One Woman’s Immortal Cells Have Saved Hundreds of Thousands of Lives

by Guest Fri Mar 31, 2017 6:45 pm

Imagine this: you’re a physician at one of the most renowned medical institutions in the world. A patient comes in with a very aggressive form of cervical cancer and you collect her cells to study them for her particular case. But while studying her cells, you notice something odd. After a certain number of cell divisions, they don’t die like other cells in the research lab. In fact, they don’t die at all.

It’s the year 1950 and it’s years before any regulations on harvesting cells from patients are mandated. In fact, there is no custom of asking permission for cell collection for research. With that said, you think about all the potential these “immortal cells” may have. You have never seen cells quite like them before in your life, and you know for a fact that your colleagues and other researchers around the world have not either.
What do you do?

To George Otto Gey, it was simple: collect the cells and propagate them for future research. His patient was a 31-year-old woman named Henrietta Lacks.

THE BIRTH OF A MEDICAL REVOLUTION

Henrietta Lacks’s cancer cells were quickly dubbed “HeLa cells” in the scientific community. Even 60 years after their collection, HeLa cells are still the most commonly-used cell line around the world, having been produced billions and billions of times now. This is because HeLa cells were the first cells to survive in vitro (in a test tube) and provided the foundation for some of the most remarkable discoveries in modern medicine.

https://futurism.com/one-womans-immortal-cells-saved-hundreds-thousands-lives/

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