ShareThisNearly 60 years ago, a beautiful African-American woman died of aggressive cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, and she was just 31. She left behind five children. She also left behind some of her cancer cells, which were taken to a Johns Hopkins laboratory run by Dr. George Gey.
Gey had been on a 30-year quest to grow human cancer cells in the lab to promote research into curing malignancies, but no matter how he tried to improve their care and feeding, the cells always seemed to die out quickly.
Not Lacks' cells, though.
Dubbed HeLa, for the first two letters of her names, these cancer cells grew, and grew, and grew, becoming the world's most successful and widely used cancer-cell line.
The story of those cells and of the Lacks family, many of whom never had steady health insurance despite their mother's contribution to science, is told in a new book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," by Rebecca Skloot.
It took Skloot 10 years to write the book, which was released Feb. 2, and already has been excerpted in Oprah Winfrey's magazine, O, and featured on ABC World News.
The 37-year-old author, who now teaches at the University of Memphis, did much of her research while living in Pittsburgh. She said recently that "I wouldn't trade those 10 years for anything because there is no way I could have understood the story if it hadn't taken me that long."
After Gey discovered what a miracle he had growing in his petri dishes, she wrote, he began giving HeLa cells away to scientists all over the world. The cells soon assumed a central role in biomedical research.
They were used to help develop Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. They were employed during the Cold War to test radiation exposure on human cells. They were fired into orbit to examine the effect of weightlessness on biological processes.
And they are still used today.
HeLa cells, which are infected with one strain of the human papillomavirus, helped in the formulation of Gardasil, Merck's cervical-cancer vaccine.
Dr. John Lazo, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Drug Discovery Institute, said he has worked with HeLa cells for 20 years and has published two-dozen papers in which they played a critical role.
"In fact, I use them much more today than I did in the previous decade."
HeLa cells are still valuable today for testing various anticancer compounds. He called them "well-behaved" -- they grow at a predictable rate in flat layers that make them easy to see under a microscope.
They also can be used for research that would seem to have little to do with cancer, Lazo said. Not only do the HeLa cells share many common biological properties with noncancerous cells, but they can be tweaked with genetic engineering to act more like other types of cells, such as heart cells or neurons.
For all their value -- HeLa cells have brought in millions of dollars over the years and a standard vial of them sells for more than $250 -- neither the Lacks family nor Johns Hopkins has received a penny. For many years, Henrietta Lacks' relatives did not even know that her cells were thriving all over the globe.
When they did find out, Skloot discovered, they were both enormously proud of her achievement and angry. As reports about HeLa cells filtered through to them, they sometimes believed even the strangest rumors about what had been done with them.
While Deborah Lacks was honored that her mother's cells seemed to have helped so many people, her brothers were often angry that the family had been kept from knowing about it and denied any money from later discoveries.
"One of the first things the Lacks men asked me when I contacted them was, 'So what are you going to pay us?' " Skloot recalled. " 'Or are you going to be one of those people who goes off and makes money from us?' I told them I couldn't pay them anything. Besides the whole issue of journalistic ethics, I said, 'I'm a grad student paying for my research with student loans and credit cards.' "
Now that the book is out, she and others have set up a foundation for scholarships for children in the Lacks family, www.HenriettaLacksFoundation.org.
As medical research using HeLa moves forward, Dr. Roland Pattillo, who is an adviser to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation and a gynecological surgery professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, said there are still complicated ethical issues to resolve with the Lacks family and society as a whole.
"Clearly the Lacks family, as they greatly praise the result of their mom's contribution to science, is nevertheless a poor family without much health insurance themselves. So more than just respecting and praising the family members' contribution, society ought to find some resolution" to what they might be owed from all the money generated by HeLa research.
Ruth Faden, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, said most hospitals now ask consent from patients before they donate tissue or have it surgically removed.
(Contact Mark Roth at mroth(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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