Rebecca Skloot came to Dartmouth last Thursday to discuss her new book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the lasting impact of Lacks’ cells on science, and the ethical paradoxes of current research.
In the realm of cell biology research, HeLa cells are ubiquitous. Characterized by their “immortality” or ability to divide an unlimited number of times, these cells have been used in many areas since Lacks’ death in 1951, including development of the Polio vaccine, testing of the atomic bomb, gene mapping, and space research.
Despite the presence of HeLa cells in scientific research, or perhaps because of it, little thought is given to the woman from whom the cells first originated or to the ongoing impact of HeLa cell research on the Lacks family.
Henrietta Lacks was raised as a tobacco farmer in Southern Virginia, knowing nothing of biomedical research. When, at age 31, she discovered an oddly formed knot on her womb, her husband David took her to Johns Hopkins Hospital, the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients, albeit in segregated wards. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Howard Jones treated the very unusual purple and shiny tumor on her cervix with the standard treatment of the day: application of radium tube inserts to the cancerous cells. Jones also took samples of the tumor cells, without asking Henrietta, and sent them down to George Gey to analyze. Gey noted that the HeLa cells doubled every 24 hours without fail; the first immortal human cell line had been discovered.
Henrietta did not survive her cancer. It was not until the late 1960s, nearly two decades after Gey first propagated the HeLa cells, scientists finally tracked down Lacks’ husband and children, who knew nothing of Henrietta’s contribution to science. David Lacks’ initial response to the news was of abject horror, envisioning his wife kept alive in a physical cell. The family had no concept of cells as the smallest units of life. Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, was under the impression that her mother was the cells and that her soul would never be at peace because it had been divided so many times. Henrietta’s sons, meanwhile, were more outraged by the great profits garnered by biomedical companies from the commercialization of their mother’s cell line and felt entitled to at least some of the money as they couldn’t even pay for health insurance.
In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot narrates the legacy of the cells and the Lacks family which she has been avidly researching since the nineties. Skloot and others in the scientific community believe that while unique cells like Lacks’ are invaluable to medical research, legal measures should be enacted to prevent future uninformed exploitation of a patient’s body matter.
In the 1950s, and even now, there was no legal requirement to inform a patient about what happens to any of their discarded viscera. The precedent set by the Supreme Court of California case Moore v. Regents of the University of California is that once cells or tissues have been removed from one’s body, they are no longer considered the property of the donor and can therefore be commercialized.
In the vast majority of cases, a patient’s cells are not unique enough to be widely used in research. There is concern in the scientific community that increasing awareness of the few cases like Lacks’ will cause unnecessary public worry and impede research. Henrietta’s latest contributions to science are the many questions concerning informed consent in medical procedures, the answers to which will surely dictate the future of scientific research.
Tracy
This is an incredible article — amazing reference to how cells have been treated since then.