She is buried in an unmarked grave at Clover near her mother’s tombstone. Like many of her unknown relatives she did not have a marker to indicate her final resting spot. Asides from her family, her identity is known to the world as the code name HeLa. Her name was Henrietta Lacks. Her cells were taken without consent, and are the first immortal human cells grown in culture.
Built in 1880, John Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in America dedicated towards the sick and poor. The Jim Crow era, a racial caste system segregating the Caucasians from the African Americans between 1877 and the mid 1960s was in place (http://www.ferris.edu/Jimcrow/what.htm). It was during this time when Henrietta arrived at John Hopkins regarding her health issue.
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One of the most prominent contributions of HeLa cells was the development of polio vaccine. Polio is an infectious disease spread from direct human-to-human contact which attacks the central nervous system causing paralysis (http://www.cdc.gov/polio/about/index.htm). Around 1951, the world had witnessed a dangerous period of polio epidemic. In 1952, Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh had developed the first polio vaccine, but could not administer it to children without testing to prove that it was safe. So the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), charity created by Franklin D. Roosevelt, organized the largest filed trial for the polio vaccine. During the trial Salk inoculated over 2 million children, whose blood would be tested for antibody production, however analyzing the results required monkey cells which were really expensive. So NFIP contacted Dr. Gey and other researches to obtain cell cultures which could be produced on mass scale and cheaper compared to monkey cells. This was the perfect opportunity for Gey to put the HeLa cells to work. HeLa cells could be grown easily and cultured in the lab. The HeLa cells were found to be more susceptible to the virus than normal cells through the work of Gey, William Scherer and other researchers at the University of Minnesota. Hearing this NFIP contracted Scherer for developing a HeLa distribution centre at the Tuskegee Institute in …show more content…
It brought about the standardization of the field which is presently used to culture cells. The standardization came into place through the initiation of three important steps. HeLa cells were grown in large quantities at the Tuskegee Institute. Harry Eagle, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) used HeLa cells for the production of the first standardized culture medium which could be distributed ready to use (Skloot, pg 99). Gey along with some other researchers used HeLa cells in determining the ideal glassware in providing a less toxic environment for the cells. Following the introduction of these events, researchers around the world could work with the same cells, grown in the same media, using the same equipment. This eventually led the researchers to use the first-ever human cell clones. HeLa cells were also used by researchers to develop freezing techniques. This allowed for the cells to be safely stored and shipped to different laboratories around the world. Freezing also allowed the researchers to “pause” cells at various stages during an experiment and analyze them. In doing so they believed they could observe the actual moment a normal cell transformed to a malignant one, a process they termed spontaneous transformation (Skloot, pg