1. “I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel
knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would
happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the
most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning,
gene mapping, in vitro fertilization.”
2. “There’s no way of knowing exactly how
many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you
could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50
million metric tons – an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell
weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all
HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three
times, spanning more than 350 million feet.”
3. “Defler paced the front of the classroom
telling us how mitosis – the process of cell division – makes it possible for
embryos to grow into babies, and for our bodies to create new cells for healing
wounds or replenishing blood we’ve lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a
perfectly choreographed dance. All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in
the division process for cells to start growing out of control, he told us.
Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could
have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.”
4. “Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious
case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took
samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying
to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty four
hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever
grown in a laboratory.”
5. “Her cells were part of research into
the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop
drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s
disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted
diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative
cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been
studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk.
Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard
laboratory workhorse. “HeLa cells were one of the most important things that
happened to medicine in the last hundred years,” Defler said.”
6. “And as Howard Jones once wrote,
“Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical
material.””
7. “On February 5, 1951, after Jones got
Henrietta’s biopsy report back from the lab, he called and told her it was
malignant.”
8. “I told him about the Tuskegee syphilis
study like I was giving an oral report in history class: It started in the
thirties, when U.S. Department of Public Health researchers at the Tuskegee
Institute decided to study how syphilis killed, from infection to death. They
recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die
slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin
could cure them. The research subjects didn’t ask questions. They were poor and
uneducated, and the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot
meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty dollar burial stipends
for their families when the men died. The researchers chose black subjects
because they, like many whites at the time, believed black people were “a notoriously syphilis soaked race”.
The public didn’t learn about the Tuskegee study until the seventies,
after hundreds of men enrolled in it had already died. The news spread like pox
through black communities: doctors were doing research on black people, lying
to them, and watching them die. Rumors started circulating that the doctors had
actually injected the men with syphilis in order to study them.
“What else?” Pattillo grumbled.
I told him I’d heard about so called Mississippi
Appendectomies, unnecessary hysterectomies performed on poor black women to
stop them from reproducing, and to give young doctors a chance to practice the
procedure. I’d also read about the lack of funding for research into
sickle-cell anemia, a disease that affected blacks almost exclusively.””
9. “Deborah sat silent for a long moment,
then screamed, “That’s right!” She giggled and started talking like we’d known
each other for years. “Everything always just about the cells and don’t even
worry about her name and was HeLa even a person. So hallelujah! I think a book
would be great!””
10. ““Nobody never said nothing,” she told
me. “I mean, where my mother clothes at? Where my mother shoes? I knew about her
watch and ring, but it was stolen. That was after my brother killed that boy.”
She talked about a man she didn’t name, saying, “I didn’t think it was fit for
him to steal my mother medical record and autopsy papers. He was in prison for
fifteen years in Alabama. Now he sayin John Hopkin killed my mother and them
white doctors experimented on her cause she was black.””
11. ““The normal cells which make up our
bodies are tiny objects, five thousand of which would fit on the head of a
pin,” he said, his voice a bit too loud and stilted. “How the normal cells
become cancerous is still a mystery.””
12. “At one point he said, “Now let me show
you a bottle in which we have grown massive quantities of cancer cells.” He
picked up a clear glass pint sized bottle, most likely full of Henrietta’s
cells, and rocked it in his hands as he explained that his lab was using those
cells to find ways to stop cancer. He said, “It is quite possible that from
fundamental studies such as these that we will be able to learn a way by which
cancer cells can be damaged or completely wiped out.”
To help make that happen, Gey began sending Henrietta’s cells to any
scientist who might use them for cancer research. Shipping live cells in the
mail – a common practice today – wasn’t done at the time. Instead, Gey sent them
via plane in tubes with a few drops of culture medium, just enough to keep them
alive for a short time. Sometimes pilots or stewards tucked the tubes in their
shirt pockets, to keep the cells at body temperature as if they were still in
an incubator. Other times, when the cells had to ride in the cargo hold, Gey
tucked them into holes carved in blocks of ice to keep them from overheating,
then packed the ice in cardboard boxes filled with sawdust. When shipments were
ready to go, Gey would warn recipients that the cells were about to
“metastasize” to their cities, so they could stand ready to fetch the shipment
and rush back to their labs. If all went well, the cells survived. If not, Gey
packaged up another batch and tried again.
