Feb 2, 2010: Henrietta Lacks

[xoxoxoBruce]

Here's my contribution to Black History Month.
The picture, taken in 1945, is Henrietta Lacks and her husband David.
You, I, we, owe Henrietta... bigtime!

Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they 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 research.

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. No one knows why, but her cells never died.

So why do you and I owe a debt to Henrietta?

Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.

I find it disturbing that "immortal" cells came from a tumor.
But anyway, things got complicated later on.... link

Via