Henrietta Lacks

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Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks circa 1945–1950
Born	August 8, 1920(1920-08-08) Roanoke, Virginia
Died	October 4, 1951 (aged 31) Baltimore, Maryland
Occupation	Housewife
Spouse	David Lacks I (1915–2002)
Children	Deborah Lacks Pullum, David Lacks II, Lawrence Lacks, and Zakariyya Lacks
Parents	Eliza (1886–1924) and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969)

Henrietta Lacks (August 18, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was the involuntary (and likely unknowing) donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. This is now known as the HeLa cell line.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Later life 3 HeLa's immortality and Lacks' mortality 4 Legacy 5 Helacyton gartleri 6 Further reading 7 References

[edit] Early life

She was born as Henrietta Pleasant on August 8, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia to Eliza (1886–1924)^[1] and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969).^[2][3][4] Eliza died giving birth to her tenth child in 1924. Sometime after his wife's death, John Pleasant took the children back to where their relatives on their mother's side lived, and where they were raised. In 1929, a 48-year-old John, still living in Roanoke at 12th Street Southwest, married a 13-year-old girl named Lillian. John worked as a brakeman on the railroad.^[5]

[edit] Later life

Henrietta Pleasant married David Lacks I (1915–2002) in Halifax County, Virginia. After convincing David to go north to search for work, Henrietta followed in 1943, with her children. David found work at the Sparrow's Point shipyards and found a house for them on New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turners Station, now a part of Dundalk, Baltimore County, Maryland. This community was one of the largest and one of the youngest, if not the youngest, of the approximately fifty historically African American communities in the region.

The couple had five children: Deborah Lacks (born 1948), who married a Pullum; David Lacks II; Lawrence Lacks; Zakariyya Lacks; and another daughter^[6][7]

[edit] HeLa's immortality and Lacks' mortality

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)

The HeLa cells or cell line is immortal. Today, HeLa cells are commonly used in research laboratories as a model for human cells.^[8][9] Since HeLa was cultivated to live outside the human body, this cell line has since been used in thousands of experiments, contributing to the understanding of disease processes. In the past HeLa was used in Jonas Salk's development of the polio vaccine.

Mrs. Lacks was the human source of HeLa cell line and of this cell line's name. The word "HeLa" was devised by Gey by using the first two letters of Lacks' first and last names to keep her real name a secret. This worked for a while, leading some to think the human source of HeLa was "Harriet Lane", "Helen Lane", and others.^[10][11]

Various accounts on HeLa and Mrs. Henrietta Lacks differ over why and how she died, over whether or not (1) her cancer was metastasizing at an abnormal rate, faster than any other cancer; (2) whether she or her her husband were asked about the cultivation of her cells, or the future use of them; (3) over how her husband and her children were treated by physicians, researchers, scientists and science writers after her death, especially when the family members, now all past the age of twenty, were told that a sample of the cells could be studied to isolate genetic factors and to prevent cancer deaths in future generations; and (4) when her husband and her children actually learned about HeLa and the research using HeLa, and related issues involving the family's loss of privacy and anonymity.

When it came to informing Lacks or her husband (three of her five children were under the age of five years old) of the potential use of the cells, then as now there was no necessity to inform or ask for consent from a patient or relatives because discarded material, or material obtained during surgery, diagnosis or therapy, was and is the property of the physician or medical institution. Years later, this was the decision of the Supreme Court of California in the case of John Moore vs. the Regents of the University of California. The court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not his or her property and can be commercialized without permission or recompense.

In the 1971 article cited above, it was reported that Mrs. Lacks was misdiagnosed with the slower-metastasizing epidermoid carcinoma, when in reality she had adenocarcinoma, a fast-metastasizing cancer. The article reported on this discovery, how they discovered this misdiagnosis, and stated further that researchers may in the future discover what Gey had thought he discovered nearly twenty years. Some articles say that the HeLa cell line was originally cultured due to its tremendous proliferation rate, abnormally rapid even compared to other cancer cells. It is stated that it was this remarkably speedy proliferation which sealed Henrietta Lacks' fate. This misdiagnosis, it is said, would not have affected her chances of survival by the oncological standards of the day, her cancer being so fast-moving.^[8]. Other authors point to a general inattention to the report of a misdiagnosis.

