‘Immortal’ Cells

Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells





Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book investigates how a poor black
tobacco farmer had a groundbreaking impact on modern medicine

• By Sarah Zielinski
  
• Smithsonian.com, January 22, 2010
  

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. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the
amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's
impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.



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.

There has been a lot of confusion over the years about the source of HeLa cells. Why?
When the cells were taken, they were given the code name HeLa, for the
first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. Today, anonymizing samples is
a very important part of doing research on cells. But that wasn’t
something doctors worried about much in the 1950s, so they weren’t
terribly careful about her identity. When some members of the press got
close to finding Henrietta’s family, the researcher who’d grown the
cells made up a pseudonym—Helen Lane—to throw the media off track.
Other pseudonyms, like Helen Larsen, eventually showed up, too. Her
real name didn’t really leak out into the world until the 1970s.

How did you first get interested in this story?
I first learned about Henrietta in 1988. I was 16 and a student in a
community college biology class. Everybody learns about these cells in
basic biology, but what was unique about my situation was that my
teacher actually knew Henrietta’s real name and that she was black. But
that’s all he knew. The moment I heard about her, I became obsessed:
Did she have any kids? What do they think about part of their mother
being alive all these years after she died? Years later, when I started
being interested in writing, one of the first stories I imagined myself
writing was hers. But it wasn’t until I went to grad school that I
thought about trying to track down her family.

How did you win the trust of Henrietta’s family?
Part of it was that I just wouldn’t go away and was determined to tell
the story. It took almost a year even to convince Henrietta’s daughter,
Deborah, to talk to me. I knew she was desperate to learn about her
mother. So when I started doing my own research, I’d tell her
everything I found. I went down to Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta
was raised, and tracked down her cousins, then called Deborah and left
these stories about Henrietta on her voice mail. Because part of what I
was trying to convey to her was I wasn’t hiding anything, that we could
learn about her mother together. After a year, finally she said, fine,
let’s do this thing.

When did her family find out about Henrietta’s 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.

How did they do that?
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.

What are the lessons from this book?
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.

And for the rest of us?
The story of HeLa cells and what happened with Henrietta has often been
held up as an example of a racist white scientist doing something
malicious to a black woman. But that’s not accurate. The real story is
much more subtle and complicated. What is very true about science is
that there are human beings behind it and sometimes even with the best
of intentions things go wrong.
One of the things I don’t want people to take from the story is the
idea that tissue culture is bad. So much of medicine today depends on
tissue culture. HIV tests, many basic drugs, all of our vaccines—we
would have none of that if it wasn’t for scientists collecting cells
from people and growing them. And the need for these cells is going to
get greater, not less. Instead of saying we don’t want that to happen,
we just need to look at how it can happen in a way that everyone is OK
with.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html#ixzz0eJkzAjSe