He sent shipments of HeLa cells to researchers in Texas, India, New
York, Amsterdam, and many places between. Those researchers gave them to more
researchers, who gave them to more still. Henrietta’s cells rode into the
mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules. As Gey flew from one lab to
another, demonstrating his culturing techniques and helping to set up new
laboratories, he always flew with tubes of Henrietta’s cells in his breast
pocket. And when scientists visited Gey’s lab to learn his techniques, he
usually sent them home with a vial or two of HeLa. In letters, Gey and some of
his colleagues began referring to the cells as his “precious babies.”
The reason Henrietta’s cells were so precious was because they allowed
scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living
human. They cut HeLa cells apart and exposed them to endless toxins, radiation,
and infections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would
kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune
suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa cells into immune compromised
rats, which developed malignant tumors much like Henrietta’s. If the cells died
in the process, it didn’t matter – scientists could just go back to their
eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again.
Despite the spread of HeLa and the flurry of new research that followed,
there were no news stories about the birth of the amazing HeLa cell line and
how it might help stop cancer. In Gey’s one appearance on television, he didn’t
mention Henrietta or her cells by name, so the general public knew nothing of
HeLa. But even if they had known, they probably wouldn’t have paid it much
mind. For decades the press had been reporting that cell culture was going to
save the world from disease and make man immortal, but by 1951 the general
public had stopped buying it. Cell culture had become less a medical miracle
than something out of a scary science fiction movie.”
13. Carrel// “At age thirty nine he’d
already invented the first technique for suturing blood vessels together, and
had used it to perform the first coronary bypass and develop methods for
transplanting organs. He hoped someday to grow whole organs in the laboratory,
filling massive vaults with lungs, livers, kidneys, and tissues he could ship
through the mail for transplantation.”
14. “Months later, Carrel won a Nobel Prize
for his blood vessel suturing technique and his contributions to organ
transplantation, and he became an instant celebrity. The prize had nothing to
do with the chicken heart, but articles about his award conflated the immortal
chicken heart cells with his transplantation work, and suddenly it sounded like
he’d found the fountain of youth. Headlines around the world read: CARREL’S NEW
MIRACLE POINTS WAY TO AVERT OLD AGE! … SCIENTISTS GROW IMMORTAL CHICKEN HEART …
DEATH PERHAPS NOT INEVITABLE”
Scientists said Carrel’s chicken heart cells were one of the most
important advances of the century, and that cell culture would uncover the
secrets behind everything from eating and sex to “the music of Bach, the poems
of Milton, [and] the genius of Michelangelo.” Carrel was a scientific messiah.
Magazines called his culture medium “an elixir of youth” and claimed that
bathing in it might make a person live forever.
But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a
eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what
he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less
intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He
dreamed of never ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced
sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic
measures” he took in that direction.
15. “Carrel was a mystic who believed in
telepathy and clairvoyance, and thought it was possible for humans to live
several centuries through the use of suspended animation. Eventually he turned
his apartment into a chapel, began giving lectures on medical miracles, and
told reporters he dreamed of moving to South America and becoming a dictator.
Other researchers distanced themselves, criticizing him for being unscientific,
but much of white America embraced his ideas and saw him as a spiritual adviser
and a genius.”
16. “Her doctors tried in vain to ease her
suffering. “Demerol does not seem to
touch the pain,” one wrote, so he tried morphine.
“This doesn’t help too much either.” He gave her Dromoran. “This stuff works,” he wrote. But not for long. Eventually
one of her doctors tried injecting pure
alcohol straight into her spine. “Alcohol injections ended in failure,” he
wrote.”
17. “There is no record that George Gey
ever visited Henrietta in the hospital, or said anything to her about her
cells. And everyone I talked to who might know said that Gey and Henrietta
never met. Everyone, that is, except Laure Aurelian, a microbiologist who was
Gey’s colleague at Hopkins.
“I’ll never forget it,” Aurelian said. “George told me he leaned over
Henrietta’s bed and said, “Your cells will make you immortal”. He told
Henrietta her cells would help save the lives of countless people, and she
smiled. She told him she was glad her pain would come to some good for
someone.”
18. “What rolled in front of me on that
television screen was a one hour BBC documentary about Henrietta and the HeLa
cells, called The Way of All Flesh,
which I’d been trying to get a copy of for months. It opened to sweet music and
a young black woman who wasn’t Henrietta, dancing in front of the camera. A British
man began narrating, his voice melodramatic, like he was telling a ghost story
that just might be true.
