In: Biology
Henrietta lacks
Henerietta lacks She was a black tobacco farmer who passed away
from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30
years old.
At Johns Hopkins he took a piece of tumor out and told her to send
it down the hall so that scientists had been trying to grow the
tissue for decades without success. No one knows why, but the cells
have died.
Medical researchers use human laboratory-grown cells to learn from
the sophisticated cell culture system and the test that come with
astronomers who talk about the causes and treatment of
diseases.
Cell lines need an "immortal" that can grow permanently, frozen for decades, divided into different clusters and shared with scientists.
In 1951, a scientist at the hospital iJohs Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, created a line of the first immortal human cell tissue sample taken from the woman black and cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became a great help for medical research however their donor has not been known for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Loss, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of an amazing source HeLa cells Henrietta lacks, and documents the impact on cell line in both the modern and the family's lack of treatment.