The History Of Hela Cells

Henrietta Lacks was a 30- year - old black mother of five when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. She went to Johns Hopkins hospital to have the tumor looked at; they took a sample and sent her home. A few weeks later, when Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr. was prepping Henrietta for treatment he took two samples from her one from the tumor and one from her healthy cervix. He never asked Henrietta if he could take these samples from her. Dr. Wharton Jr. took the samples down to Dr. Gey’s lab; he got excited but thought the cells would just die like all the rest. The women in the lab cut the cancer cells, placed them in test tubes, and placed them in the incubator. The next morning the women noticed that there was growth in the test tubes, Henrietta’s cells were growing at a great speed, they doubled over night. That day she cut the cell in half and those two halves grew overnight. Every 24 hours the cells where growing like crabgrass. It seemed like her cancer cells where unstoppable, as long as they had food and warmth. Because of their adaption to growth in tissue cultures plates, HeLa cells are difficult to grow. In 1952, researchers injected HeLa cells into everything, from mumps to herpes. That year was the worst year of the polio epidemic they used Hela cells to test the …show more content…
By the mid 1960’s they found that if you mixed Hela cells with mouse cells it created the first cross-species helped prove that human papillomavirus causes cancer, and they made a vaccine to help prevent it, this could have saved Henrietta’s life it was available then. A few years later, they inject HIV into the HeLa cells to try to find the key receptor in this virus. Thanks to the HeLa cells, scientists have been able to find cures, vaccines, and help to many types of viruses.hybrid, and that helped with mapping human genes. They also discovered Herceptin, a cancer drug, with the help of the Hela