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The Immortal Woman & Founder Of A New Species?

JamesWhitehead

Piffle Prospector
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Aug 2, 2001
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Henrietta Lacks & HeLa Cells

She died in 1951 but went on growing all around the world. She was sent into space and was bought in bulk by cosmetic companies. Yet she was buried in an unmarked grave.

The article here:

http://www.vifu.de/new/os/1509_schneider.html

has the uninspiring title "The body as a biomedical resource" but the story is fascinating and has not, so far as I know, been mentioned on the Board so far.

I found a slightly incomplete recording of the BBC 1997 documentary The Way of All Flesh lurking at the end of an old tape and had to my shame forgotten it almost completely.

There must be lots more online about this . . .
 
I can see you didn't invent this error, Fenris. There is a statement online to the effect that the cells came from a Helen Lang and maybe that was the source for the glossary you cite.

http://www.healthboards.com/ubb/Forum97 ... 00183.html

A search for +"Helen Lang" +HeLa produces just nine hits on Google and I'd guess the Japanese and German sites copied the error, unless they all have an earlier mistaken source.

A search for +"Henrietta Lacks" +HeLa produces 447 hits.

It is of course possible that a pseudonym was used at some early date to disguise the identity of the donor. But I'm with the majority on this one.

:)
 
Helacyton gartleri

The immortal remains of Henrietta Lacks.


When human body cells are removed and put into a cell culture, they weaken and die quickly, usually within about 50 divisions. Without the rest of the support structure—a heart, blood circulating, a digestive system and so-on—body cells can't survive. Body cells also age, so even if you were to simulate the body's environment in a test tube or petri dish, the cells would eventually perish anyway. The basic mortality of the cells reflect the basic mortality of the organism they comprise, which is why there's no fountain of youth or medicinal procedure that'll give you biological immortality.

There is, however, one human being who is biologically immortal on a technicality, and her name is Henrietta Lacks. In 1951 she showed up at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, complaining of blood spotting in her underwear. Samples were taken of her cervical tissue and sent to a lab for analysis, which came back with a diagnosis of cervical cancer.

The cancer was caused by the Human papillomavirus, which is a sexually transmitted disease. Most variants of this virus are harmless, but some are known to cause cervical cancer, as in Henrietta's case. After her diagnosis and before attempts to treat the disease with radium, another sample from the tumor was sent to George Gey, who was the head of tissue culture research at Hopkins. Gey discovered that the cells from Henrietta's tumor would not only survive and multiply outside of her body, but they didn't age either. These cells were basically immortal.

And they're still alive, even though Henrietta herself died of the cancer on October 4th, 1951. Now, HeLa cells are about as common in biological research as the lab rat and the petri dish, and are still being grown in an unbroken lineage from the cells originally harvested from Mrs. Lacks in 1951. They're used in cancer research because a scientist can perform experiments on them that otherwise couldn't be done on a living human being. They were also used in the development of the Polio vaccine, making Henrietta somewhat of a posthumous hero to millions.

But say you're a scientist looking at HeLa cells under a microscope. They live independently of the body they came from. They reproduce (faster even than other cancerous cells). They consume, excrete, and do everything an independent living organism usually does. A thousand years from now there will still be HeLa cells multiplying and living, even some of the original cells sampled from Mrs. Lacks, even though Henrietta Lacks herself has long since passed away. Is this a new species?

In 1991 the scientific community decided it was, and blessed HeLa cells with its own genus and species: Helacyton gartleri, named by Van Valen & Maiorana.

That would make Helacyton gartleri an example of speciation, which is when a new species is observed developing from another. In this case, the development is from a chordate (homo sapien) to something that's more like an ameoba (a cross-phylum mutation), giving us an animal with a mostly human genotype, but which does not develop into a human-like phenotype. Since this event occurred in nature when the papillomavirus transformed Henrietta's cells, and not in the laboratory, it's a strong piece of evidence supporting Evolution (although not one that suggests you could go from an ameoba to a chordate, which would probably take more than one mutation).

www.disenchanted.com/dis/lookup.html?node=1860
 
Fascinating stuff.

