The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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Henrietta Lacks is best known as the source of cells that form the HeLa line, used extensively in medical research since the 1950s.



Synopsis
Henrietta Lacks was born on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia. Lacks died of cervical cancer on October 4, 1951, at age 31. Cells taken from her body without her knowledge were used to form the HeLa cell line, which has been used extensively in medical research since that time. Lacks's case has sparked legal and ethical debates over the rights of an individual to his or her genetic material and tissue.

Life and Death
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia. At some point, she changed her name to Henrietta. After the death of her mother in 1924, Henrietta was sent to live with her grandfather in a log cabin that had been the slave quarters of a white ancestor's plantation. Henrietta Lacks shared a room with her first cousin, David "Day" Lacks. In 1935, the cousins had a son they called Lawrence. Henrietta was 14. The couple had a daughter, Elsie, in 1939, and married in 1941.

Henrietta and David moved to Maryland at the urging of another cousin, Fred Garret. There, they had three more children: David Jr., Deborah and Joseph. They placed their daughter Elsie, who was developmentally disabled, in the Hospital for the Negro Insane.

On January 29, 1951, Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital to diagnose abnormal pain and bleeding in her abdomen. Physician Howard Jones quickly diagnosed her with cervical cancer. During her subsequent radiation treatments, doctors removed two cervical samples from Lacks without her knowledge. She died at Johns Hopkins on October 4, 1951, at the age of 31.



HeLa Cells
The cells from Lacks's tumor made their way to the laboratory of researcher Dr. George Otto Gey. Gey noticed an unusual quality in the cells. Unlike most cells, which survived only a few days, Lacks's cells were far more durable. Gey isolated and multiplied a specific cell, creating a cell line. He dubbed the resulting sample HeLa, derived from the name Henrietta Lacks.

The HeLa strain revolutionized medical research. Jonas Salk used the HeLa strain develop the polio vaccine, sparking mass interest in the cells. Scientists cloned the cells in 1955, as demand grew. Since that time, over ten thousand patents involving HeLa cells have been registered. Researchers have used the cells to study disease and to test human sensitivity to new products and substances.

Recognition
The Lacks family learned about the HeLa cells in the 1970s. In 1973, a scientist contacted family members, seeking blood samples and other genetic materials. Inquiries from the family regarding the use of HeLa cells, and publications that included their own genetic information, were largely ignored. The case gained new visibility in 1998, when the BBC screened an award-winning documentary on Lacks and HeLa. Rebecca Skloot later wrote a popular book on the subject, called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Oprah Winfrey announced plans to develop a film based on Skloot's 2010 book and in 2016, HBO stated that the television mogul would both produce and star in a key role in the biopic which will air on the cable network. Lacks’ sons David Lacks, Jr. and Zakariyya Rahman, and granddaughter Jeri Lacks will consult on the film and Skloot will be a co-executive producer.

Organizations that have profited from HeLa have since publicly recognized Henrietta Lacks's contributions to research. The Lacks family has been honored at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. Morgan State University granted Lacks a posthumous honorary degree. In 2010, Dr. Roland Pattillo of Morehouse donated a headstone for Lacks's unmarked grave.

Legal and Ethical Implications
The HeLa case has raised questions about the legality of using genetic materials without permission. Neither Lacks nor her family granted permission to harvest her cells, which were then cloned and sold. The California Supreme Court upheld the right to commercialize discarded tissue in the 1990 case Moore v. Regents of the University of California. In 2013, German researchers published the genome of a strain of HeLa cells without permission from the Lacks family.

The Lacks family has had limited success in gaining control of the HeLa strain. In August 2013, an agreement between the family and the National Institutes of Health granted the family acknowledgement in scientific papers and some oversight of the Lacks genome.
 
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Science writer Rebecca Skloot has always been obsessed with Henrietta Lacks, the African-American woman whose cancer cells were harvested and used to create an immortal cell line for scientific experimentation. Because there isn't much information about Henrietta and her family, Skloot wants to tell their story. But she doesn't realize how much backstory and emotional baggage exists until she starts contacting the family and people connected with them.

It turns out that the Lacks family is very hostile to the idea of speaking to yet another reporter about their wife and mother's famous cells. Skloot quickly learns that the Lacks family has been badly treated by both media and the scientific community, and that she'll have to earn their trust before they'll allow her to tell their story.

Thirty year-Henrietta Lacks sought help in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for what she called a "knot" on her cervix. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy.

In the process, some of the tissue was removed from her tumor and sent down to George Gey's lab at Hopkins to be cultured, or grown, in test tubes. Gey was the head of the tissue culture department at Hopkins and he'd been trying for years to get cells to divide continuously and infinitely in the lab so that the scientific community could have an inexhaustible supply of human cells to experiment on.

Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample—and neither Gey nor Hopkins ever informed them. They didn't inform them even after the cells began to grow amazingly fast and Gey and the rest of the scientific world realized they'd just made a gigantic breakthrough in medical technology.

Maybe it wouldn't have meant anything to the Lacks family, who were poor, uneducated and extremely wary of the medical community. They had to focus on Henrietta, whose cancer cells spread as rapidly through her body as they did in the lab. She had rounds of radiation and x-ray therapy, but Henrietta didn't survive her disease. She died at the age of 31, leaving behind a husband and five young children.

Her husband, David ("Day") Lacks allowed a cousin and his wife to move into their house to take care of the children. But both Ethel and Galen were abusive to the children, and they all suffered horrendously at the hands of their relatives. Deborah and Joe suffered the most: Joe was beaten and isolated from the rest of the family, while Deborah was sexually molested by Galen.

When oldest brother Lawrence moved in with his girlfriend Bobbette, she insisted that they take in his younger siblings. But the damage was done. Joe grew up to be violent and unstable, and spent years in prison for murdering a guy who had threatened him. Deborah still had to fight off Galen and ultimately found herself in an abusive marriage at a young age.

During her teenage years, Deborah learned about the existence of an older sister, Elsie, who was institutionalized and died at Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane. Elsie suffered from congenital syphilis and couldn't hear or speak. She also suffered from epilepsy. Deborah knew very little about her mother and sister and had a lot of anxiety about this.

Deborah and the rest of the Lacks siblings learned about Henrietta's cells (called HeLa cells) quite by accident when a researcher from the National Cancer Institute was visiting a friend of Bobbette. He asked her last name and excitedly asked her if she was related to Henrietta Lacks. He told her about HeLa and Bobbette ran to tell the family that part of Henrietta was still alive. Pretty soon, researchers from Johns Hopkins were calling the family to get permission to draw their blood. Apparently, HeLa cells were so prolific that they had begun contaminating other cell lines all over the world. Now they had to be contained. In order to do this, scientists needed to find genetic markers in HeLa cells that would help them definitively identify the cell so they could keep other cell lines separate.

The Lacks family had no understanding of what HeLa cells were, where they came from, or what it meant when doctors and scientists say that Henrietta's cells are "immortal.' And the scientific community wasn't doing anything to rectify that. Mostly, they were trying to cover their butts, as HeLa had since become a massive for-profit industry—without the family's knowledge and without any financial benefit to the family.

This was particularly bad for the Lackses on two levels: first, they thought that Henrietta was still alive somehow and suffering in all these labs. Then they felt exploited, since others were profiting from their mother's cells while they lived in poverty and couldn't even afford to see a doctor.

Skloot works with Deborah to uncover the story of Henrietta's life, death, and transformation into immortal cells. She also promises to help her find out the truth about Elsie and her fate. They travel to Crownsville and find out some very disturbing things about Elsie's treatment there. Deborah suffers from the knowledge that her sister died alone and abused, but still feels she's better off knowing.

In the process of investigating and Henrietta's life, Skloot also tells the story of unethical scientific experimentation on human subjects and how the law struggled to keep up with such atrocities. She touches on the Tuskegee syphilis studies (and their relationship to the story of HeLa cells), Chester Southam's infamous cancer studies and the more anecdotal stories of "night doctors" who allegedly snatched black men and women off the streets of Baltimore in order to experiment on them. Even though she's a science reporter who's generally enthusiastic about scientific advances, Skloot paints a picture of the medical and scientific communities as corrupted by racism, exploitation, and the objectification of their patients and research subjects.

Ultimately, Skloot and other sympathetic doctors and researchers are able to answer the Lacks family's questions about Henrietta and her contributions to science over the last six decades. Although she can't force the scientific community to make reparations to the Lacks family, Skloot creates a foundation to help the family financially. But she also does something much more: she ensures that the rest of the world gets to hear the incredible story of the young mother, a descendant of slaves, whose suffering changed the course of medical research and made life healthier for the rest of us.


http://hugefiles.net/q1l0qen7s8si
 
This black woman is the basis of the crakkas medicine they use to financial cripple many of us.

All the while they use it for free.

no joke at all..

and they still using our black womens stem cells through the fetuses they give away

when they get abortions..

and the clinics end up selling those fetuses for big bucks..

my sisters need to start reading these contracts before they sign on the dotted line...

they should be getting paid for their abortions, I mean it would be nice if they didnt have to

get em, but since they are getting them they might as well get paid...

the dude they called bro polite was kicking some facts about her on the breakfast club...


damn shame how from birth we are being pimped...

its all good tho... because this existence is only an illusion anyway.. we are here to learn get stronger and move on

but thats another thread!!

Good Posting bro, we all need to learn about this and how we are "guinea" pigs to this day...
 
wow a three month old thread that has 10 responses and 3 of them were me.

game having a word fight with beanie when hundreds ..

our priorities are so fucked up it's crazy.
 
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