“In 1951 a woman died in Baltimore in America,” he said, pausing for
effect. “She was called Henrietta Lacks.” The music grew louder and more sinister
as he told the story of her cells: “These cells have transformed modern
medicine. … They shaped the policies of countries and of presidents. They even
became involved in the Cold War.
Because scientists were convinced that in her cells lay the secret of how to
conquer death…””
19. ““Now I don’t know for sure if a spirit
got Henrietta or if a doctor did it,” Cootie said, “but I do know that her
cancer wasn’t no regular cancer, cause regular cancer don’t keep on growing
after a person die.””
20. “Researchers had long believed that
human cells contained forty eight chromosomes, the threads of DNA inside cells
that contain all of our genetic information. But chromosomes clumped together,
making it impossible to get an accurate count. Then, in 1953, a geneticist in
Texas accidentally mixed the wrong liquid with HeLa and a few other cells, and
it turned out to be a fortunate mistake. The chromosomes inside the cells
swelled and spread out, and for the first time, scientists could see each of
them clearly. That accidental discovery was the first of several developments
that would allow two researchers from Spain and Sweden to discover that normal
human cells have forty six chromosomes.
Once scientists knew how many chromosomes people were supposed to have,
they could tell when a person had too many or too few, which made it possible
to diagnose genetic diseases. Researchers worldwide would soon begin
identifying chromosomal disorders, discovering that patients with Down syndrome
had an extra chromosome number 21, patients with Klinefelter syndrome had an
extra sex chromosome, and those with Turner syndrome lacked all or part of
one.”
21. “Southam was a well respected cancer
researcher and chief of virology at Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer
Research. He and many other scientists believed that cancer was caused by
either a virus or an immune system deficiency, so Southam decided to use HeLa
to test those theories.
In February 1954, Southam loaded a syringe with saline solution mixed
with HeLa. He slid the needle into the forearm of a woman who’d recently been
hospitalized for leukemia, then pushed the plunger, injecting about five
million of Henrietta’s cells into her arm. Using a second needle, Southam
tattooed a tiny speck of India ink next to the small bump that formed at the
HeLa injection site. That way, he’d know where to look when he reexamined the
woman days, weeks, and months later, to see if Henrietta’s cancer was growing
on her arm. He repeated this process with about a dozen other cancer patients.
He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about
injecting them with someone else’s malignant cells.”
22. “The plan was that Mandel would have
doctors on his staff inject twenty two JCDH patients with cancer cells for
Southam. But when he instructed his staff to give the injections without
telling patients they contained cancer cells, three young Jewish doctors
refused, saying they wouldn’t conduct research on patients without their
consent. All three knew about the research Nazis
had done on Jewish prisoners. They also knew about the famous Nuremberg Trials.”
23. “The tribunal set forth a ten point
code of ethics now known as the Nuremberg
Code, which was to govern all human experimentation worldwide. The first
line in that code says, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is
absolutely essential.” The idea was revolutionary. The Hippocratic Oath, written in the fourth century BC, didn’t require
patient consent. And though the American
Medical Association had issued rules protecting laboratory animals in 1910,
no such rules existed for humans until Nuremberg.
But the Nuremberg Code – like
other codes that would come after it – wasn’t law. It was, essentially, a list
of recommendations. It wasn’t routinely taught in medical schools, and many
American researchers – including Southam – clamied not to know it existed.
Those who did know about it often thought of it as “the Nazi code,” something that applied to barbarians and dictators,
not to American doctors.
When Southam began injecting people with HeLa cells in 1954, there was
no formal research oversight in the United States. Since the turn of the
century, politicians had been introducing state and federal laws with hopes of
regulating human experimentation, but physicians and researchers always protested.
The bills were repeatedly voted down for fear of interfering with the progress
of science, even though other countries – including, ironically, Prussia – had
enacted regulations governing human research as early as 1891.”
24. “The term informed consent first
appeared in court documents in 1957, in a civil court ruling on the case of a
patient named Martin Salgo. He went under anesthesia for what he thought was a
routine procedure and woke up permanently paralyzed from the waist down.”
25. “Lefkowitz wrote, “Every human being
has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body.
These patients then had a right to know … the contents of the syringe: and if
this knowledge was to cause fear and anxiety or make them frightened, they had
a right to be fearful and frightened and thus say NO to the experiment.””
26. “When the first humans went into orbit,
Henrietta’s cells went with them so researchers could study the effects of
space travel, as well as the nutritional needs of cells in space, and how
cancerous and noncancerous cells responded differently to zero gravity. What
they found was disturbing: in mission after mission, noncancerous cells grew
normally in orbit, but HeLa became more powerful, dividing faster with each
trip.”
