The cell lines they need are immortalthey 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 researchthough 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 lines impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family. 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. ![]() Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. Source Code In Blood Cancer Code Name HeLaWhy 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 wasnt something doctors worried about much in the 1950s, so they werent terribly careful about her identity. When some members of the press got close to finding Henriettas family, the researcher whod grown the cells made up a pseudonymHelen Laneto throw the media off track. Other pseudonyms, like Helen Larsen, eventually showed up, too. Her real name didnt really leak out into the world until the 1970s. Everybody learns about these cells in basic biology, but what was unique about my situation was that my teacher actually knew Henriettas real name and that she was black. 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 wasnt until I went to grad school that I thought about trying to track down her family. These cells are shown in green the cytoplasm is red and structures within the cytoplasm are blue. It took almost a year even to convince Henriettas daughter, Deborah, to talk to me. So when I started doing my own research, Id 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 wasnt hiding anything, that we could learn about her mother together. It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down Henriettas relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the familys DNA to make a map of Henriettas genes so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which werent, to begin straightening out the contamination problem. But he had a third-grade education and didnt even know what a cell was.
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