Today’s article will look into the story of Henrietta Lacks, a woman who, unbeknownst to her, drastically changed all of science by giving us the first immortalized cell line. Unfortunately, this discovery came at the cost of unethical practices that to this day are still controversial.

Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. She later moved to Maryland with her husband, where she had five children. In 1951, soon after her fifth birth however, she was accepted into the gynecology department of John Hopkins Hospital, where she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She unfortunately passed a few months later from the disease. However, during her treatment, her gynecologist took some of her cervical cells, without her consent or knowledge. These cells were for Dr. George Gey, the head of the tissue culture department at John Hopkins [source / source / source].

Dr. George Gey was looking for something that at the time was only a fantasy: immortal cells. Even in the 1950s, labs were able to collect cells from a patient and study them in their labs, however they would die a few days later, as any cell would. However, upon receiving Henrietta’s cells, he made a surprising discovery. Not only were her cells never dying, they were replicating very fast. He named these cells HeLa cells, the only mark linking these cells to Henrietta Lacks [source / source].

As such, HeLa cells became the first immortalized cell line that science had access to. If we study these cells, we observe an enormous amount of mutations: first, they have upwards of 80 chromosomes instead of the 46 healthy cells possess. Furthermore, these cells have an overacting protein called telomerase, whose role is to slow down aging. These mutations were caused by the papillomavirus (HPV) that caused Henrietta’s cancer. Due to these changes, the cell is unable to die. During a healthy cell cycle, there are various checkpoints that allow the cell to replicate, or to stay alive. In HeLa cells, and many cancerous cells, these checkpoints are cancelled, and the cell will not only continue to survive, it will replicate indefinitely [source / source].

To this day, we still use HeLa cells, and they have allowed us to make tremendous discoveries, the first one being that we can now create immortal cells from almost all cells. But HeLa cells were also used to develop the polio vaccine, they were used to study radiation, and were even sent in space to study the effect of the environment on our cells. Immortalized cell lines allow us to study the direct effect of something on human cells without having to put humans in danger. However, as I mentioned, Henrietta Lacks did not consent to give her cells. Worse even, many scientist hid the actual identity of the cell’s owner under the fake name Helen Lane. Therefore, neither Henrietta nor her family knew that her cells were used. These cells, once commercialized, created a large revenue that never reached the family. Further, the family did not, and still does not, know how the cells are used. One of the big controversies was the public release of the genetic content of HeLa cells, which indicates every aspect of Henrietta Lack’s genetic makeup, including potential illnesses. Genetic informations are nowadays always confidential, and this public release exposed Henrietta’s family. And because of the social environment in the 1950s, complaints from a family of black people was not taken seriously, if listened to at all. The controversy continues to this day, with no compensation to the family [source / source / source / source].

Overall, the discovery of HeLa cells is bittersweet; these cells have drastically improved the life of humans in general, but at the cost of unethical practices. This story is a prefect example of the saying the end justify the mean. However, should science really be allowed everything for the sake of knowledge?