneficial, episodes in the history of medical science, cells from the tumor that killed her grow today in laboratories all over the world. Read more

Henrietta Lacks

2010-02-12T04:15:00.001-08:00

Henrietta Lacks today lies in an unmarked grave in Virginia.