The Immortal Cells from Henrietta Lacks

In order to learn and discover more about cells, researchers and even students use laboratory-grown human cells to run tests and experiments. Unfortunately for researchers, keeping a culture/cell line of human cells alive to be used over and over again was proving to be a difficult feat. After a while, the cells would just stop dividing and die off. This was the story until scientists came across Henrietta Lacks' cells. As this article explains, Henrietta Lacks' cells have proven to be  "immortal".

Henrietta Lacks was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who developed cervical cancer at thirty years old. Without Henrietta's knowledge, a doctor from Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor and sent it to some scientists. These scientists had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades but had had no success. They struck success with Henrietta Lacks' cells because for some reason, her cells never died.
Henrietta Lacks' cells, which have been named HeLa cells were the first humans cells to ever be grown in culture. Some of her cells achievements include playing an essential part in developing the polio vaccine and going to space in the first space mission to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. HeLa cells have also been involved in cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping.
Over the years, there has been much confusion over the source of HeLa cells. Back in the 1950's, doctors were not too concerned with anonymity in donating samples are they are today. Since the cells are codenamed HeLa cells, when the media would get too close to finding Henrietta Lacks' family, the researcher who had grown the cells gave out the pseudonym Helen Lane, and eventually even Helen Larsen. Henrietta Lacks was not accredited for the HeLa cells until the 1970's.
Henrietta's family did not find out about the HeLa cells until twenty-five years after she died. This came about because a scientists discovered other tissue types, including prostate and breast cells, were HeLa cells. They then found out that HeLa cells could float on dist particles in the air, travel on unwashed hands, and contaminate other cultures. This created a huge controversy, so some scientists decided to track down Henrietta's family to see if they could take her family's DNA to map out Henietta's genes and found out which HeLa cell cultures belonged to Henrietta. This would help them begin to fix the problem of contamination. Since her husband only had a third-grade education he did not understand what a cell was or how scientists still had the cells from his dead wife. The scientists did not know that the Henrietta Lacks' husband and family did not understand what was going on. As a result, her family got sucked into a world of research with the cells basically taking over their lives.
Her daughter Deborah was an infant when Henrietta died. When she found out that part of her mother was still alive, she was desperate to fully understand what that meant. However, Deborah's brothers only became interested once they found out that money was involved. When they found out that their mother's cells helped launch a multi-billion dollar industry, were being sold in vials to people, and that the family got no money from it, they were furious. Most of her Henrietta's family was poverty-stricken. Therefore, her family launched a campaign to try and get what they felt they were financially owed. This campaign somewhat consumed their lives.