6/11/2023 0 Comments The immortal life of henrietta laxI'm pretty sure that she - like most of us - would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I've spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she'd think about cells from her cervix living on forever - bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. She's simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world's first immortal human cells - her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. She's usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. No one knows who took that picture, but it's appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is "Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson." Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her - a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. It's the late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the age of thirty. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. In her new book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," author Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta, her amazing cells, and the family she left behind. And though her cells launched a multimillion-dollar selling human biological materials, her family - who often can't even afford health insurance - never saw any of the profits. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons - as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, her cells - known as "HeLa cells" - are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. — - Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine.
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