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Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman whose cervix cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortal human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. She was born on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia. She later moved to Clover, Virginia where she lived with and was a mother of 5 with her cousin, Day. Her cells were taken without her consent or knowledge during a routine Radion treatment for her cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Most patients had their cells taken to be tested for immortality, a trait that would be beneficial for extensive studying of the cells, and Henreitta's cells just too happened to be. She didn't even know that her cells were even taken or immortal in her entire lifetime.

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Henrietta Lacks' Family and Ethical Issues

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Henrietta Lacks' Family and Ethical Issues

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Besides from the questionable ethics of taking a part of someone without telling them and the racism that is interwoven with that fact, and the story of the Lack's and their constant persecution for their information is something even more important. The questionable ethics of human genome and cell tempering in the first place had created a lot of debate as well as an interesting and important mystery that has only been unveiled relativity recently considering how important and old the HELA cells are.

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Cervical cancer: the legacy of Henrietta Lacks

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Do you think that the family deserves componsation from there family members cells generations down the line?

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Do you think that the family deserves componsation from there family members cells generations down the line?

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This is a timelapse of HeLa Cells. The video is very sped up, as the cells only devide every 20-24 hours, which is alot slower than i thought. Even though they are relativly slow though, they are still infinite.

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Time Lapse Imaging of Dividing HeLa Cells

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The HeLa cell line that is derived from Henrietta Lacks' cervical cancer cells has been instrumental in many scientific breakthroughs, including the development of the polio vaccine, research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and many more. HeLa cells were the first human cells to be cloned in 1955 and since have been used in thousands of experiments and medical experiments. Even if she didn't know, she has saved thousands if not millions of lives. The cells weren't just normal human cells, they were an aggressive cancer. And as quoted by the scientists that discovered them "They were sure Henreitta cells would die just like all the others."

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Rebecca Skloot's book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," brought Henrietta's story into the light, a story which was previously widely unknown or not cared about by the public. The book is about Henrietta life and family, what happened to her and why she was never told her cells were taken as well. The discovery and impact of HeLa cell has been very important to science, but even so the ethicality of taking her cells is still debated. The book has grown to be very popular and acclaimed and has sparked discussions about racism, scientific advancements, and the ethics of human genome tampering.

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This article talks more about the social injustices and controversy's surrounding HELA cells. Some debate includes whether or not the family should be compensated for the cells, while the family seems to maintain that all they want is recognition of Henreitta Lacks. One of my favorite parts of the article is when they list things about Henreitta Lacks often overlooked, "Henrietta Lacks loved to cook — spaghetti was a favorite — and she loved to dance, often with one of her five children in her arms. She dressed stylishly and wore red nail polish."

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In Henrietta Lacks's centennial year, researchers must do more to ensure that human cells cannot be taken without consent.

That day in Erika Johnson's high-school biology class, some 20 years ago, is seared into her memory. The teacher was leading the students through experiments involving cells from a widely used line known as HeLa. The cell line originated from tissue taken from a woman named Henrietta Lacks - and Johnson's mother was a Lacks. "This is my great-grandmother I'm holding in my hand," Johnson remembers feeling. "It was a very surreal situation."

Last month marked 100 years since Lacks's birth. She died in 1951, aged 31, of an aggressive cervical cancer. Months earlier, doctors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, had taken samples of her cancerous cells while diagnosing and treating the disease. They gave some of that tissue to a researcher without Lacks's knowledge or consent. In the laboratory, her cells turned out to have an extraordinary capacity to survive and reproduce; they were, in essence, immortal. The researcher shared them widely with other scientists, and they became a workhorse of biological research. Today, work done with HeLa cells underpins much of modern medicine; they have been involved in key discoveries in many fields, including cancer, immunology and infectious disease. One of their most recent applications has been in research for vaccines against COVID-19.

But the story of Henrietta Lacks also illustrates the racial inequities that are embedded in the US research and health-care systems. Lacks was a Black woman. The hospital where her cells were collected was one of only a few that provided medical care to Black people. None of the biotechnology or other companies that profited from her cells passed any money back to her family. And, for decades after her death, doctors and scientists repeatedly failed to ask her family for consent as they revealed Lacks's name publicly, gave her medical records to the media, and even published her cells' genome online. (Following an outcry, the genome was soon removed.) Nature later published the genome of another HeLa line after the Lacks family reached an agreement with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to approve its release.