27. “The other unusual thing scientists had
noticed about cells growing in culture was that once they transformed and
became cancerous, they all behaved alike – dividing identically and producing
exactly the same proteins and enzymes, even though they’d all produced different
ones before becoming malignant. Lewis Coriell, a renowned cell culturist,
thought he might have an explanation. He published a paper suggesting that
perhaps “transformed” cells behaved the same not because they’d become
cancerous, but because they’d been contaminated by something – most likely a
virus or bacterium – that made them behave similarly. Almost as an aside, he
pointed out one possibility that other researchers hadn’t considered: all
transformed cells seemed to behave identically to HeLa, he wrote, which could
mean that HeLa was the contaminant.”
28. “In recent years, using tissue samples
from themselves, their families, and their patients, scientists had grown cells
of all kinds – prostate cancer, appendix, foreskin, even bits of human cornea –
often with surprising ease. Researchers were using that growing library of
cells to make historic discoveries: that cigarettes caused lung cancer; how
X-rays and certain chemicals transformed normal cells into malignant ones; why
normal cells stopped growing and cancer cells didn’t. And the National Cancer Institute was using various cells, including
HeLa, to screen more than thirty thousand chemicals and plant extracts, which
would yield several of today’s most widely used and effective chemotherapy
drugs, including Vincristine and Taxol.”
29. “Cell number one in the ATCC’s
collection was the L-cell, the original immortal mouse cell line grown by
Wilton Earle.”
30. “Genetically speaking, humans are
terrible research subjects. We’re genetically promiscuous – we mate with anyone
we choose – and we don’t take kindly to scientists telling us who to reproduce
with. Plus, unlike plants and mice, it takes us decades to produce enough
offspring to give scientists much meaningful data.”
31. “In 1965 two British scientists, Henry
Harris and John Watkins, took cell sex an important step further. They fused
HeLa cells with mouse cells and created the first human-animal hybrids – cells
that contained equal amounts of DNA from Henrietta and a mouse. By doing this,
they helped make it possible to study what genes do, and how they work.
In addition to the HeLa-mouse hybrid, Harris fused HeLa with chicken
cells that had lost their ability to reproduce. His hunch was that when those
deactivated chicken cells fused with HeLa, something inside HeLa would
essentially turn the chicken cell back on. He was right. He didn’t know how it
worked yet, but his discovery showed that something in cells regulated genes.
And if scientists could figure out how to turn disease genes off, they might be
able to create a form of gene therapy.”
32. “Scientists in laboratories throughout
North America and Europe began fusing cells and using them to map genetic
traits to specific chromosomes, creating a precursor to the human genome map we
have today. They used hybrids to create the first monoclonal antibodies,
special proteins later used to create cancer therapies like Herceptin, and to identify the blood
groups that increased the safety of transfusions. They also used them to study
the role of immunity in organ transplantation. Hybrids proved it was possible
for DNA from two unrelated individuals, even of different species, to survive
together inside cells without one rejecting the other, which meant the
mechanism for rejecting transplanted organs had to be outside cells. Scientists
were ecstatic about hybrids, but throughout the United States and Britain, the
public panicked as the media published one sensational headline after the next:
MAN-ANIMAL CELLS ARE BRED IN LAB … THE NEXT STEP COULD BE TREE MEN … SCIENTISTS
CREATE MONSTERS”
33. “The Most Critical Time on This Earth
Is Now.”
34. “Still, many scientists refused to
believe HeLa contamination was real. After the conference where Gartler dropped
what became known as “the HeLa bomb,” most researchers
kept right on working with the cells he’d said were contaminated. But Stevenson
and a few other scientists realized the potential scope of the HeLa
contamination problem, so they began working to develop genetic tests that
could specifically identify HeLa cells in culture instead of just testing for
the presence of G6PD-A. And those genetic tests would eventually lead them to
Henrietta’s family.”
35. “He leaned forward in his chair, his
face inches from mine, and whispered, “You know what I heard? I heard by the
year 2050, babies will be injected with serum made from my mama’s cells so they
can live to eight hundred years old.” He gave me a smile like, I bet your mama
can’t top that. “They’re going to get rid of disease,” he said. “They’re a
miracle.””
36. “My wife is a fire dragon without morning
coffee.”
37. “John Hopkins was known for
experimenting on black folks.”
