Walter Nelson-Rees
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Walter Nelson-Rees is a cell culture worker and cytogeneticist who helped expose the problem of cross-contamination of cell lines. Nelson-Rees used chromosome banding to show that many immortal cell lines, previously thought to be unique, were actually HeLa cell lines. The HeLa cells had contaminated and overgrown the other cell lines.
In 1967 Stanley Gartler at the University of Washington used an X-linked biochemical polymorphism to distinguish individual cell lines. Some proteins have a number of different forms, called isoenzymes, and the forms can differ genetically among individuals. The American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) supplied Gartler with what was thought to be 18 unique human cell lines, and he found that all these cell lines had the less common A form of the X-linked enzyme, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), the form found in HeLa cells, and a form common in people of African descent and rare in people of European descent.
Walter Nelson-Rees confirmed and extended Stan Gartler's findings. At the time Nelson-Rees was co-director of the Cell Culture Laboratory at the Naval Biosciences Laboratory in Oakland, California. This laboratory was part of the University of California, Berkeley and was funded by NIH. Nelson-Rees used Giemsa banding of chromosomes and he found that the HeLa cell line had several marker chromosomes not found in the normal complement of human chromosomes. He identified these marker chromosomes in over 40 cell lines. In each of these lines, only the A form of G6PD was present, even though the majority of the donors of origin were Caucasian and would be expected to have the B, not the A, type of G6PD. Nelson-Rees's work was published in a series of 11 papers, including 5 in the journal Science.
Nelson-Rees retired in 1980-1981. In 2005 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest honor given by the Society for In Vitro Biology (SIVB).[1]
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