That is how the HeLa line of cells was obtained - without the patient or the family consenting to the taking or the use.
Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells
Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book investigates how a poor black tobacco farmer had a groundbreaking impact on modern medicine
By Sarah Zielinski
smithsonian.com
January 22, 2010
Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.
Who was Henrietta Lacks?
She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. No one knows why, but her cells never died.
Why are her cells so important?
Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.
There has been a lot of confusion over the years about the source of HeLa cells. Why?
When the cells were taken, they were given the code name HeLa, for the first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. Today, anonymizing samples is a very important part of doing research on cells. But that wasn’t something doctors worried about much in the 1950s, so they weren’t terribly careful about her identity. When some members of the press got close to finding Henrietta’s family, the researcher who’d grown the cells made up a pseudonym—Helen Lane—to throw the media off track. Other pseudonyms, like Helen Larsen, eventually showed up, too. Her real name didn’t really leak out into the world until the 1970s.
Read more:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/henrietta-lacks-immortal-cells-6421299/#H4TePrOf5eHGBGZV.99
Tissue Rights and Ownership: Is a Cell Line a Research Tool or a Person?
Posted on March 9, 2010 by Claire Devine
To doctors, the HeLa cell line is an invaluable tool in the treatment of disease; to the Lacks family, it is an invaluable piece of their mother. The HeLa cell line, the first “immortal” cell line, is the solution to overcoming many impediments in biomedical research, and a key tool in developing certain cures and drugs that have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people. That collection of cells derives from the now-deceased Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother from Baltimore, Maryland, kept alive for decades without her children’s knowledge or permission. The shock and discomfort they felt upon learning of this, coupled with the lack of any disclosure, seeking of informed consent on the part of HeLa cell researchers, or share of the vast financial benefit that accrued to the physicians and researchers, serves as an emotional counterbalance to the utility these cells represent. Her cells’ story raises many difficult questions regarding ‘tissue rights,’ including questions about ownership rules, the role of informed consent, and the fair distribution of profit. Do patients still own tissue cells once they have been removed from their bodies? Do doctors have the duty to ensure their patients understand that these cells may be cultured and preserved, and to share any profits from selling the cells?
HeLa’s Immortal Cell Lines
The development of “immortal” cell lines led to major improvements in research and experimentation; unlike most cells, these cells do not die of old age. Immortal cell lines are significant because of their ability to grow indefinitely and to survive being divided and shared; these traits allow scientists to engage in more productive research. Scientists created the first immortal cell line, dubbed HeLa, almost 60 years ago, in the 1950s. Since then, scientists have used HeLa cells to develop the polio vaccine, as well as drugs that treat Parkinson’s disease and leukemia. Scientists even sent cells from the line into space to aid in research on the effects of zero gravity on human tissue. Overall, scientists have produced more than two thousand pounds of these cells, the sales of which have generated millions in profits.
The Personal Side to the Story
Recently, renewed interest in this cell line has focused on its origin rather than its results. In this case, scientists named HeLa cells after the patient in whom they first found them: Henrietta Lacks. Lacks suffered from a particularly virulent strain of cervical cancer and, after unsuccessful radium treatment, died in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland. Without Lacks’ knowledge or consent, her doctor shared a sample of her tumors with a researcher, Dr. George Gey, intent on developing an immortal cell line. With Lacks’ tumor cells, the researcher succeeded in making the line that led to medical advancements and high profits.
This behind-the-back cellular research and development story has recently become the subject of controversy. “Tissue rights” scholars now question whether or not patients should retain any control over cells removed from their body. Currently, cells be bought and sold without the patients’ permission, but tissue rights advocates suggest that these often-unwitting donors deserve a share in the profits their cells eventually reap.
http://stlr.org/2010/03/09/tissue-rights-and-ownership-is-a-cell-line-a-research-tool-or-a-person/
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