Henrietta Lacks - Wikipedia

Henrietta Lacks: The Immortal Woman
In 1951, doctors took a tissue sample from a poor, dying black woman that was given to researchers without her knowledge or permission. The HeLa cells, named for the patient’s first and last name, acted differently than other cells in the lab — they were hardier, and replicated at an amazing rate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU5uCiV0MyQ

Images:
1. 'The Mother of Modern Medicine' by Kadir Nelson, oil on linen
2. Henrietta Lacks [Hela] Family tree.
3. The Lacks family gathering at a highway marker honoring Henrietta Lacks near her childhood home in Clover, Va.

Biography
1. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898613
2. blackthen.com/something-didnt-learn-school-true-story-henrietta-lacks-video

1. Background from {[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898613/]}
I must start off this review by admitting that although I had seen this book reviewed in publications ranging from the New York Post to Entertainment Weekly magazine and everything in between, I guessed that I, as a scientist trained in cell biology, would not enjoy it. What could I possibly learn? I assumed that a book on the subject of HeLa cells written for the general public would be beneath me. Boy, was I ever wrong.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the astonishing biography of a poor tobacco farmer whose cells, first grown in culture in 1951, are still ubiquitous in the laboratory world today. The author, Rebecca Skloot, dedicated nearly a decade to researching the science and, perhaps more interestingly, getting to know the Lacks family. Skloot is a science journalist whose name is familiar in the corridors of my own institution, the New York Academy of Sciences, because she did freelance work for us, writing about our scientific symposia. With this book, she presents an unforgettable story that reads like a novel.

Henrietta Lacks was a 29-year-old mother when doctors at Johns Hopkins diagnosed her with aggressive cervical cancer. At that time, Hopkins was the only hospital nearby that would admit and treat African American patients. Without her consent, as was commonly done in that time, doctors removed a sample of her cancerous tissue and gave it to a laboratory that had been trying for years to grow an immortalized human cell line. They named the cells HeLa, consistent with their practice of abbreviating the first and last names of the patient, and without informing her or her family put them in a dish.

Anyone who has come from a basic science laboratory knows where the story is going. Of course, the heartiness of HeLa cells in culture and their ability to be grown in suspension, easily freeze-thawed, and shipped provided the scientific community for the very first time with a consistent and reliable tool for experimentation that revolutionized the way we do research. HeLa cells have been used in so many groundbreaking studies that it would be hard to overstate their importance to science and medicine. The cells were used to launch the field of virology, to create the polio vaccine, to do gene mapping and cloning, and to study the effects of zero gravity in outer space and in a slew of other studies that add nearly 300 new publications each month to a library that now totals about 60,000.

And it goes without saying that the launch of reliable cell culture provided novel financial opportunities to the pharmaceutical industry. Billions of these cells have since been bought and sold, not to mention the culture medium used to grow them and the related biological materials and laboratory equipment needed.

Henrietta Lacks died eight months after her diagnosis, leaving behind five small children, including a one-year-old daughter, Deborah. The family, still oblivious to the fact that her cells were thriving in vitro after her death, buried her in an unmarked grave on their land in Virginia, too poor to even buy a headstone.

In a random twist of fate nearly two decades later, the family learned about the cell line bearing their mother’s initials. This book focuses on the story of the family — the offspring of this unintentional heroine who are raised in dire poverty and often without medical insurance, who can only explain the permanence of the living cells as voodoo, and who are taken advantage of. Over time, Skloot develops a close relationship with Deborah and helps her pour over biology textbooks and muddle through jargon until she can understand the concept of the cells and be convinced that her mother has not been and cannot be cloned. Skloot brings Deborah and her brother to Christoph Lengauer’s then laboratory at Hopkins to see the cells under a microscope for the first time. And all the while, Henrietta’s grown children ponder the absurdity of how they can’t afford to see a doctor when their mother’s cells have helped cure so many diseases and when industry is making a fortune. The family has never been compensated financially in any way.