Now, the extraordinary events of 2020 - the #BlackLivesMatter movement for racial justice, and the unequal toll of COVID-19 on communities of colour - are compelling scientists to reckon with past injustices. Some have called for a reduction in the use of HeLa cells in research, or even an end to their use entirely. The argument is that, because the cells were obtained without Lacks's knowledge or consent (even though this was legal at the time), any use of them is unethical and perpetuates an injustice.

But that is not what many Lacks family members want. Henrietta Lacks has dozens of descendants, several of whom are leading a new effort in her centennial year, #HELA100, that instead calls for people to celebrate her life and legacy. "I want scientists to acknowledge that HeLa cells came from an African American woman who was flesh and blood, who had a family and who had a story," her granddaughter Jeri Lacks-Whye told Nature.

And there is so much to her story. Henrietta Lacks loved to cook - spaghetti was a favourite - and she loved to dance, often with one of her five children in her arms. She dressed stylishly and wore red nail polish. She was the emotional and psychological centre of a home where the extended family gathered and where the door was always open to anyone in need.

To her grandson Alfred Lacks Carter, the most important thing about HeLa cells is how they have advanced cancer research - a fitting tribute, given that Lacks died of the disease. Many people have also told him that they were able to conceive a child because of in vitro fertilization, which was developed with the help of HeLa cells. "They were taken in a bad way but they are doing good for the world," he says. And they do so for people of all ethnicities.

Policy review

Over the past decade, scientists and the Lacks family have worked together to establish stronger rules to govern the use of these precious specimens. But there is still much work to be done.

First is action on consent. NIH director Francis Collins has signalled that he wants the research community to consider changing the Common Rule, the set of policies that protect human participants in research funded by the US government.

This revision would require consent to be obtained from anyone from whom biological specimens are taken before the samples are used in research - even if the specimens are "deidentified" from the person they came from.

Earlier efforts to make this change failed in 2017, but now is the time to revisit the Common Rule, and to reconsider the question of consent. In the past, some researchers have warned that this would impose additional burdens. But a compromise must be found. The last time the US Department of Health and Human Services worked to revise the Common Rule, it proposed a series of other changes at the same time; perhaps one way forward is to tackle the question of consent for biospecimens on its own, and with thorough discussion involving not only scientists, but also the public.

A second, separate step must be to acknowledge and undo the disparities that are baked into basic research - because the systemic racism that existed when Lacks's cells were taken still exists today.

In the current climate of reckoning with racial injustice, some researchers who use HeLa cells have concluded that they should offer financial compensation. For example, a laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, and a UK-based biomedical company have announced donations to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which was established in 2010 by Rebecca Skloot, the author of a book about Lacks. The foundation awards grants both to Lacks's descendants and to family members of others whose bodies have been used without consent for research. Other institutions and researchers must examine whether - and how - their own work builds on past injustices. And they must consider how best to make amends.

COVID-19, a disease that is disproportionately affecting Black people in a number of countries, offers an opportunity for those who wish to usher in a fairer era of research. To give back now, researchers should not only study why the disease is more prevalent and severe among Black people, but also help to implement solutions to close the gap. And, once a vaccine is available - possibly as a result of work with HeLa cells - researchers must work with marginalized communities to see that it reaches those who need it most.

The fact that Lacks's cells were taken in a different era of consent will never justify what happened. The past cannot be undone, but we must acknowledge the wrongs of previous generations, and those wrongs that persist today. Justice must be done, and the time to start is now.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02494-z

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Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong

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In Henrietta Lacks's centennial year, researchers must do more to ensure that human cells cannot be taken without consent. In Henrietta Lacks's centennial year, researchers must do more to ensure that human cells cannot be taken without consent.

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Do you think genetic modifications are okay if they save lives? What if the information or substances for the modification was gotten in less than okay ways?

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Do you think genetic modifications are okay if they save lives? What if the information or substances for the modification was gotten in less than okay ways?

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This is an infographic about the timeline of Henrietta Lacks and her cells. It is pretty interesting, I suppose.

