Honoring Henrietta: The Legacy Of Henrietta Lacks.
On August 1 is the birth anniversary of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who made one of the several significant contributions to modern medical science out her knowledge or the consent. The story of the lacks and the HeLa cell line that did harvest of her- and which yet forms the basis of a lot of medical research is important for an understanding of the moral issues in medical research on human subjects.
Who was The Henrietta Lacks?
Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who according to The Immortal Life Of the Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, turned up on a tobacco estate in Rural Virginia. Henrietta was married to David Lacks and had five children.
On January 29, 1957, she visited the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, for the treatment and diagnosis of a lump in her middle. It moved out to be an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Lacks died at age of 31 on 4 October 1951s.
What is Hela cell and What's so special about it?
When Lacks were at Johns Hopkins, her tumour was biopsied and tissues from this did use for research by Dr George Otto Gey. The head of the Tissue of Culture Laboratory at the clinic.
The cells were seen to be growing at a remarkable rate, doubling in count in 24 hours. Their astonishing growth time made them ideal for mass replication for use in medical research. The HeLa cells named after the donor were the first ones to be successfully immortalized.
How have the HeLa cells in advanced medical science?
The HeLa cell line is the best important cell line in the history of medical science and has been the foundation for any of the most significant advances in the aforementioned field. HeLa cells were the 1st human cells to be contentedly cloned and were used by Jonas Salk to test the Polio vaccine.
Significantly, they helped in identifying the human papillomavirus as being the main cause of many forms of cervical cancer, including the one that killed Lacks and HPV vaccine, which won its author, Harald Zur Hausen, the Nobel Prize for the Medicine in 2008. They are been used widely in cancer research and obtained used to establish that human cells restrain 23 pairs of chromosomes, not 24, as previously thought.
When were Lacks recognized as the donor of the HeLa cells?
Lacks was an unwriting donor neither she, nor her family was aware that her cells had been extorted and were to be used for medical research. Lacks was a poor, ignorant Black woman and her approval was not considered necessary by the medical institution at the time.
While 1000 of studies and developments deserving many billions of dollars happened due to the HeLa cells, Lacks herself was only recognized as their source in the 1970s when researchers solicited blood samples of her family.
Furthermore, her descendants had no control over the cell line until 2013, when one National Institutes of the Health arrived at an agreement with them, admitting them a degree of control over how Lacks genetic material was to be used.