By Mandy Feder
It”s immoral and unethical to take someone”s body parts without asking and without telling them.
That”s what happened though.
Henrietta Lacks was described as the kind of a woman who would give you the shirt off of her back; a kind woman with a wonderful smile.
Eight months after her diagnosis of cervical cancer, she died at age 31, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the segregated ward for blacks.
Researchers removed a fragment of her tumor and preserved it. The “HeLa” cells, represent the first two letters of her first name and the first two letters of her last name.
The year was 1951. A mother of five from rural Virginia gave a piece of herself and became a part of medical history.
HeLa cells were the world”s first immortal human cells.
Her cells multiplied as never seen before, outside of the human body, doubling numbers daily. One of the most widely used continuous cell lines for virology is the HeLa cell line.
Dr. George Gey, the head of tissue-culture research at Johns Hopkins, appeared on television holding a tube of HeLa cells. He said a new age of medical research had begun. He said this breakthrough could produce a cure for cancer. He was applauded by the world and he took his bows without considering the contributions of the unknowing donor.
He sent her cells all around the country. Much like that old shampoo commercial, “he told two friends ?,” the researchers who received the cultures passed them on. The cells went into mass production and traveled around the world. They were even tested in space on a satellite “to determine whether human tissues could survive zero gravity.”
Her cells have been used for cancer and AIDS research, as well as gene-mapping, among many other scientific endeavors. Dr. Jonas Salk used HeLa to develop the polio vaccine in the 1950s.
If I were one of her children, I”d be so proud to know my mother died with such purpose.
But nobody told her family of her cellular celebrity status.
Her family didn”t know her cells still lived. There was a definite lack of informed consent.
Gey died in 1970 and took the secret to the grave. The family found out incidentally, at a dinner party, years later.
She died with nearly nothing. Her children were deprived of the knowledge of their mother”s amazing contributions in the medical world.
Even today not much has been done to honor her.
Morehouse College in Atlanta does celebrate Henrietta Lacks Day and Congress passed a resolution in her memory sponsored by Rep. Robert Ehrlich (R-Md.).
The most comprehensive information available on Lacks is written by Rebecca Skloot in her book titled, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Skloot is a freelance science writer and a contributing editor for Popular Science. She has written feature stories for The New York Times and Discover Magazine. Skloot wrote that she tracked down a few magazine articles about Lacks from the 1970s and “Ebony quoted Henrietta”s husband saying, ?All I remember is that she had this disease and right after she died they called me in the office wanting to get my permission to take a sample of some kind. I decided not to let them.”” Jet wrote, “The family was angry, angry that Henrietta”s cells were being sold for $25 a vial and angry that articles had been published about the cells without their knowledge.” It said, “Pounding in the back of their heads was a gnawing feeling that science and the press had taken advantage of them.””
According to Skloot, “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. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over 5-feet tall.”
That is amazing.
One of Skloot”s professors told her that “HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last 100 years.”
In my opinion, Lacks” story should be an integral part of history. She and her family should be honored and given the respect they so deserve, albeit shamefully much later than ethically explicable.
Mandy Feder is the Record-Bee managing editor. She can be reached at mandyfeder@yahoo.com or 263-5636 Ext. 32.