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This talks alot about how and why HeLa cells were used, going into detail about what expereiments were done with them. "They were sent to space during the Space Race to uncover the impact of zero gravity on human cells." This quoute is about how they were used to test the effects of zero gravity, and there are other quotes stating they were used for testing of radiations effects on humans cells. This is one of the more extensive articles.

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by Noel Jackson
figures by Daniel Utter

Have you ever wondered how scientists study human tissue in the lab? They do so with the help of authentic human cells. Normal cells in the human body have a finite number of replications, which limits their lifespan. Immortal cancer cells escape this limit and replicate indefinitely, making them ideal for research that requires a constant supply of quickly growing cells. Today, thousands of distinct proliferative human cell cultures called "cell lines" are used as biospecimens in medical research. The discovery of naturally occurring immortal cells occurred 70 years ago with the identification of a cell line called HeLa. The HeLa cell line still lives today and is serving as a tool to uncover crucial information about the novel coronavirus.

HeLa cells were the first human cells to survive and thrive outside the body in a test tube. Ever since then, HeLa cell lines have been used in more than 100,000 scientific PubMed publications on a range of topics including cancer, cell biology, genetics, and infectious diseases. Plus, studies in this cell line have led to pioneering discoveries that have merited three Nobel prizes to date!

But where do these cells come from? As it turns out, they originate from the uterus of a 31-year-old African American mother who was diagnosed with an unusually aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951. The young woman's name was Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks and her special cells

Henrietta Lacks grew up with extended relatives in a poor community in Clover, Virginia. As a child, she worked on the family farm growing tobacco. Ten years after moving to Baltimore, Maryland with her husband and children, she entrusted Dr. Howard Jones at Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat the pain she began to experience in her abdomen. Dr. Jones diagnosed her with cervical cancer. While Lacks succumbed to the cancer a few months later, an extension of her lives on as a crucial tool in science. Her immortal cells remain circulating among scientists in laboratories all over the world today.

Without her knowledge or permission, pieces of the tumor from her cervix were taken and given to Dr. George Otto Gey for cancer research. Like many other scientists, Dr. Gey was working to model human cancer in a test tube to develop therapeutics against the disease. While many cancer cells grow and replicate uncontrollably, those that grew as such outside the body were not known until Henrietta Lacks's cells were discovered. Cells from her tumor grew indefinitely in flasks in Dr. Gey's lab. The HeLa cell line, coined after the letters of her first and last names, was born.

HeLa cells revolutionized biomedical research

After their discovery, scientists were able to directly perform tests on human tissue outside the body for the first time. The excitement about HeLa cells crossed industrial and geographical boundaries (Figure 1). They were sent to space during the Space Race to uncover the impact of zero gravity on human cells. They were studied to determine the effects of radiation after nuclear bomb explosions. They were even used by the beauty industry to test potential side-effects of new cosmetic products. The cells were used by biomedical researchers all over the world to study genetic mutations as cells divide, discover potential cancer therapeutics, and develop treatments for infectious diseases.

Figure 1: The impact of HeLa cells on biomedical research. HeLa cells represented scientists' first opportunity to do long-term studies of human tissue outside of the human body. Many scientific and science-adjacent fields took advantage of these cells to study a variety of things, from disease prevention to Space physiology.

HeLa cells and virus research: then and now

HeLa cells were first used to study the growth and spread of poliomyelitis virus, the pathogen that causes polio. This research eventually led scientists to develop a vaccine for polio in the U.S. All children born in the U.S. now receive four doses of the inactivated poliovirus (IPV) vaccine to prepare their immune system to fend off polio infections. Now, the worldwide incidence of wild polio has dropped 99% and is completely eradicated in the Americas, Europe, South East Asia, the Western Pacific, and, most recently, Africa. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) projected that, in the absence of a vaccine, more than 17 million people would have been infected and paralyzed by the virus. Without HeLa cells, this projection may have become a globally morbid reality.