According to anthropologist Hannah Landecker in Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (2007),^[12] in "Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science" in Science in Context (1999), and in a chapter of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (2000),^[13] narratives on Mrs. Lacks and HeLa have changed over time. In the earlier 1950's narratives, Lacks was portrayed as the "angelic", "beneficent", "heroic" and "self-sacrificing" donor of HeLa, which was considered to be a "standard" or a "universal", and Mrs. Lacks was "assumed to be white". (2000,64)

After 1966, argues Landecker, when it was found that HeLa was contaminating other cell lines (2007, 171), and after her gender and race were also confirmed, the following adjectives, nouns, and phrases increased in the narratives: "voracious","vigorous", "aggressive", "malicious", "male-volent", "malignant", "surreptitious", "indefatigable", "renegade", "catastropic", "luxuriant", "undeflatable", "contaminating", "promiscuity", "wild proliferative tendencies," "colorful laboratory life", and even "a monster among the Pyrex". Some wrote about "world domination by HeLa" or about "HeLa taking over the world." Landecker, in addition, writes about narratives that "took on a racial grammar of miscegenation and heredity pollution" and that depicted HeLa cells as "racialized threats to scientific order".

In the 1980s and 1990s, according to Landecker, economic and monetary considerations began to be stressed, and there was a focus on "economic injustice", "economic exploitation", economic value, and "economic power and privilege". In the last instance, the poverty or educational levels of those at Johns Hopkins or such institutions is contrasted to the wealth, or educational level of the members of the Lacks' family. Three conventions, however, persist in these narratives: inclinations (1) to emphasize HeLa's immortality; (2), to "obscure" (2007, 171) and "mask" (2007,64) Lacks' death or misdiagnosis; and (3), to use her photographs, "as was the case" with the tissue from a biopsy as well, "without any indication that permission was sought or given for its use, either from Lacks or her family". (2000, fn 61,264).

Landecker states that "Although it is difficult to say whether an accurate diagnosis of adenocarcinoma would have helped in Lack's treatment", what was evident to her was a "total absence of questioning of the circumstances and adequacy of her medical treatment --- even with the clearly stated admission of misdiagnostic error published in 1971" among scientists and journalists. To Landecker this "absence of questioning ... indicates the power of the concepts of immortality produced by the life of these cells." The "death of a person who was Henrietta Lacks has been obscured by the personification of her cells as an immortal entity".(2000,55)

The identification of HeLa has not just revealed the death of a specific human being, it has also focussed attention on the interactions between this and other American families with science writers and the media in general; with researchers, whether those in the social and natural sciences or the humanities; with scientists, including social scientists and government officials, including the military. Questions have also been raised regarding the education of Americans vis-a-vis the storage and use of human genetic material, including research and legislation issues. Public education on the subject has been recommended, but no measures have been implemented.

The problem as outlined by Landecker can be viewed as part of a larger issue identified by science writer Michael Gold that has yet to be addressed. Neither Henrietta Lacks nor HeLa is the main subject of Gold's Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused. He focuses most of his attention on Nelson Rees and his many, and probably career-ending, efforts to identify the contamination, which was occurring in the best medical and research institutions in the USA and abroad, and in the laboratories of the best physicians, scientists, and researchers, including Jonas Salk, as a problem that he named HeLa. He did not, however, mention an occurrence of a HeLa contamination problem in the laboratories run by either Rees himself or by Gey and his wife, nurse Margaret Gey. Gold states that this problem almost led to a cold war incident. Gold's concern was how much time, money and energy had been wasted in the war against cancer, not so much because of a HeLa contamination problem, but because of a problem he and others called "HeLa".

In his epilogue, Gold writes about the contamination problem: "There is more to the problem than a tenacious and hardy cell culture.... HeLa cells persist because they have always been helped along by a certain human element in science, an element connected to emotions, egos, a reluctance to admit mistakes...." Gold continues, "It's all human - an unwillingness to throw away hours and hours of what was thought to be good research...worries about jeopardizing another grant that's being applied for, the hurrying to come out with a paper first. And it isn't limited to biology and cancer research. Scientists in many endeavors all make mistakes, and they all have the same problems".

Gold ends his book with the following statement of a virologist who discovered another contamination problem: "A 'HeLa' ... is a scientific claim that sucks people into a line of work for a while, a line that is later refuted or shown to be a waste of time. It's a type of error in science that occurs fairly often. And it will continue to exist". Rather than recognize or focus on the problem of HeLa and on how to resolve it, many scientists, researchers and science writers continue to document this problem as a contamination problem, or as a problem caused by the hardiness, tenacity, proliferating or overpowering nature or other characteristic of HeLa, the cell line created by Gey, discovered by Mary Kubicek^[14],a laboratory assistant, and named in this laboratory run by his nurse wife after this husband and wife team had engaged in almost two decades of research.