38. “The Lackses aren’t the only ones who
heard from a young age that Hopkins and other hospitals abducted black people.
Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of
“night doctors” who kidnapped black people for research. And there were
disturbing truths behind those stories.”
39. “But night doctors weren’t just
fictions conjured as scare tactics. Many doctors tested drugs on slaves and
operated on them to develop new surgical techniques, often without using
anesthesia. Fear of night doctors only increased in the early 1900s, as black
people migrated north to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and news spread that
medical schools there were offering money in exchange for bodies. Black corpses
were routinely exhumed from graves for research, and an under ground shipping
industry kept schools in the North supplied with black bodies from the South
for anatomy courses. The bodies sometimes arrived, a dozen or so at a time, in
barrels labeled turpentine.”
40. “Johns Hopkins was born on a tobacco
plantation in Maryland where his father later freed his slaves nearly sixty
years before Emancipation. Hopkins made millions working as a banker and
grocer, and selling his own brand of whiskey, but he never married and had no
children. So in 1873, not long before his death, he donated $7 million to start
a medical school and charity hospital. He wrote a letter to the twelve men he’d
chosen to serve as its board of trustees, outlining his wishes. In it he
explained that the purpose of Hopkins Hospital was to help those who otherwise
couldn’t get medical care: “The indigent sick of this city and its environs,
without regard to sex, age, or color, who require surgical or medical treatment,
and who can be received into the hospital without peril to other inmates, and
the poor of the city and State, of all races, who are stricken down by any
casualty, shall be received into the hospital without charge.””
41. ““Hopkins say they gave them cells away,”
Lawrence yelled, “but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most
important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother
so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?””
42. “Soon after that fishing trip, at the
age of seventy one, Gey learned he had the disease he’d spent his entire life
trying to fight. And he had one of its most deadly forms: pancreatic cancer. If
doctors didn’t operate, Gey knew he would die within months. If they did, it
might buy him a little time. Or it might not.”
43. “Before going into the operating room,
George told his surgeons that he wanted them to take samples of his tumor, just
as Dr. Wharton had done with Henrietta’s tumor decades earlier. Gey gave his
lab staff careful instructions for growing GeGe, a line of cancer cells taken
from his pancreas. He hoped that his cells, like Henrietta’s, would become
immortal. “Work all day and night if you have to,” he told his postdocs and
assistants. “Make this happen.””
44. “A few months after Gey’s death, Howard
Jones and several Hopkins colleagues – including Victor McKusick, a leading
geneticist – decided to write an article about the history of the HeLa cell
line as a tribute to Gey’s career. Before writing the article, Jones pulled
Henrietta’s medical records to remind himself of the details of her case. When
he saw the photographs of her biopsy, he immediately realized her tumor had
been misdiagnosed. To be sure, he dug out the original biopsy sample, which had
been stored on a shelf since 1951.
In December 1971, when Jones and his colleagues published their tribute
to Gey in the journal Obstetrics and
Gynecology, they reported that the original pathologist had
“misinterpreted” and “mislabeled” Henrietta’s cancer. Her tumor was invasive, but not an epidermoid carcinoma as originally
diagnosed. Rather, the article said, it was “a very aggressive adenocarcinoma
of the cervix,” meaning it originated from glandular tissue in her cervix instead
of epithelial tissue.
A misdiagnosis of this type was not uncommon at the time. In 1951, the
same year Jones biopsied Henrietta’s tumor, researchers from Columbia
University reported that the two types of cancer were easily and often
confused.”
45. “Cervical adenocarcinomas are often
more aggressive than epidermoid. (Her syphilis, it turns out, could have been a
factor as well – syphilis can suppress the immune system and allow cancer to
spread faster than normal).
Regardless, Jones and his colleagues wrote, the new diagnosis was “but a
footnote to the abiding genius of George Gey. … It has been often said that
scientific discovery results when the right man is in the right place at the
right time.” Gey, they said, was precisely that man. And HeLa was the result of
that luck. “If allowed to grow uninhibited under optimal cultural conditions,
[HeLa] would have taken over the world by this time,” they wrote. “The biopsy …
has secured for the patient, Henrietta Lacks as HeLa, an immortality which has
now reached 20 years. Will she live forever if nurtured by the hands of future
workers? Even now Henrietta Lacks, first as Henrietta and then as HeLa, has a
combined age of 51 years.””
