HENRIETTA LACKS
What is life? This is a question which often sparks various arguments. Scientists claim cell to be to the origin of life. If cell is the origin of life, then Henrietta Lacks is still alive today. Last year marked 100 years since Lack's birth. She died in 1951, at the age of 31 years of an aggressive cervical cancer.In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Henrietta was aware of the promiscuous nature of her husband and hence associated her vaginal bleeding with syphilis, a commonly known sexually transmitted disease. Upon examination, renowned gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. At the time, The Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of only a few hospitals to treat poor African-Americans. Cancer treatment was not easy back then. However radium was widely used for destroying the cancerous cells. This was the best treatment for cancer at that time. Back the scientists were aware of two types of cancer cells; invasive and non invasive. Invasive cancer means the cancer cells have broken out of the lobule where they began and have the potential to spread to the lymph nodes and other areas of the body.Non-invasive cancer simply means that it has not spread outside the tissue where it began. Scientists had different views on the both types; some believed non invasive cancer is the preliminary stage of the invasive one while some believed both are different and equally dangerous. Unfortunately Henrietta died eight months later. A sample of her cancer cells retrieved during a biopsy were sent to Dr. George Gey's nearby tissue lab. For years, Dr. Gey, a prominent cancer and virus researcher, had been collecting cells from all patients - regardless of their race or socioeconomic status - who came to The Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer, but each sample quickly died in Dr. Gey’s lab. What Dr. Gey would soon discover was that Mrs. Lacks’ cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, Mrs. Lacks' cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours. Over 50,000,000 metric tonnes of HeLa cells have been distributed around the world, the subjects of over 75,000 studies.Today her sample cells are present almost at every corner of the Earth. If all her cells are placed adjacent to each other it is estimated to make rings around the Earth more than eight times. This strikes us with a very important thought, if living cells are the source of life then Henrietta is still alive today. The hospital where her cells were collected was one of only a few that provided medical care to Black people. None of the biotechnology or other companies that profited from her cells passed any money back to her family. And, for decades after her death, doctors and scientists repeatedly failed to ask her family for consent as they revealed Lacks’s name publicly, gave her medical records to the media, and even published her cells’ genome online.