Other authors continue to focus on the issues surrounding the widespread HeLa contamination of cell lines used in research from the 1950s through at least the early 1980s as the major problem of HeLa in science^[15]. Recent data suggest that cross contaminations are still a major ongoing problem with modern cell cultures.^[16]

Author Rebecca Skloot has completed the first full length book focusing on the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family, which is being published by Crown Publishers.

[edit] Legacy

Henrietta Lacks has been recognized as an unintentional contributor to science, research, medicine and public health. Her contributions, which began almost immediately after her February 1, 1951 trip to Johns Hopkins Hospital, continue until today. According to reporter Michael Rogers, her visit and the subsequent development of HeLa by a researcher at the hospital, helped answer the demands of 10,000 who marched for a cure to polio just a few days before. By 1954 HeLa was used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio. As stated by reporter Van Smith in 2002 a "demand" for HeLa "quickly rose ... the cells were put into mass production and traveled around the globe--even into space, on an unmanned satellite to determine whether human tissues could survive zero gravity".

Reporter Smith continued, "In the half-century since Henrietta Lacks' death, her ... cells ... have continually been used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa was used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue cosmetics, and many other products.

In 1996 Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and the mayor of Atlanta recognized the late Henrietta Lacks' family for her posthumous contributions and for their sacrifices. Her life is commemorated annually by Turners Station. A Congressional resolution in her honor was presented by Robert Ehrlich following this event. .^[17]

In 1998, "Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh" the documentary on Mrs. Lacks and HeLa won the Best Science and Nature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Immediately following this film's airing in 1997, an article on HeLa, Mrs. Lacks, and her family was published by reporter Jacques Kelly in the Baltimore Sun. News on Mrs. Lacks and on HeLa had been published throughout the world. Yet the Dundalk Eagle was the first local newspaper to publish an article which was not in a scientific or medical journal on Mrs. Lacks and HeLa in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Johns Hopkins University's students also published articles. The family was also honored at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2001 it was announced that the National Foundation for Cancer Research would be honoring "the late Henrietta Lacks for the contributions made to cancer research and modern medicine" on September 14th. Because of the events of September 11, 2001 the date for honoring "the late Henrietta Lacks" was changed.

The annual events usually continue to bring the Turners Station and the Dundalk community out to commemorate Mrs. Lacks and her family, their contributions and sacrifices as well as those like Mrs. Mary Kubicek, the laboratory assistant who discovered that the HeLa cells lived outside the body rather than died like so many cells had done during Dr. Gey's and his nurse wife, Mrs. Margaret Gey's over twenty years of attempts to grow human cells outside of the human body.

[edit] Helacyton gartleri

One biologist, Leigh Van Valen, has written that Lacks' cancer cells have evolved into a self-replicating, single-cell life-form and has proposed HeLa cells be given the new species name of Helacyton gartleri. The cells are a genetic chimera of human papillomavirus 18 (HPV18) and human cervical cells and now have a distinct, stable, non-human chromosome number.^[18] His 1991 suggestion has not been followed, nor been widely noted. With near unanimity, evolutionary scientists and biologists hold that a chimeric human cell line is not a distinct species, and that tumorigenesis is not an evolutionary process.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Further reading

• Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh; (1997) BBC documentary on Henrietta Lacks, directed by Adam Curtis
• Michael Gold, A Conspiracy of Cells, 1986, State University of New York Press
• Rebecca Skloot, 2007, HeLa: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Rebecca Skloot, [Henrietta's Dance, Hopkins Magazine: http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0400web/01.html]
• Rebecca Skloot, Cells That Save Lives are a Mother's Legacy, New York Times: New York Times
• Hannah Landecker 2000 Immortality, In Vitro. A History of the HeLa Cell Line. In Brodwin, Paul E., ed.: Biotechnology and Culture. Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics. Bloomington/Indianapolis, 53-72, ISBN 0-253-21428-9
• Hannah Landecker, 1999, "Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science," Science in Context, 203-225.
• Hannah Landecker, 2007, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. HeLa is the title of the fourth chapter.
• Russell Brown and James H M Henderson, 1983, The Mass Production and Distribution of HeLa Cells at Tuskegee Institute, 1953-1955. J Hist Med allied Sci 38(4):415-43
• Sources on Mrs. Lacks and HeLa^[19]

[edit] References

Persondata
NAME	Lacks, Henrietta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Pleasant, Henrietta
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Medical patient
DATE OF BIRTH	August 18, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH	Maryland
DATE OF DEATH	October 4, 1951
PLACE OF DEATH	Johns Hopkins University Hospital