The Lacks family describe Henrietta Lacks, on their website... "Mrs. Lacks was a wife, mother of five, native of rural southern Virginia, resident of Turner Station in Dundalk, Maryland — Henrietta went to Johns Hopkins complaining of vaginal spotting. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer which quickly consumed her body despite [the use] of radiation treatment. Henrietta['s] life was cut short on October 4, 1951. Not all of Henrietta Lacks died that day. She unknowingly left behind a piece of her that still lives today—it’s called the HeLa cell. Her cells were taken and used for medical research without her consent. And for more than 20 years after her death Henrietta’s family would learn how science retrieved her cells and of her enormous contribution to medicine and to human life. The birth of the HeLa cells were making its mark worldwide. After all the “HeLa” cells continue to multiply daily as [does] no other cell outside the human body, a breakthrough in cell research. With that being said the world will never be the same due to the “HeLa” phenomena which began in 1951. Since then there has been a mass production of the cells which have traveled around the globe, even into space! Even though Henrietta’s cells launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, the family never saw any of the profits or that Henrietta received the recognition she deserves. The “HeLa” cells are continually used for research; in the early 50’s the cells were used to help develop a polio vaccine and now today, the cells are used for cancer and aids research and theories about the cause and treatment of diseases. Henrietta, unknowingly, changed the medical & science world forever! She has been called many things: Immortal, Heroine of Modern Medicine, Medical Miracle, and Wonder Woman. To her family she was and is: daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother. Henrietta was a phenomenal woman during her life time, in Henrietta’s passing her medical contributions exhibits what a phenomenal woman she really was. She continues to enhance many lives who are unaware of her past existence. After all, she has a rich and important history and a great legacy that she left for her family to carry."
It is true that the immortal cancer cell-line left by Mrs Lacks has revolutionised much of the research and contributed to many treatments, including the Polio Vaccine, and were also the first cells to ever be cloned. The wide use of HeLa cells in research also had some unforeseen consequences. Due to Mrs Lacks African-Carribean bloodline scientists in the 1980's discovered that an inordinate number of cancer research tissue cell cultures worldwide were indeed linked to Mrs Lacks, HeLa cells. This was a problem for countries like Russia, where the population almost entirely excludes these bloodlines, since not all treatments developed were cross-cultural.
From Wikipedia:
"George Otto Gey, the first researcher to study Lacks's cancerous cells, observed that her cells were unique in that they reproduced at a very high rate and could be kept alive long enough to allow more in-depth examination. Until then, cells cultured for laboratory studies only survived for a few days at most, which wasn't long enough to perform a variety of different tests on the same sample. Lacks's cells were the first to be observed that could be divided multiple times without dying, which is why they became known as "immortal." After Lacks' death, Gey had Mary Kubicek, his lab assistant, take further HeLa samples while Henrietta's body was at Johns Hopkins' autopsy facility. The roller-tube technique was the method used to culture the cells obtained from the samples that Kubicek collected. Gey was able to start a cell line from Lacks's sample by isolating one specific cell and repeatedly dividing it, meaning that the same cell could then be used for conducting many experiments. They became known as HeLa cells, because Gey's standard method for labeling samples was to use the first two letters of the patient's first and last names.
The ability to rapidly reproduce HeLa cells in a laboratory setting has led to many important breakthroughs in biomedical research. For example, by 1954, Jonas Salk was using HeLa cells in his research to develop the polio vaccine. To test his new vaccine, the cells were mass-produced in the first-ever cell production factory. Additionally, Chester M. Southam, a leading virologist, injected HeLa cells into cancer patients, prison inmates, and healthy individuals in order to observe if cancer could be transmitted as well as to examine if one could become immune to cancer by developing an acquired immune response.
HeLa cells were in high demand and put into mass production. They were mailed to scientists around the globe for "research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa cells were the first human cells successfully cloned in 1955, and have since been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other products. Since the 1950s, scientists have grown 20 tons of her cells, and there are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells.
In the early 1970s, a large portion of HeLa cells became contaminated by other cell cultures. As a result, members of Henrietta Lacks's family received solicitations for blood samples from researchers hoping to learn about the family's genetics in order to replace the contaminated cells.
Alarmed and confused, several family members began questioning why they were receiving so many telephone calls requesting blood samples. In 1975, the family also learned through a chance dinner-party conversation that material originating in Henrietta Lacks was continuing to be used for medical research. The family had never discussed Henrietta's illness and death among themselves in the intervening years but with the increased curiosity about their mother and her genetics they now began to ask questions."
Henrietta Lacks may have passed in 1951 but she has become immortalised, both through her HeLa cell line and the treatments developed using it. There are also memorials, books and a feature film about her. Her contribution to science and medicine is great.
The Wikipedia article:
Further reading at biography.com:
Rebecca Skloot's book on Mrs Henrietta Lacks:
The Lacks family website:
Link to the Author's FaceBook page: https://facebook.com/UberSci/