46. “Near the end of 1972, when Russian
scientists claimed they’d found a cancer virus in cells from Russian cancer
patients, the U.S. government had samples of the cells hand delivered to the
Naval Biomedical Research Laboratory in California for testing. It turned out
those cells weren’t from Russian cancer patients at all. They were from
Henrietta Lacks.”
47. “Despite all the evidence, most
researchers still refused to believe there was a problem. And the media didn’t
seem to notice, until news hit that the Russian cells had been contaminated by
American ones. Only then did newspapers in London, Arizona, New York, and
Washington run headlines saying things like CANCER CELLS FROM LONG-DEAD WOMAN
INVADE OTHER CULTURES. They reported “serious confusion,” “misguided research”
and “millions of wasted dollars.”
48. “McKusick’s research on the Lacks
family coincided with the beginning of a new era of genetic research, in which
the concept of risk to patients would change completely. With the ability to
identify genes from a blood sample or even a single cell, the risk of a blood
draw was no longer just a minor infection or the pain of a needle stick – it
was that someone could uncover your genetic information. It was about violation
of privacy.”
49. “There’s no record of Hopkins and Gey
accepting money for HeLa cells, but many for profit cell banks and biotech
companies have. Micro biological Associates – which later became part of Invitrogen and BioWhittaker, two of the largest biotech companies in the world – got
its start selling HeLa. Since Microbiological Associates was privately owned
and sold many other biological products, there’s no way to know how much of its
revenue came specifically from HeLa. The same is true for many other companies.
What we do know is that today, Invitrogen
sells HeLa products that cost anywhere from $100 to nearly $10 000 per vial. A
search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office database turns up more than seventeen thousand patents involving
HeLa cells. And there’s no way to quantify the professional gain many
scientists have achieved with the help of HeLa.”
50. “On March 25, 1976, when Mike Rogers’s Rolling Stone article hit newsstands, it
was the first time anyone had told the true story of Henrietta Lacks and her
family, the first time the mainstream media had reported that the woman behind
HeLa was black. The timing was explosive. News of the Tuskegee study was still
fresh; the Black Panthers had been setting up free clinics for black people in
local parks and protesting what they saw as a racist healthcare system; and the
racial story behind HeLa was impossible to ignore. Henrietta was a black woman
born of slavery and sharecropping who fled north for prosperity, only to have
her cells used as tools by white scientists without her consent. It was a story
of white selling black, of black cultures “contaminating” white ones with a
single cell in an era when a person with “one drop” of black blood had only
recently gained the legal right to marry a white person. It was also the story
of cells from an uncredited black woman becoming one of the most important
tools in medicine. This was big news.”
51. “Slavin started selling his serum for
as much as ten dollars a milliliter – at up to 500 milliliters per order – to
anyone who wanted it. But he wasn’t just after money. He wanted someone to cure
hepatitis B. So he wrote a letter to Nobel Prize winning virologist Baruch
Blumberg, who’d discovered the hepatitis B antigen and created the blood test
that found Slavin’s antibodies in the first place. Slavin offered Blumberg
unlimited free use of his blood and tissues for his research, which began a
years long partnership. With the help of Slavin’s serum, Blumberg eventually
uncovered the link between hepatitis B and liver cancer, and created the first
hepatitis B vaccine, saving millions of lives.”
52. “Slavin realized he probably wasn’t the
only patient with valuable blood, so he recruited other similarly endowed
people and started a company, Essential
Biologicals, which eventually merged with another, larger biological product
corporation. Slavin was only the first of many who have since turned their
bodies into businesses, including nearly two million Americans who currently
sell their blood plasma, many of them on a regular basis.”
53. “Moore, however, couldn’t sell the Mo
cells because that would have violated Golde’s patent. So in 1984,
Moore sued Golde and UCLA for deceiving him and using his body in research without
consent; he also claimed property rights over his tissues and sued Golde for
stealing them. With that, he became the first person to legally stake a claim
to his own tissue and sue for profits and damages.”
54. “But plenty of science was already on
hold while researchers, universities, and biotech companies sued one another
over ownership of various cell lines. Only two of those cases mentioned the
people those cells came from: the first, in 1976, involved ownership of an
important human-fetal cell line. Leonard Hayflick, the researcher who’d
originally grown the cells, argued that there were numerous parties with
legitimate property interests in any cultured cells, including the scientist
who grew them, the financers of any related work, and the “donors” of the
original samples.”
