The Role of Hela Cell in Medical Development

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa.

She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells- taken without knowledge- become one of the most important tools in medicine (Rebecca Skloot). According to the scientists who have been growing HeLa for countless experiments, if you could pile HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons- as much as Empire State Buildings (The NY Times).Long times ago, even during the 19th century, scientist all over the world had started to find the cure for cancer, one of the most feared disease you can ever imagine, simply because you don’t know what the cause and how to turn it off. Cancer started off with something very simple- when they cannot stop dividing. Normally, a healthy cell, when they are matured and ready to divide, will send some kind of information to the neighboring cells that it is going to undergo mitosis- a process of cell division and completed in different stage.

In every stage, there will be a checkpoint where the cells are going to be self-examined and in order to pass the checkpoint; they have to be in the completely good condition. The responsible gene to destroy or recycle the damaged cells at the checkpoint is called the tumor suppressor genes. There are many known tumor suppressor genes; the first one discovered by human is Retinoblastoma but the most renowned one is p53. In the damaged cells, however, the tumor suppressor genes are turned off by mutation, which may change, add or delete some of the alleles in the genes, as a result, the gene cannot function in proper manner.In the absence of the tumor suppressor genes, damaged cells can proceed to the next step in mitosis and divide uncontrollably.

When the damaged cells divided successfully, the process is repeated in the every daughter cell over and over again and these cells will form a lump of tissue called tumor. The overgrowing of tumor cell is what we define as cancer. In 1950s while the mass efforts and experiments were passionately in progress to find the cure for cancer, medical researches already use the real human cells to observe how the cells behave on different treatments.Hence, they need an ‘immortal’ cell line that can grow numerously, be frozen for decades and divided into many batches (The NY Times). Many of them have been trying to grow an immortal cell line taken from various parts of human’s organ such as liver, brain, skin, muscle, and more but to no avail.

Those cells did not favor the condition outside human’s body and even with sufficient medium for nutrient, they were dying unexpectedly (Rebecca Skoot). However, in 1951 when an African- American woman named Henrietta Lacks went to John Hopkins hospital to examine the “knot” in her cervix, everything changes.After the biopsy, the doctor who treated her, Dr George Gey, found a malignant tumor in her cervix, which causes bloody vaginal discharge. During the procedure, a sample of tumor was removed and sent to the lab for medical examination. Dr Gey, at that time was a head tissue culture research at Hopkins and one of the scientists who had been trying to create an immortal human cell line.

When Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, he announced that he had produced one, taken from her cervix cancer. This cell line from Ms Lacks is like no other, because it keeps growing continuously from one single clone to a lump of tissue, even in the test tubes.To honor Ms Lacks, Dr Gey named the cells HeLa cells, the combination of the initials Henrietta and Lacks when he announced them on national television. Ms Lack’s family, however, aware nothing of this. Since then, HeLa cells have been used in many laboratories all over the worlds, become one of the most essential elements in research and produce countless impossible discoveries.

One of them is the creation on poliovirus vaccine. As mentioned by Rebecca Skloot in her book, in Chapter 13 …By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio epidemic in history.Schools closed, parents panicked, and the public grew desperate for a vaccine. In February 1952, Jonas Salk at University of Pittsburgh announced that he’d developed the world’s first polio vaccine, but he couldn’t begin offering it to the children until he’d tested it on a large scale to prove it was safe and effective.

And doing that would require culturing cells on an enormous, industrial scale, which no one had done before (Rebecca Skloot). Not long after, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who created the national foundation for infantile paralysis (NFIP) had himself paralyzed by polio too.He take this as a wakeup call and then began starting and organizing the massive research to test the effectiveness of polio vaccines which created by Jonas Salk. However, in order to that, require a lot of money, complicated procedures and not to forget, the subject to test the vaccines (Rebecca Skloot). Since vaccines are made from inactivated cell, there are possibilities that the injected vaccines will be rejected by the body due to the immune system.

One of the procedures is mixing blood serum from the vaccinated children with live poliovirus and cells in culture.If the vaccine worked, the vaccine will protect the cells and block he poliovirus but if it’s failed, worse consequences can take place. At that point, the problem is to get the cells to be tested. Scientists at the current time use monkeys which will be killed in the process. The trouble they had did not come from animal right or concern but because monkeys, were costly.

In order to have enough monkeys for millions neutralization tests would costs millions dollar to the foundation and hence, NFIP went everywhere desperately searching for easier and cheaper method; cultured cell that can be grown in massive scale (Rebecca Skloot).Dr Gey at this time, seeing the golden opportunity quickly furthers his research. The problem with cells however, is their essentials. They need space to grow, specifically, glass surface and hence they will be out of space in no time. For the scientists, this is very labor consuming because they have to scrap off the surface and divide the cells in different batch repeatedly in a short time so that those cells did not ran out of spaces. HeLa cells, on the other hand, are not that demanding because they do not need so much space as glass surface to grow.

In particular, they can even grow in culture medium that was constantly stirred by magnetic device- the technique that Dr Gey developed, so the cells can now grow in suspension. To grow cells in suspension means that you can grow the cells without the limitation of the space because they can survive on culture medium only (Rebecca Skloot). After some time, Dr Gey and one of his colleagues from NFIP committee- William Scherer work together to test the effect of poliovirus on HeLa cells and they found that Ms Lacks’s cells, indeed, are more susceptible to this virus more than any other cells they had ever tested on.Eventually, HeLa cells was supervised by NFIP and sent to the Distribution Center at Tuskegee Institute, one of the most prestigious black universities in the country (Rebecca Skloot).

Within few months, the staff at Tuskegee successfully grew twenty thousand tubes of HeLa every week. With those cells, Salk, with the help from his fellow scientists, proved that his vaccine was effective (Rebecca Skloot). Besides that, HeLa cells were also used in the cancer research. Rebecca Skloot, in her book, explains how we can predict a cell’s lifetime by measuring the telomere.

Telomere is located at the end of the chromosomes and it function involved in the replication and stability of the chromosomes (MedicineNet). Every times a cell divide, a tiny length of the telomere will be shortened; this can be analogized like time ticking off a clock. In the lifetime of a cell, they will divide and the telomerase will keep on shortening until it reaches its limit. This theory can be equivalent to the life of a person. The younger the person is the longer the telomere will be, vice versa (Rebecca Skloot).In the early nineties, a scientist from Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cell contain an enzyme named telomerase to rebuild their telomeres.

The presence of telomerase makes their telomere keep on regenerating over time, which explains the questions of HeLa’s immortality. For HeLa, it can be said as time never exists because every time it divides, telomerase constantly rewound the telomere so they never age (Rebecca Skloot). Rising from this discoveries, is the question whether human being had discovered the secret to anti-aging or immortality.On December 5th 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF, Carol Greider of John Hopkins and Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School had been announced as the winners of 2009 Nobel Prize on Physiology or Medicine, awarded for the discoveries of telomeres, the repeated sequences of DNA that protect the integrity of the chromosomal DNA, and for the further discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that build telomeres (NobelPrize. org). Other than that, HeLa cells had also aided the past scientists to develop HIV cure.

When AIDS began to rise and reached its epidemic, a group of researchers- including Richard Axel, try to infect HeLa with HIV, which then creates another scandal. Usually, HIV can only infect blood cells, but those researchers however managed to alter the DNA sequences of blood cells and inserted them to HeLa, making it is possible for HIV to infect them too. The scandal rise when Jeremy Rifkin- an activist who debated whether scientist should alter DNA, sued to stop it because he and many others believed it may lead to genetic mutation and lead to the engineering of ‘designer babies’ (Rebecca Skloot)