Summer Session-Immortal HeLa Cells and Henrietta Lacks

This blog entry created as an interim post until course enrollment authorization received.

Hello! Welcome back.

I am currently reading a fascinating book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, who was a poor, uneducated tobacco farmer who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. Unknown to Henrietta and without her permission, before she died her doctor took a sample of the cancerous cells from her tumor. Those cells were later determined to be immortal, or cells that could be repeatedly grown in culture without cell death; subsequently, this discovery became one of the most important research developments of the 20th century. Trillions of copies of the cells were cultured and shipped to research facilities around the world, giving birth to a multi-million dollar industry and aiding in such vital breakthroughs as a vaccine for polio. The cells have been used in every type of research imaginable, from AIDS to consumer product testing; they were the first human cells successfully cloned and were even shipped to the moon during the initial years of the space program to test the effects of zero gravity on humans.

Photo: Henrietta Lacks/Credit: http://nmaahc.si.edu/Events/BPL
Henrietta's family has never been compensated for her phenomenal contribution to science and has very little control over how her cells are utilized. The book details both her life and her family's attempts to come to terms with the legacy left by Henrietta. I'm still reading it, and I'm not writing a book report here, so I will leave further investigation into the subject to you. I have attached a couple of links that will point you in the right direction. One of them is a Wikipedia link; normally, I detest Wikipedia as a source, but in this instance the site has an extensive collection of sources that will prove useful to the reader who desires a more academic source of information about HeLa cells and Henrietta.

Good luck, and happy reading! P.S.: Please click the link below to check out a vintage video.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/9581140" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

Video: Early cell progression video featuring HeLa cells. Credit: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91716-henriettas-tumor/

Photo: Multiphoton fluorescence image of HeLa cells stained with the actin binding toxin phalloidin (red), microtubules (cyan) and cell nuclei (blue). Source: directorsblog.nih.gov



Credits: All information provided by http://rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/ and http://www.livescience.com/38728-hela-cells-restricted-new-nih-plan.html .

Wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa