We’ve only ever seen immortality on TV, but what if I told you, we seem to be closer to it than we think. In 1952, a cervical cancer patient, Henrietta Lacks, was admitted to the John Hopkins hospital where a sample of her cells were collected without her consent (Hongbao, 2017). The doctor who had treated her took a sample of the tumor onto a dish, and sent it down the hall to George Gey, the head of tissue culture research at John Hopkins. At that time, George Gey was researching how to grow cells outside of the human body for decades until Henrietta Lacks.
A later discovery revealed that her cells were durable and could be kept alive, multiplying on their own when a single cell was separated. For unknown reasons, Henrietta’s cells could just double their cell numbers every 24 hours. They became known as HeLa Cells, the first “immortal human cell line,” being able to grow and divide forever. These HeLa Cells became the first human cells grown in a lab that were naturally immortal, surviving even after a set number of cell divisions (Hongbao, 2017).
After the discovery of HeLa cells, the news spread fairly quickly, with many researchers requesting for HeLa cells, which George Gey gave to anyone who wanted them. They quickly became one of the most important things that happened to medicine. One researcher, Jonas Stalk, was able to successfully grow polio virus and quickly develop a vaccine for it. Due to its highly proliferative nature and its innate ability to be easily infected by the poliovirus, HeLa cells were made as the ideal source for testing vaccines. This cell line went on to be the first human cells to be successfully cloned as the results from vaccine testing could be easily obtained, but still remained the same tumor cells that were removed from Lacks (Hongbao, 2017). They helped develop all kinds of vaccines that we use today, and most can be traced back to Henrietta’s cells. HeLa cells have been used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits (Hongbao, 2017). Additionally, they even went up into the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Evidently, not a single person hasn’t benefited from Henrietta’s cells.
Citations
Hongbao, M. (2017). Hela cells and immortality. Cancer Biology, 3(7), 71-78.
BBC. (2022, Feb 23). How one woman’s “immortal” cells changed the world. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08wr9gf/how-one-woman-s-immortal-cells-changed-the-world
