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RSS FeedsHow poor tobacco farmer Henrietta Lacks became a medical superstar after her death
(The Star Fashion & Style)

 
 

23 april 2017 15:01:34

 
How poor tobacco farmer Henrietta Lacks became a medical superstar after her death
(The Star Fashion & Style)
 


Some 66 years after her death, Henrietta Lacks lives on — daily and quite literally — atop laboratory benches at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital.Indeed, cells taken from the cervical cancer that killed her in 1951 are still being cultured and used by the metric tons in labs around the globe, says biochemist Jim Woodgett, director of the hospital’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. “Oh, we use them all the time,” Woodgett says of the thriving cells — dubbed HeLa after the two first initials of their original owner’s given and last names.HeLa cells, which have unique properties, have become a basic and ubiquitous tool of biomedical research.They’ve also inspired a best-selling book, a long-running ethics debate, and are taking a star turn this weekend in an Oprah Winfrey movie debuting on HBO.Unbeknownst to Lacks — a poor, African-American tobacco farmer from Virginia — cells harvested from that long-ago tumour biopsy began to be grown for human tissue research at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was being treated in the Baltimore facility’s “colored” ward.And they just kept growing.Unlike any seen before, Lacks’s cells would divide outside the body with abandon — overspilling Petri dishes and test tubes that all previous human counterparts were hard-pressed to fill.In medical terms, they proved “immortal,” says Woodgett, whose lab has used them to study cell division and protein function.Lacks’s cells were famously used in the development of Dr. Jonah Salk’s polio vaccine in the early 1950s, and in the creation of countless drugs and research advances worth untold billions of dollars since.But they also entered a vortex of mounting ethics controversies and compensation claims that will be explored as part of the Winfrey production, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.The movie is based on a 2010 book of the same name b ...


 
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