Skloot expertly interweaves this heartbreaking family story with the inspirational story of the cell line and the disturbing tale of the ethical and legal issues surrounding treatment of African American patients at mid-century. Skloot provides just enough background information for the reader to appreciate the materialization of federal laws regulating the use of human subjects in experimentation.

The result is one comprehensive and hauntingly beautiful story. No matter how much you may know about basic biology, you will be amazed by this book."

2. Background from {[https://blackthen.com/something-didnt-learn-school-true-story-henrietta-lacks-video/]}
Henrietta Lacks was an impoverished, black, barely educated tobacco farmer who made enormous albeit unknowing contributions to science. She was born Loretta Pleasant in 1920, but everyone who knew her called her Henrietta or Henny, and she married her first cousin, David Lacks, in 1941. Ten years later she was the mother of five, but seriously ill, and she sought medical treatment at the world-famous Johns Hopkins Hospital, because it was the only hospital within twenty miles of her home that would accept black patients. At Hopkins her cervical cancer was misdiagnosed, and Dr George Gey (1899-1970) obtained a tissue sample from her growing and soon-to-be fatal tumor for medical research, without her knowledge or consent. Not informing the patient was an ordinary practice at the time, and Gey routinely collected samples from all the hospital’s cancer patients for his research.

Lacks died within months of her first visit to the hospital, at just 31 years of age, but the cells cultured from her cancer have had a profoundly different fate. Unlike any other human cells that had previously been cultured, Lacks’ cells were found to be astonishingly resilient, effectively immortal, infinitely dividing and replenishing themselves. For reasons still not understood, Lacks’ cells survive and redivide without any apparent limit so long as a growth medium is provided, unlike ordinary human cells, which soon struggle and die under test-tube conditions. As the first immortal cell line, this phenomenon meant that cell lines derived from Henrietta Lacks were ideal for medical research. For the first time, scientific studies could be conducted on living human cells, which could even be kept in a state of suspended animation, frozen and stored at -80 °C, and when thawed the cells would simply start growing again.

On 4 October 1951, the same day that Henrietta Lacks died, Dr Gey appeared on television holding a vial of cells from her body, and explained this scientific breakthrough to the camera without mentioning Lacks by name. New methods were promptly developed to mass-produce these cells, which Gey called HeLa, a shortened and anonymized version of Henrietta Lacks’ name. A factory was set up at the Tuskegee Institute solely to manufacture HeLa cells, which were distributed worldwide, and came to be seen as “the gold standard” in scientific research.

HeLa cells were crucial in the development of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, and have been used extensively in research into cancer, AIDS, and other diseases from herpes to influenza to Parkinson’s disease. HeLa samples have been used in testing of glues, cosmetics and other commercial products; were the first human cells to be gene mapped; were sent into space to study the effects of zero gravity on a cellular level; were used to study the effects of nuclear explosions on living human cells; were used to develop chemotherapy drugs — the list of scientific uses for HeLa cells is almost literally endless. By the mid 2000s, about 20 tons of HeLa cells had been manufactured and used in research, and these cells, all derived from one woman who died in 1951, are still alive, and are still the human cell line most commonly used in research.

For many years after her death, however, Henrietta Lacks’ widow, children, and extended family knew nothing of all this, receiving neither payment nor acknowledgment for her uncredited contributions to science. Scientists and reporters occasionally inquired about the source of HeLa, but Henrietta Lacks’ name was usually lacking from the answers provided by Dr Gey, the physician at Johns Hopkins and whose scientific reputation was built on having cultured and discovered the hardy nature of Lacks’ cells. In published accounts, HeLa cells were almost always attributed to the fictitious “Helen Lane,” or less frequently the equally fictitious “Helen Larson” or “Henrietta Lakes.” The acknowledgement of Lacks’ contributions to science is due largely to Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which detailed the story of Lacks’ short life and unending scientific afterlife."