quotes from the immortal life of henrietta lacks

#QUOTES FROM THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS SERIES#

I've always sat in the middle on this conundrum: I don't believe legal grounds exist for anyone to provide compensation to the Lacks family (and which family members would qualify?), but they do deserve something out of simple common decency. The NIH agreement provides no monetary compensation for the family. One of the most common questions Skloot describes getting from readers is whether the survivors of Henrietta Lacks have benefited financially from the sales of HeLa cells and discoveries made using them in academic and industrial laboratories around the world. Skloot was also involved via telephone as an observer but was instrumental in setting up the meetings as described in this Q&A yesterday with Bob Grant at The Scientist. Jay Shendure.Īs Shendure's team was funded by NIH, the medical research agency of the U.S., NIH director Francis Collins and Kathy Hudson, deputy director for science, outreach, and policy, initiated discussions in April with members of the Lacks family to inform them of the significance of this work to them and the world. Nature had also been fielding a more extensive paper on the HeLa genome from University of Washington researchers led by Dr. I recently did exercises with local AP high school biology students and my colleagues Christy Flint and Debra Bailey at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh where we visualized the chromosomes of Lacks's cells while discussing their class reading of Skloot's book.Įarlier this year, the majority of the DNA sequence from one population of Henrietta's cancer cells was published by German scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, again, without the knowledge of the Lacks family. We're also still using HeLa cells as teaching tools, both for science and in the medical humanities. We also used HeLa cells for the first peer-reviewed publication from my independent laboratory at the University of Colorado in 1995 where we extended our findings into human leukemia cells. Like so many other researchers and those in training, I was the beneficiary of Henrietta's cells for experiments that formed the basis of my 1989 PhD dissertation work. So widespread was the subsequent distribution of HeLa cells over the years that over 76,000 research articles have been written citing the use of these cells.

#QUOTES FROM THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS SERIES#

Skloot's book follows the subsequent series of events that would be unconscionable, and some illegal, under today's standards of medical ethics and regulations of human subjects research. Ironically, the 'factory' for growing and shipping these cells was led and operated by African-American researchers and technicians at Tuskegee University at the same time rural men were unknowingly being used as experimental subjects to study the long-term progression of untreated syphilis. If a vaccinated patient made antibodies that would prevent the disease, then their blood plasma would prevent polio infection when mixed with HeLa cells and poliovirus in the lab. With that knowledge, the cells provided a quick way to test the effectiveness of the Salk polio vaccine, then under development. University of Minnesota researchers discovered that HeLa cells could be infected with the virus that causes the debilitating muscular disease, polio. Moreover, her survivors were completely unaware until the mid-1970s that cells from her cancer continued to grow around the world as medical research tools.Īfter their original isolation, the cells quickly began to play a central role in medical research in the 1950s. However, neither Henrietta nor her family were fully informed that her tissue had been taken. These cells, known as HeLa (HEE-luh), gave the medical world the first chance to experiment with human cells without having to go back to individual patients every time specimens were needed. With Henrietta's unknowing donation, the Geys and Kubicek overcame more than 20 years of laboratory failures: The team succeeded in keeping human cancer cells alive and growing indefinitely. George Gey, where his wife Margaret and technician Mary Kubicek worked. As with the majority of Hopkins cancer patients at the time, biopsy samples had been taken of her cancerous tumors earlier and brought to the laboratory of Dr. On October 4, 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old wife and mother of five, died of cervical cancer in the segregated colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Quotes from the immortal life of henrietta lacks