55. “The dead woman’s arms had been pulled
up and back so that the pathologist could get at her chest … the body had been
split down the middle and opened wide … greyish white tumor globules … filled
the corpse. It looked as if the inside of the body was studded with pearls.
Strings of them ran over the surfaces of the liver, diaphragm, intestine,
appendix, rectum, and heart. Thick clusters were heaped on top of the ovaries
and fallopian tubes. The bladder area was the worst, covered by a solid mass of
cancerous tissue.”
56. “Patient confidentiality has been an
ethical tenet for centuries: the Hippocratic
Oath, which most doctors take when graduating from medical school, says
that being a physician requires the promise of confidentiality because without
it, patients would never disclose the deeply personal information needed to
make medical diagnoses. But like the Nuremberg
Code and the American Medical
Association Code of Ethics, which clearly said that doctors should keep
patient information confidential, the Hippocratic
Oath wasn’t law.”
57. “More than thirty years after
Henrietta’s death, research on HeLa cells finally helped uncover how her cancer
started and why her cells never died. In 1984 a German virologist named Harald
zur Hausen discovered a new strain of a sexually transmitted virus called Human
Papilloma Virus 18 (HPV-18). He believed it and HPV-16, which he’d discovered a
year earlier, caused cervical cancer. HeLa cells in his lab tested positive for
the HPV-18 strain, but zur Hausen requested a sample of Henrietta’s original
biopsy from Hopkins, so he could be sure her cells hadn’t been contaminated
with the virus in culture. The sample didn’t just test positive; it showed that
Henrietta had been infected with multiple copies of HPV-18, which turned out to
be one of the most virulent strains of the virus.
There are more than one hundred strains of HPV in existence, thirteen of
which cause cervical, anal, oral, and penile cancer – today, around 90 percent of
all sexually active adults become infected with at least one strain during
their lifetimes. Throughout the eighties, using HeLa and other cells,
scientists studied HPV infection and how it causes cancer. They learned that
HPV inserts its DNA into the DNA of the host cell, where it produces proteins
that lead to cancer. They also found that when they blocked the HPV
DNA, cervical cancer cells stopped being cancerous. These discoveries would
help lead to an HPV vaccine, and eventually earn zur Hausen a Nobel Prize.
Research into HPV eventually uncovered how Henrietta’s cancer started:
HPV inserted its DNA into the long arm of her eleventh chromosome and
essentially turned off her p53 tumor suppressor gene. What scientists still
haven’t figured out is why this produced such monstrously virulent cells both
in and out of Henrietta’s body, especially since cervical cancer cells are some
of the hardest of all cells to culture.”
58. “In the early 1900s, Carrel’s chicken heart
cells supposedly proved that all cells had the potential for immortality. But
normal human cells – either in culture or in the human body – can’t grow
indefinitely like cancer cells. They divide only a finite number of times, then
stop growing and begin to die. The number of times they can divide is a
specific number called the Hayflick Limit,
after Leonard Hayflick, who’d published a paper in 1961 showing that normal
cells reach their limit when they’ve doubled about fifty times.”
59. “The older we are, the shorter our
telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die.”
60. “Pattillo grew up in the thirties, the
son of a blacksmith turned railroad worker in a small segregated Louisiana
town. He was the first in his family to go to school, and when he learned about
Henrietta as a postdoctoral fellow in Gey’s lab, he felt immediately connected
to her. He’d wanted to honor her contributions to science ever since. So on
October 11, 1996, at Morehouse School of Medicine, he organized the first
annual HeLa Cancer Control Symposium.
He invited researchers from around the world to present scientific papers on
cancer in minorities, and he petitioned the city of Atlanta to name October 11,
the date of the conference, Henrietta
Lacks Day. The city agreed and gave him an official proclamation from the
mayor’s office. He asked Howard Jones to contribute an article recording his
memories of diagnosing Henrietta’s tumor.”
61. “Cofield began spending his days at
Hopkins, digging through the medical school’s archives, taking notes. Of all
the people who’d come to the Lackses over the years talking about the cells, he
was the first to tell the family anything specific about what happened to
Henrietta at Hopkins. The way the Lackses remember it, his findings confirmed
their worst fears. He told them that one of the doctors who treated Henrietta
didn’t have a medical license, and that another had been expelled from the
American Medical Association. On top of that, Cofield said, Henrietta’s doctors
had misdiagnosed her cancer and might have killed her with an overdose of
radiation.”