When initially discovered, HeLa cells were the human cell line of choice to study the viral pathogenesis of polio. Now, they are paving the way for COVID-19 research breakthroughs. The groundbreaking study that identified the infectivity of the virus SARS-CoV-2 in humans did so using the cells that were isolated from Henrietta Lacks. Scientists began studying COVID-19 using HeLa cells, but soon found that the virus did not infect these cells well. This curiosity led the researchers to search for the key to viral entry that was apparently missing on the HeLa cells. Other forms of the coronavirus used a molecule, called ACE2, to enter the cells. ACE2 particles surround the surface of some human cells. Maybe the novel coronavirus also enters cells through the same molecule. After engineering HeLa cells to display the ACE2 molecule, the authors observed that the novel coronavirus could then enter and infect the cells (Figure 2). ACE2 acts as an entryway for any SARS-CoV-2019 particles to recognize and bind. After entry, it can use the cell's machinery to replicate and spread, causing the novel coronavirus disease - COVID-19. Using HeLa cells, then, the researchers discovered an important aspect of SARS-CoV-2 infectivity and thus of viral spread.

Figure 2: ACE2 receptors decorate the surface of HeLa cells to promote infection. HeLa cells do not naturally display high levels of ACE2 proteins on their surface, preventing efficient infection by SARS-CoV-2 particles. However, when researchers engineer HeLa cells to display the ACE2 protein, the viral particles gain entry into the cells and begin their cycle of infection.

Another study used HeLa cells as a tool to uncover the machinery required and process used for invasion of human cells. Researchers have also investigated the stability of the virus's genomic material in HeLa cells by comparing its genomic material with that of many other viruses. The use of HeLa cells in COVID-19 research has provided insights on the molecular mechanics of SARS-CoV-2019 and the components required for infection. These data are pieces of information that come together to build a greater understanding of the virus, which is essential for developing future treatment.

A lasting contribution to the world

When Henrietta Lacks and her cells alerted the world to the existence of immortal human cells, opportunities arose for research and medical treatment development. Today, her cells continue to serve academic and industrial institutions. So much so that she has been described as the Mother of Modern Medicine in a painting by artist Kadir Nelson in 2017. The use of HeLa cells in COVID-19 research is a testament to Henrietta Lacks's lasting contribution to provide microscopic tools for scientific discoveries that billions have benefitted from thus far and will benefit from in the future to come.
Noel Jackson is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program. Daniel Utter is a 6th year Ph.D. student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.
For more information:

Stay up-to-date on the use of HeLa cells in biomedical research by visiting here

Check out original research publications that use HeLa cells for COVID-19 discoveries here and here

Acknowledgements:

The Henrietta Lacks Family Foundation

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Vessels for Collective Progress: the use of HeLa cells in COVID-19 research - Science in the News

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by Noel Jacksonfigures by Daniel Utter Have you ever wondered how scientists study human tissue in the lab? They do so with the help of authentic human cells. Normal cells in the human body have a finite number of replications, which limits their lifespan.

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This is the article about HeLa cells written by john Hopkins themselves. It is very short and sweet, making sure to clarify that john Hopkins don't own the rights to or cell Hela cells, but rather they offer them freely to anyone who wants the. They talk about some of the discovery's that HeLa cells have contributed to as well as confirming the fact that other cell lines are used today.

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Among the important scientific discoveries of the last century was the first immortal human cell line known as "HeLa" - a remarkably durable and prolific line of cells obtained during the treatment of Henrietta's cancer by Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. George Gey in 1951.

Although these were the first cells that could be easily shared and multiplied in a lab setting, Johns Hopkins has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line. Rather, Johns Hopkins offered HeLa cells freely and widely for scientific research.

Over the past several decades, this cell line has contributed to many medical breakthroughs, from research on the effects of zero gravity in outer space and the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines, to the study of leukemia, the AIDS virus and cancer worldwide.

Although many other cell lines are in use today, HeLa cells have supported advances in most fields of medical research in the years since HeLa cells were isolated.

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Among the important scientific discoveries of the last century was the first immortal human cell line known as "HeLa" - a remarkably durable and prolific line of cells obtained during the treatment of Henrietta's cancer by Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. George Gey in 1951.

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Why do you think it took over 50 years for people to find out about Henrietta Lacks cells and whose she was?  Do you think if Rebecca Skloot hadn't taken an interest in her case she would be known as she it today?

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Why do you think it took over 50 years for people to find out about Henrietta Lacks cells and whose she was?  Do you think if Rebecca Skloot hadn't taken an interest in her case she would be known as she it today?