Hello! I’m fresh back from a lovely wedding and honeymoon in the Caribbean. We saw no pirates, but did venture by areas named “Port Royal.” Is it wrong that I giggled a little?
While away, I finished up a book that many have already heard of, but I knew nothing about until a few weeks ago – “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. I’m going to use this book as the setting for my next set of posts, which will pertain to cervical cancer, human papillomavirus, and laboratory tissue culture.
Before we jump into that, I want to step back and discuss the book for those who have not read it. Ms. Skloot picks up the reins to tell the story of a woman who died in 1951 of metastasized cervical cancer. Her pain, treatment, and death were difficult to read about, not the least of which is because cancer is a horrible disease that steals your body, your dignity and eventually your life. Having the details displayed before you, especially when juxtaposing cancer and medicine in the 1950s to present day, is eye-opening. During her treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a small portion of Henrietta’s cervical tumor was removed and sent to Dr. George Gey, who figured out how to make these cells divide and thrive in a laboratory setting. Until Henrietta’s cells came along, no one had been able to successfully grow (also called “culture”) cells outside a body.
This was a huge breakthrough. Human bodies are composed of tissues (like liver, skin, heart, etc.) and each tissue is made up of specialized cells (see Central Dogma post). Remember that every cell in the human body contains the exact same DNA molecule and that DNA molecule encodes for every protein the human body could ever need. It should make sense that skin cells are expected to do different functions than heart cells so skin cells will need different proteins than heart cells. Pretend you are cupcake baker. You will need different ingredients than the bread baker, but the bakery kitchen will hold all the ingredients that both of you will need. You, the cupcake baker, will take what you need from the kitchen to perform your function, while the bread baker will do the same. Cells work very similarly.
Scientists were very interested in culturing individual tissue cells to ease and advance experimental techniques. Imagine you want to know how the kidney will react to a certain drug. Technically, it is possible to treat the entire animal with the drug, kill it, and then study the kidney directly, but that procedure is tedious and unnecessarily sacrifices research animals. What if you could just have a bunch of kidney cells and see how they respond instead? How much easier that would be?!
Until Henrietta’s cells came along, culturing tissue cells had been wildly unsuccessful. Amazingly though, her cells grew well and allowed scientists to develop and standardize growing procedures for tissue cells, in addition to much larger advances, such as the polio vaccine.
Ms. Skloot takes this story and places it firmly in the middle of medical ethics. Henrietta Lacks never consented to donation of her cells to medical science, but consent was not required in the 1950s. Neither Henrietta nor her family was ever compensated for her cells, which have proven to be exceedingly valuable and a large money maker for certain companies. However, these companies and this business was never dreamed of at the time of her donation and none of the scientists that originally cultured her cells (such as Dr. George Gey and his assistant Mary Kubicek) received compensation, either. These are just a few of the issues broached in this book.
Also explored within these ~300 pages are Henrietta’s descendants, their feelings on this story, their financial background, and, what I consider to be the most egregious issue, the lack and importance of scientific education among all Americans. Hence, this is why I’m using the book as a backdrop for several posts.
Let’s jump back to Henrietta’s cells for a moment. Scientists are still growing these cells in cultures all over the world. I have a few plates of them myself in an incubator at work. We know these cells as “HeLa” for Henrietta Lacks (current cell cultures are no longer named for the human who donated them due to new laws that protect patient’s privacy). Her cells came from her cervical cancer tumor. These cells aren’t representing a woman’s healthy cervix; they are representing cells from a diseased cervix. This is an important clarification. In fact, her diseased cervix was infected with the human papillomavirus and, it is due to this infection, that her cells were able to thrive outside her body.
Would I recommend this book? It certainly brings up controversial topics and invites many to have knee-jerk reactions to medical science. I think Ms. Skloot does an excellent job describing Henrietta, her life, cancer and death, as well as framing her story with explanations of 1950s Baltimore, Johns Hopkins and research on African Americans. The second half of the book introduces you to Henrietta’s current descendants and this part isn’t nearly as thought-provoking or interesting as the first. Her afterword is the most valuable portion of this half. For a nice summary of current ethics, research practices and problems that face researchers, doctors, and patients, definitely read the afterword.
REFERENCES
Picture of book came from www.amazon.com
Pictures of HeLa cells came from www.atcc.com, which cells HeLa cells for $279/vial
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