62. Christoph Lengauer// “He’d been working
with HeLa cells daily his whole career, he said, and now he couldn’t get the
story of Henrietta and her family out of his mind. As a Ph.D. student, he’d
used HeLa to help develop something called fluorescence
in situ hybridization, otherwise known as FISH, a technique for painting chromosomes with multicolored
fluorescent dyes that shine bright under ultraviolet light. To the trained eye,
FISH can uncover detailed information about a person’s DNA. To the untrained
eye, it simply creates a beautiful mosaic of colored chromosomes.
Christoph had framed a fourteen by twenty inch print of Henrietta’s
chromosomes that he’d “painted” using FISH. It looked like a photograph of a
night sky filled with multicolored fireflies glowing red, blue, yellow, green,
purple, and turquoise.”
63. Jurassic
Park// “I saw this movie a bunch of times,” she said. “They talking about
the genes and taking them from cells to bring that dinosaur back to life and
I’m like, Oh Lord, I got a paper on how they were doin that with my mother’s
cells too!” She held up another videocassette, this one a made for TV movie
called The Clone. In it, an
infertility doctor secretly harvests extra embryos from one of his patients and
uses them to create a colony of clones of the woman’s son, who died young in an
accident.”
“That doctor took cells from that woman and made them into little boys
look just like her child,” Deborah told me. “That poor woman didn’t even know
about all the clones until she saw one walk out of a store. I don’t know what
I’d do if I saw one of my mother clones walkin around somewhere.”
64. ““I don’t know what they did,” Deborah
said, “but it all sound like Jurassic Park to me.””
65. “Soon after Elsie’s death, a new warden
took over at Crownsville and began releasing hundreds of patients who’d been
institutionalized unnecessarily. The
Washington Post article quoted him saying, “The worst thing you can do to a
sick person is close the door and forget about him.””
66. ““Like the Bible said,” Gary whispered,
“man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometime we
care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.””
67. ““Science is not the highest value in
society,” Andrews says, pointing instead to things like autonomy and personal
freedom. “Think about it,” she says. “I decide who gets my money after I die.
It wouldn’t harm me if I died and you gave all my money to someone else. But
there’s something psychologically beneficial to me as a living person to know I
can give my money to whoever I want. No one can say: “She shouldn’t be allowed
to do that with her money because that might not be most beneficial to
society”. But replace the word money in that sentence with tissue, and you’ve
got precisely the logic many people use to argue against giving donors any
control over their tissues.””
68. “Gene patents are the point of greatest
concern in the debate over ownership of human biological materials, and how
that ownership might interfere with science. As of 2005 – the most recent year
figures were available – the U.S. government had issued patents relating to the
use of about 20 percent of known human genes, including genes for Alzheimer’s,
asthma, colon cancer, and, most famously, breast cancer. This means
pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and universities control what research
can be done on those genes, and how much resulting therapies and diagnostic
tests will cost. And some enforce their patents aggressively: Myriad Genetics, which holds the patents
on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes responsible for most cases
of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, charges $3 000 to test for the genes. Myriad has been accused of creating a
monopoly, since no one else can offer the test, and researchers can’t develop
cheaper tests or new therapies without getting permission from Myriad and paying steep licensing fees.
Scientists who’ve gone ahead with research involving the breast cancer genes
without Myriad’s permission have
found themselves on the receiving end of cease and desist letters and threats
of litigation.”
69. “The debate over the commercialization
of human biological materials always comes back to one fundamental point: like
it or not, we live in a market driven society, and science is part of that
market. Baruch Blumberg, the Nobel Prize winning researcher who used Ted
Slavin’s antibodies for hepatitis B research, told me, “Whether you think the
commercialization of medical research is good or bad depends on how into
capitalism you are.” On the whole, Blumberg said, commercialization is good; how
else would we get the drugs and diagnostic tests we need? Still, he sees a
downside. “I think it’s fair to say it’s interfered with science,” he said.
“It’s changed the spirit.” Now there are patents and proprietary information
where there once was free information flow. “Researchers have become
entrepreneurs. That’s boomed our economy and created incentives to do research. But it’s also brought problems, like secrecy and arguments over who owns
what.””
70. www.scienceblogs.com
71. “Follow my/ your art.”
72. “I am endlessly thankful to my father,
Floyd Skloot, for teaching me to see the world with a writer’s eyes, for
inspiring me with his many wonderful books, and for treating this one as if it
were his own. He has always encouraged me to follow my art, and to fight for
what I believed it could be, even when that meant taking risks like quitting a
stable job to freelance.” (Rebecca Skloot)
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