image by: HWN

HWN Suggests

What are HeLa cells? A cancer biologist explains

Most cells divide around 40 to 60 times before they become too old to function properly and are naturally killed off. But HPV can allow cells to divide forever, because they attack the sentinels keeping uncontrolled division in check. After Lacks was infected with HPV 18, the second-most-common high-risk type of the virus, her cervical cells lost the ability to produce these sentinels. Without growth checks in place, her cells were able to divide indefinitely and became “immortal” – living on to this day both in test tubes and the 70,000 studies they’ve made possible.

read full article

Featured

 Five Reasons Henrietta Lacks is the Most Important Woman in Medical History

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor woman with a middle-school education, made one of the greatest medical contributions ever.

 Henrietta Lacks' descendants reach a settlement over the use of her 'stolen' cells

The family of Henrietta Lacks has reached a settlement with a science and technology company that it says used cells taken without Lacks' consent in the 1950s to develop products it later sold for a profit. Lacks was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 when doctors removed cells from her tumor without her knowledge or permission. Those cells — now known as HeLa cells — had remarkable properties that allowed them to be endlessly reproduced, and they have since been used for a variety of scientific breakthroughs, including research about the human genome and the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines.

 Henrietta Lacks’ family finally got their due; many more never will

The descendants of Virginia-born miracle woman Henrietta Lacks finally won a major settlement with a biotechnology company that profited billions from Lacks’ ever-reproducing cells; I congratulate them. The hard-won settlement is a glimmer of justice flashing within a dark facet of America’s medical and scientific progress, fields fueled by racist, unethical practices in the past and present that have taken so much from Black people and given very little in return.

 Henrietta Lacks’ stolen cells changed medicine—and her family is finally getting compensated

Henrietta Lacks’ stolen cells changed medicine—and her family is finally getting compensated.

 The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks

As medical records show, Mrs. Lacks began undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer. This was the best medical treatment available at the time for this terrible disease. A sample of her cancer cells retrieved during a biopsy were sent to Dr. George Gey's nearby tissue lab. For years, Dr. Gey, a prominent cancer and virus researcher, had been collecting cells from all patients - regardless of their race or socioeconomic status - who came to The Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer, but each sample quickly died in Dr. Gey’s lab. What Dr. Gey would soon discover was that Mrs. Lacks’ cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, Mrs. Lacks' cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.

 The Unsettled Debate at the Heart of the Henrietta Lacks Case

Do we own our bodies? To an ordinary person, the answer is obviously yes. To a lawyer, it’s not at all clear. That discrepancy needs to be resolved. The issue arose in the recently settled lawsuit brought by the family of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose “immortal” cells were used without her knowledge or consent in research that led to the development of treatments for diseases including cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu.

Articles of Interest

'Henrietta Lacks': A Donor's Immortal Legacy

Our interview today is about science, ethics, class and race. One of the obstacles that used to face medical researchers was the difficulty of finding human cells that would keep multiplying in the culture of a Petri dish. That problem was solved in 1951, when one doctor took cells from the cervix of a poor African-American woman who was dying of cervical cancer. Her cells were unique.

A Family Consents to a Medical Gift, 62 Years Later

But Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, black and uneducated, never consented to her cells’ being studied. For 62 years, her family has been left out of the decision-making about that research. Now, over the past four months, the National Institutes of Health has come to an agreement with the Lacks family to grant them some control over how Henrietta Lacks’s genome is used.

A Lesson From the Henrietta Lacks Story: Science Needs Your Cells

It’s often portrayed as a story of exploitation. In the early 1950s, Henrietta Lacks, a poor, young African-American woman, learned she had terminal cancer. Cells collected from a biopsy of her cancer were cultured without her knowledge or permission to develop a cell line, called HeLa. Over the ensuing decades, research using HeLa cells led to scores of medical advances, saving lives — and making a lot of money for a lot of people, though not for Ms. Lacks’s family.

An Uneven Tribute to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The HBO film, based on the book by Rebecca Skloot and starring Oprah Winfrey, centers on the family of the woman whose cancer cells revolutionized medical science.

HeLa Around the World

Research with HeLa cells have been used to shed light on some of the most fundamental questions about human health and disease. HeLa cells have also played an important catalyst role in furthering experiments that bridge multiple disciplines.

HeLa Cells: A Lasting Contribution to Biomedical Research

Since Ms. Lacks’ untimely death in 1952, HeLa cells have been a vital tool in biomedical research, leading to an increased understanding of the fundamentals of human health and disease. Some of the research involving HeLa cells also served as the underpinning of several Nobel Prize winning discoveries. While Henrietta Lacks’ story has been known in the research community for some time, it raised further awareness after the publication of the best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, 2010).

Henrietta Lacks Wasn’t the Only Woman Who Unknowingly Contributed to Medical History

The untold story of the aborted fetus that helped create the rubella vaccine.

Henrietta Lacks, Genomes, And The Collaborations That Make Science Work

Cells taken from Lacks’s body in 1951–now known as HeLa cells–have revolutionized cell biology. But neither she nor her family had any say about their use. This woeful situation came to a head recently when it turned out that scientists had sequenced the genome of HeLa cells without any contact with the family.

Henrietta Lacks, Whose Cells Were Taken Without Her Consent, Is Honored by W.H.O.

In a ceremony in Geneva, the World Health Organization presented an award to the family of Ms. Lacks, whose cancer cells led to world-changing advances in medical and scientific research.

Henrietta Lacks: the mother of modern medicine

How did cells taken from a poor black woman in 1951 come to unlock some of the biggest advances in science?

Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book investigates how a poor black tobacco farmer had a groundbreaking impact on modern medicine.

How the ‘groundbreaking’ Henrietta Lacks settlement could change research

The beauty of HeLa cells “is that they grow in almost any type of media”, says Ivan Martinez, a cancer biologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown. “You can do many different types of studies with them, from basic biology experiments to understand, for instance, how chromosomes divide, to [application-based studies] like testing drugs or developing vaccines.” The cells have been instrumental in at least three Nobel-prizewinning discoveries, but Lacks’s family was not compensated for those uses.

The Consent Conundrum

Decades after a woman’s cervical cancer cells were taken without her permission, we’re still trying to determine what rights researchers have to your body.

The Immortal, Shattered Cells of Henrietta Lacks

In 1951, scientists at Johns Hopkins Hospital harvested cells from Henrietta Lacks. "With her under anesthesia, they just took this small piece of her tumor -- without her knowing -- and they put it in a dish and sent it down the hall," author Rebecca Skloot told CBS. Those cells multiplied and multiplied and multiplied, becoming the most-studied human cells in scientific research. The quantity of HeLa cells in the world today is so big that it is said that the only way to measure them would be "in tons," though no one has done this.

The Importance of HeLa Cells

Among the important scientific discoveries of the last century was the first immortal human cell line known as “HeLa” — a remarkably durable and prolific line of cells obtained during the treatment of Henrietta’s cancer by Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. George Gey in 1951.

The new Oprah movie about Henrietta Lacks reopens a big scientific debate

Your cells may be used in research without you knowing. That may be good for science — but how do you feel?

What to Know About The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

While Lacks’s story was unknown at the time of her death, it came to public prominence in 2010 with the publication of Skloot’s book. Here’s what you need to know about Lacks’s life.

Resources

5 important ways Henrietta Lacks changed medical science

Henrietta Lacks’s cells have long been familiar to scientists — but it was the ethical controversy around those cells that made her famous to the wider world.