The True Story of An Immortal Woman
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 01:47AM ;)
Well, since I tend to forget what I've read three months after reading it, I'm going to jot down some notes on what is an unbelievable true story.
It's the story of Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951), a woman who died far too young from a vicious case of cervical cancer that blanketed her internal organs in very short order. After her treatments, her skin was left charred from the chemicals used by her doctors. When all was said and done, her primary physician said he has never seen anything like it--before or since. Both the tumors and condition of her skin were beyond imagination.
But that's where the story begins. Unknown to Henrietta and her family, the doctors took tissue samples during one of her check-ups to use in their experiments; namely, to try and grow her cells in the lab, something that hasn't been done before. It was expected to fail like all the previous attempts, but it didn't. In fact, these "immortal cells" are still alive today. If you took all of the HeLa (Henrietta Lacks) cells produced over the last 60 years, they would weight a combined 50 million metric tons.
Her cells were instrumental in many medical advancements, including cancer research, the research of various viruses, HIV research, the effects of the atom bomb, in vitro fertilization, cloning, gene mapping, and the development of the polio vaccine. Henrietta Lacks, who had to be tended to in the "colored" wing of the hospital, would--through her cells--save millions of lives, and one has to wonder how the racist people of that day would have grumbled about a non-white woman being the source of so much good.
The dilemma is this...her doctors took her cells without permission, replicated them without permission and sold them without permission. Millions have been made from her cells. And while the research Henrietta's cells enabled has benefited millions, it has not benefited her own family, who cannot even afford basic medical insurance. Henrietta's husband couldn't afford to fight his cancer with the medicines that were created through research that was largely thanks to his wife's cells. That's pretty screwed up.
Obviously, her cells went to help the greater good. But there are two primary concerns here; (1) why did she (and her family) get nothing in return while others have profited, and (2) why were they able to take something that was as personal as her own DNA and ship it out worldwide without consent? Both have a simple answer: Then, and now, doctors can do pretty much what they want with the tissues they extract during surgery, etc. While you can go after someone for copyright infringement for publishing one of your diary entries or photos without permission, you likely have no legal recourse if a physician shares your genetic material--which contains the DNA that tells everything about you, stuff you don't even know about yourself--across the globe.
What made her cells so special?
This is the question I kept asking as I read through the book. As it turns out, the cells taken from Henrietta were cancer cells from her cervix. Now, each time normal cells reproduce through mitosis, the DNA bits called the telomeres get shorter and shorter, eventually resulting in cell death; ie, they can't replicate anymore and eventually die off (the number of times a cell can divide is called the Hayflick limit). Cancer cells, on the other hand, have an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds the telomeres, so unlike with regular cells that continually get shorter, cancer cells do not...they can be "immortal" because they are constantly regenerating instead of slowly disappearing. But other cancer cells were still not as aggressive as the HeLa cells...there's more to it...
Henrietta contracted HPV (apparently, 90% of all sexually active adults have become infected with at least one strain of HPV during their lifetimes). Long, complicated story short, the HPV virus turned off what is called her "P53 tumor suppressor" gene which allowed the cancer to flourish. The cancer AND the HPV AND Henrietta's genetics--the combination of those three things--are what makes HeLa cells so aggressive and easy to cultivate. They are so aggressive, in fact, that scientists have had a hard time keeping them isolated and millions of dollars have been lost through tainted results where the HeLa cells have spread to experiments that should've been HeLa free.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. To read more about it, I highly recommend the book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot.
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