The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks
Anna Starokadomskaya, "Biomolecule"Laboratory-grown human cell cultures are often used in biomedical research and in the development of new treatments.
Among the many cell lines, one of the most famous is the HeLa cells of the uterine endothelium. These cells, "depicting" a person in the laboratory, are "eternal" – they can endlessly divide, endure decades in the freezer, can be divided into parts in different proportions. On their surface, they carry a fairly universal set of receptors, which allows them to be used to study the action of various cytokines; they are not very whimsical in cultivation; they tolerate freezing and preservation very well.
These cells got into big science quite unexpectedly. They were taken from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died shortly after. Let's look at the whole story in more detail.
Henrietta LacksHenrietta Lacks was a beautiful black American (here she is filmed with her husband, David).
She lived in the small town of Turner in Southern Virginia with her husband and five children. On February 1, 1951, Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital – she was worried about strange secretions that she periodically found on her underwear. The medical diagnosis was terrible and merciless – cervical cancer. Eight months later, despite surgery and radiation exposure, she died. She was 31 years old.
While Henrietta was in Hopkins Hospital, the attending physician sent her tumor (cervical biopsy) for analysis to George Gey, the head of the tissue cell research laboratory at Hopkins Hospital. Recall that at that time the cultivation of cells outside the body was only at the stage of formation, and the main problem was the predetermined death of cells – after a certain number of divisions, the entire cell line died.
It turned out that the cells labeled "HeLa" (an acronym for the name and surname Henrietta Lacks) multiplied twice as fast as cells from normal tissues. This has never happened before with any other cells in vitro. In addition, the transformation made these cells immortal – their growth suppression program turned off after a certain number of divisions. This opened up unprecedented prospects in biology.
Indeed, researchers had never before been able to consider the results obtained on cell cultures so reliable: previously, all experiments were conducted on heterogeneous cell lines, which eventually died – sometimes before any results could be obtained. And then scientists got the first stable and even eternal (!) a cell line that adequately mimics the essence of the organism. And when it was discovered that HeLa cells are able to survive even mailing, Gay sent them to his colleagues across the country. Very soon, the demand for HeLa cells grew, and they were replicated in laboratories around the world. They became the first "template" cell line.
It so happened that Henrietta died on the very day when George Gay spoke in front of television cameras, holding a test tube with her cells in his hands, and declared that a new era in medical research had begun – an era of new perspectives in the search for drugs and the study of life.
Why are her cells so important?And he was right.
The cell line, identical in all laboratories of the world, made it possible to quickly obtain and independently confirm more and more new data. We can safely say that the giant leap of molecular biology at the end of the last century was due to the ability to cultivate cells in vitro. Henrietta Lacks cells became the first immortal human cells that were ever grown on an artificial nutrient medium. HeLa has taught scientists to cultivate hundreds of other cancer cell lines. And, although conditions for the cultivation of untransformed cells have not yet been found, cancer cells for the most part are an adequate model for finding answers to questions asked by scientists and physicians.
Without HeLa cells, it would have been impossible to develop a polio vaccine created by Jonas Salk. By the way, Salk was so confident in the safety of the received vaccine (weakened polio virus) that, as proof of the reliability of his medicine, he first injected the vaccine to himself, his wife and three children.
Since the death of Henrietta Lacks, her tumor cells have been continuously used to study diseases such as cancer, AIDS, to study the effects of radiation and toxic substances, to compile genetic maps and a huge number of other scientific tasks. In the biomedical world, HeLa cells have become as famous as laboratory rats and Petri dishes. In December 1960, HeLa cells were the first to fly into space in a Soviet satellite. By the way, even today the scope of experiments conducted by Soviet geneticists in space is striking.
On the third satellite spacecraft (01.12.1960), even more living objects went on the flight: two Bee and Fly dogs, two guinea pigs, two white laboratory rats, 14 black mice of the C57 line, seven hybrid mice from the SBA and C57 mice and five white mongrel mice. There were also placed six flasks with high-grade and seven flasks with low-grade drosophila lines, as well as six flasks with hybrids. In addition, two flasks with flies were covered with additional protection – a layer of lead 5 g/cm2 thick. In addition, there were seeds of peas, wheat, corn, buckwheat, horse beans on the ship. Sprouts of onion and nigella seeds were flying in a special tray. On board the ship there were several tubes with actinomycetes, ampoules with human tissue culture in the thermostat and outside the thermostat, six tubes with chlorella in a liquid medium. The ebony cartridges contained sealed ampoules with bacterial culture of E. coli and two phage varieties – T3 and T4. The special devices contained HeLa cell culture, human pulmonary amniotic tissue, fibroblasts, rabbit bone marrow cells, as well as a container with frog eggs and sperm. Tobacco mosaic viruses of various strains and influenza virus were also placed.
From the article by N. Delaunay "At the origins of space genetics" ("Science and Life" No. 4, 2008).
The results showed that HeLa feel good not only in terrestrial conditions, but also in weightlessness. Since then, HeLa has been used for cloning (preliminary experiments on nuclear transplantation before cloning the famous Dolly sheep were carried out on HeLa), and for drawing up genetic maps, and for practicing artificial insemination, and thousands of other studies (Figure hypescience.com ).
Besides science...The identity of Henrietta Lacks herself has not been advertised for a long time.
Dr. Gay, of course, knew about the origin of HeLa cells, but he believed that confidentiality in this matter was a priority, and for many years the Lux family did not know that it was her cells that became famous all over the world. After the death of Dr. Gay in 1970, the mystery was revealed. It happened as follows. Recall that the standards of sterility and techniques for working with cell lines were just emerging, and some errors surfaced only years later. The same is the case with HeLa cells – 25 years later, scientists found out that many cell cultures originating from other types of tissues, including breast and prostate cells, were infected with more aggressive and tenacious HeLa cells. It turned out that HeLa can move with dust particles in the air or on insufficiently thoroughly washed hands, and take root in cultures of other cells. This caused a big scandal. Hoping to solve the problem by genotyping (genome sequencing, we recall, was not invented yet), one group of scientists found Henrietta's relatives and asked them to give them DNA samples of the family in order to make a gene map. Thus the secret became apparent.
By the way, Americans are now more worried about the fact that Henrietta's family has not received compensation for the use of HeLa cells without the consent of the donor. Plus, to this day, the family lives in not very good prosperity, and financial assistance would be very useful. But all requests run into a blank wall – there have been no respondents for a long time, and the Medical Academy and other scientific structures do not want to keep up the conversation...
Real immortality?The malignant tumor that killed Henrietta made her cells potentially immortal.
Did this woman want immortality? And did she get it? If we compare the first and last photos of this article (HeLa cells under a scanning microscope in pseudo-colors. Illustration: Steve Gschmeissner / Science Photo Library), it feels like in a fantasy novel – a part of a living person, artificially multiplied, endures millions of tests, "tastes" all medicines before they get to the pharmacy, is dissected to the very basics by molecular biologists all over the world...
Of course, all this has nothing to do with "life after life". We do not admit that in HeLa cells, tormented all year round by insatiable graduate students under the laminars of laboratories, there is at least some part of the soul of an unhappy young woman. Nevertheless, I would like to honor the memory of this woman, because her involuntary contribution to medicine is invaluable – the cells left after her have saved and continue to save more lives than any doctor can do.
LiteratureSmithsonian Magazine: Henrietta Lacks’ „Immortal“
Cells
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