Cells taken from one woman in 1951 are still dividing in labs worldwide.
In 1951 doctors in Baltimore took a sample of Henrietta Lacks's cervical tumour without asking her. Her cells did something no human cells had done before: they kept dividing in the lab, apparently without limit. The HeLa line has since helped develop a polio vaccine and features in almost 11,000 patents.
Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old Black mother of five from Turner Station, near Baltimore, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in early 1951. During her radium treatment, two samples were taken from her cervix, one healthy and one cancerous, without her knowledge or permission. At the time, no consent was required. The samples went to George Otto Gey, a cancer researcher at the hospital. Lacks died that October, the cancer having spread throughout her body.
Until then, human cells grown in the lab had generally survived only a few days, too briefly for serious experiments. Lacks's tumour cells were different: they multiplied rapidly and simply kept going. Gey grew a line from a single cell and labelled it HeLa, using the first two letters of her first and last names, as was his habit. It became the first immortalised human cell line, one that can reproduce indefinitely under the right conditions.
HeLa cells were mass-produced and shipped around the world. By 1954 Jonas Salk was using them in polio vaccine research, supplied by the first-ever cell production factory. In 1955 they became the first human cells to be cloned. They have been used to study cancer, AIDS, radiation and gene mapping. They are so vigorous that in the early 1970s many other cell cultures turned out to have been contaminated by them.
Her family knew nothing of this until 1975, when they found out by chance at a dinner party. Later, family medical records were published without their consent, and in 2013 researchers published a HeLa genome without consulting them, raising privacy fears because the DNA reveals something about her descendants too. That year the US National Institutes of Health agreed to give the family a say over access to the data. Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brought the story to millions, and the family has since reached settlements with biotech companies. Her case is now central to debates about informed consent.
Source: Wikipedia — Henrietta Lacks · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