Knowing nothing about biology other than getting an O level several years ago, could this be a human/virual hybrid?

Is that sort of thing feasible?
 
Mr_Eamcat2 said:
Fascinating stuff.

Knowing nothing about biology other than getting an O level several years ago, could this be a human/virual hybrid?

Is that sort of thing feasible?

I suppose you could look at it along the lines of our bodies really being made up of what were essentially different simple organisms (like the mitochondria in our cells) - endosymbiosis: see this and pages it links to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondria#Origin

So I suppose you could see this like we are sloughing off simpler organisms. Possibly. I'm still pondering this one.

For more info on this case see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
 
There was a programme on the old telly box a couple or more years ago about this lady.

I think it was on bbc2. Either Panarama or Horizon.
 
river_styx said:
There was a programme on the old telly box a couple or more years ago about this lady.

I think it was on bbc2. Either Panarama or Horizon.

Ah ha and a previous thread - all merged :)

The Wikipedia entry also clarifies the Helen Lang situation - that was the name used to preserve Henrietta Lacks' anonymity.
 
Life and afterlife of a woman who will live for ever
Her cells have been used in genetics for 50 years. Now her story is a publishing triumph
By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent
Wednesday, 10 November 2010

Henrietta Lacks, the poor black tobacco worker who died in 1951 without knowing that her cells would be used to treat millions of patients through vaccines and research, could be the most important woman in modern medicine. Last night, she extended her dominance to the publishing industry.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the story of Lacks’ remarkable life and death written by the US science writer Rebecca Skloot, won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, a £25,000 award celebrating medicine in literature. Skloot’s work has also been named Amazon’s Best Book of 2010, beating Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Henrietta Lacks entered the New York Times bestseller list at number five when it was released in the US in February, and stayed there for months; it was released in Britain in June to widespread acclaim.

"It's wonderful that the prize has been awarded to a book that was such a labour of love for its author,” said Clare Matterson, director of edical hmanities and engagement at the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. “Rebecca Skloot's work absolutely meets the objective of this prize. It has something of everything - a compelling science story, an emotional personal story and intriguing ethical dilemmas - and all woven together and written with style.”

Henrietta Lacks has been described as a “biomedical thriller” and chronicles the tale of how the 31-year-old’s dead cancer cells were removed from her body without her family’s permission when she died at a Baltimore hospital from cervical cancer.

After her death, scientists grew Lacks’s tumour cells in a laboratory, the first time a human cell line had survived outside the body. Since then HeLa cells (an abbreviated version of Lacks’s name) have been used to develop polio vaccines, in vitro fertilisation techniques and in genetics research, to understand cancers and to manufacture drugs for herpes and influenza.

More than 50 million tonnes of her cells have been grown since she died, and their use has been acknowledged in more than 60,000 scientific papers with 10 new studies added to the list every day.

Skloot charts the tribulations of her impoverished relatives, and the author’s obsession with the “Henrietta mystery”, namely how such an influential figure ended up being buried in an unmarked grave in a clearing just outside Roanoke, the small town in rural Virgina where she grew up.

Lacks was only confirmed as the source of the cancer cells in 1973, to the surprise of her relations. In 2001 HeLa cells were trading at $167 (£107) a vial. Her descendants have never received a penny from their ancestor’s gift to science.

“This cell line is used all around the world and revolutionised cell biology because they grew so well in culture,” said Professor William Earnshaw, principal research fellow of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Cell Biology. “They are used to answer a wide variety of questions and yielded a huge amount of information. We use them to study how cells grow and divide.”

The story’s relevance to black society has made the book particularly appealing to parts of the US public. The treatment of Lacks has been portrayed as another example of the mistreatment of black Americans in the pursuit of medical science. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, carried out between 1932 and 1972, saw scientists observe how untreated syphilis slowly and painfully killed African American men. Penicillin, which could treat the affliction, was developed in the 1940s.

Skloot’s book has now sold 400,000 hardbacks in the US and Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood, are producing an HBO film based on the tale.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 29779.html
 
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