Today, culturing of cells, i.e. growing them outside of their natural environment is a basic and common sight in research laboratories. This domain has come a long way since it first began almost a century ago. It used to comprise mainly bacterial cells, plant cells and non-mammalian cells. Culturing human cells were important to understand the proper functioning of the basic unit of life.
Henrietta Lacks was a tobacco farmer and a mother of five, belonging to a poor and black family. In 1951, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was a patient in John Hopkins, Baltimore, one of the few places that treated African Americans during the era of segregation. Her doctor took a tissue sample from her tumor without her consent and gave it to George Gey, a physician and cancer researcher who was astonished by the ability of cells to replicate in laboratory conditions. Generally, any other cancer cells would divide few times and eventually die off before any decent experiment could be performed with it. Henrietta’s cells, however, presented a new, exhilarating and opposite outcome. They continued to divide, generation after generation if provided with the right set of conditions. The reason behind this has recently been uncovered. Gey had discovered the first ‘immortal human cell line’ and named them after the first two letters of her name — HeLa (pronounced “hee-la”).
Hela cell line was a major part of several scientific breakthroughs over the last several decades. From research on the effects of zero gravity in outer space and the development of the polio vaccine to the study of leukemia, the AIDS virus and cancer worldwide. Grasping the underlying cause of various infections and formulating their treatments, pioneering the process of In vitro fertilization could be attained due to the work done on HeLa cells. Almost all vaccines we take today can be traced back to research with her cells. Work done on her cells has benefited all humankind, all of 7.8 billion of us. She died never knowing how crucial her cells would be. Even her family did not learn the true extent of her legacy until science writer Rebecca Skloot began working with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, to uncover the truth almost five decades later. Deborah was two when her mother passed away. When Rebecca first inquired about Deborah, her response was heart-rending. “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!” “I’m sick of it. Do you know what I want? I want to know, what did my mother smell like? For all my life, I just don’t know anything, not even the common little things, like what color did she like? Did she like to dance? Did she breastfeed me? Lord, I’d like to know that. But nobody never says anything.” She experienced “mixed emotions” during this long journey to know her mother. She was contented to understand how her mother helped the world change science and medicine. At the same moment, she was indignant as a million-dollar industry was built, based solely on her mother’s cells, yet her family struggled to make ends meet for basic healthcare.
Rebecca, in her book, ‘The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks’ pleasedly fosters the importance of science to be able to communicate with the general public. It apprised of racial inequities that are embedded in the US research and healthcare systems. Henrietta’s story holds a considerable part of the concept behind the acclaimed social movement, Black Lives Matter. “So much of science and medicine was built on the backs of black people without their knowledge”. Her life, even after a century, is positively impacting every single human alive, in one way or another. The Lacks family refer to HeLa cells as “magical cells” as they’re helping all of humankind, not just a particular group of people.
Despite what the Lacks family has endured, they are proud to honor the memory of Henrietta and her unparalleled contributions to science. Their message is positive, optimistic, and — above all — a celebration of Henrietta’s life and legacy. They have visited over 100 communities and campuses, where their appearances give audiences an unforgettable first-person perspective on the collision between ethics, race, and the commercialization of human tissue, and how their experiences have impacted the Lacks family from generation to generation. Their story, as told in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, has sold nearly 3 million copies around the world, and has been selected as a common read by more than 250 schools, libraries, and community institutions. The family has further collaborated with the National Institutes of Health, NIH, in the HeLa Genome Data Use Agreement. This signifies that two members of the family join representatives from the medical, scientific, and bioethics communities on a new panel that reviews research proposals for use of the full HeLa genome sequence data and grants permission on a case-by-case basis. The family is now the first to know about the new research being conducted on HeLa cells and the promises it holds for the future.
Henrietta’s name and memory live on in the form of a remarkable lineage of continually dividing cells that have achieved, to all intents and purposes, “immortality”.
