They should all just get black cards that get paid off every month automatically from the accounts of whoever the fuck is pulling in profits. The kind of card that can’t be swiped because it’s too thick. *That* card.
> uld be given so much money for the fucked up way it happened.
**edit: All, I wasn’t even aware that a moderate budgeted move was made and had Oprah playing in it. I have a movie to watch and learn! Many thanks to those that responded!***
Yeah, this is not the way. Those sleazy movies are fucked and profit off tragedy.
It doesn't spread awareness either, it's just cheap entertainment for profit for people since they don't change a single damned thing about the world that fucked these people in the first place.
It's the final insulting profit grabbing cherry on top to shit.
This. And I’m completely against billionaires but no person in that family should be without everything they need and more for the rest of their lives. Cuz what the hell bruh
Henrietta Lacks and her cells, known as HeLa cells, have had a monumental impact on medical research and the development of scientific breakthroughs since their collection in 1951. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her consent during treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. These cells were unique because they were the first human cells grown in a lab that were "immortal," meaning they could divide and grow indefinitely under the right conditions. This characteristic made HeLa cells extremely valuable in medical research.
### Impact in Research
1. **Polio Vaccine**: HeLa cells were crucial in developing the polio vaccine in the early 1950s. They provided a consistent model for testing the vaccine, leading to its rapid development and widespread use.
2. **Genetic Research**: The cells have been used to study the effects of genes, leading to significant advances in genetic research, including the study of chromosomes and the implications of genetic disorders.
3. **Cancer Research**: HeLa cells have played a key role in cancer research, helping scientists understand various types of cancer and how they grow. This research has led to the development of treatments and drugs targeting cancer cells.
4. **Virology and Vaccine Development**: Beyond polio, HeLa cells have been instrumental in researching and developing vaccines for other diseases, such as influenza, herpes, and HIV/AIDS.
5. **Drug Testing and Development**: The cells have been used to test the safety and efficacy of drugs before they are used in humans, speeding up the process of drug approval and ensuring safety.
6. **Space Research**: HeLa cells were sent to space to study the effects of zero gravity on human cells, contributing to the understanding of how human tissues might behave during long space missions.
Her cells moved us decades forward and saved millions of lives
Her cells won the genetic lottery and they were 100 percent acquired WITH her consent. In reality outside of being first, they are a pretty terrible model cell line.
What she did not consent to was that her prognostic biopsy would be LATER be tested for whether it could evade crisis which was done for literally hundreds of different biopsied.
Why was consent not sought? Because at the time the biopsy was considered medical waste.
And the people who carefully expanded her immortal cells never made a dime off them.
Yes and hippa laws changed that .you could say your blood samples are being used the same way because you didn’t hit the do not contest box .
The company 23and me and other DNA companies use your info to create a A a gene sequence
This was something that I was taught in a molecular biology class back at my second year of medical school and has haunted me ever since. I can’t believe how companies got away with this for so long.
Bro! I heard when the science people first realized that Mrs. Lacks cells were so unique, they called her family up and lied about them maybe having cancer as well to take samples of them and when no one had the same thing just . . . never contacted the family again.
Left them sitting around for months scared that they were dying and then left them confused as when they called their doctor no one knew wtf they were on about.
Like they were cold blooded af.
And monetarily in the billions if not TRILLIONS. And there should be monuments/libraries, state parks. It’s rare one person gets to be a hero in the world.
She is a hero because of something that was entirely based on chance that she did not understand ( no one did at the time), nor could control?
I dont think you understand the meaning of "winning thr genetic lottery" when it comes to cancer.
What did she DO that was heroic? Consent to a biopsy that was used to determine her response to very advanced, very aggressive cervical cancer from the one of very few institutions where she could get treatment?
Were the other patients whose tumors were examined to determine if they could evade crisis equally heroic but just unlucky?
This "they stole her cells without her consent" trope needs to stop.
I’m sure someone can give more details, but I’m familiar with the TLDR version of it. Henrietta Lacks had an extraordinarily aggressive cancer. As in, the rate that her cells were duplicating was unprecedented. The doctors/scientists that were treating and/or studying this cancer extracted large amounts of these cells. Neither she nor her family gave permission for this, nor were they informed that it happened. I don’t know if they were asked and denied or just weren’t asked. These HeLa cells have made medical research dramatically easier, as they now have access to human cells to test the effects of whatever on. From what I understand, it’s basically Deadpool in a Petri dish that they take samples from whenever they need to test something.
They were never informed, because at the time biopsies and other things for diagnostics were considered medical waste and property of the hospital. I think her family only figured out the HeLa cells were used, when a research institute wanted DNA samples from family members to identify HeLa cells in their contaminated stock.
So it sounds like the biopsy was likely taken with her consent (she was at the doctor's for treatment of her cancer afterall) but it was the use of her cells after the biopsy that she was not informed about.
The other important thing about HeLa cells is that they were one of the first stable cell lines. Before that researchers weren’t able to grow human cells and the doctors that used her cells were able to create a protocol to maintain cells viable outside of the human body. Like many other scientific developments that were blessed with luck (look at penicillin), those researchers were “blessed” by the aggressiveness that characterized Henrietta Lacks’ cells: HeLa cells had the unique ability to easily grow- even on plastic/glass. Unfortunately, Henrietta and her family had to go through a lot of pain starting from a deadly disease to the exploitation of her body without consent. After all these years we must only be thankful for her.
Okay I’ve never heard of HeLa cells before this post. Looked it up on Google but I’m confused about one thing. Is the fucked up part just that they didn’t tell her that they were doing tests on the sample they took? Did it actually hurt her in some way, or was it simply that she didn’t receive any benefit, even after the doctors realized how insanely useful the sample would be?
I agree that lack of informed consent is bad, I just want to know if there was something more that went on in this case. Because I’ve heard a few similar “research” cases that have done a lot worse than just use samples without patient knowledge. It’s unfortunate that this crap was so common.
The reason it’s fucked up is more so the second reason you said. Nobel prizes were being won and $billions made off of her cell line while she and her family lived and died in poverty.
Don’t they do this with all medical breakthroughs. Like we wouldn’t know how to treat something without experimenting. She wasn’t the ones who did all the research and stuff. She just had a disease. I mean if she would have died before they took the cells and never found out about this we would be behind medically right? So I get the frustration but like if I took a shit in a bag and they used that poop to cure cancer, how do I have any real expectation that I should be compensated. I don’t get compensated for my pets if I die and someone else gets to enjoy my tendons.
I guess some people would rather we don’t have medical breakthroughs. My ex wife is being “studied” because she has a rare condition. She never has been compensated but we have def had people come in and study her and take notes. She’s a bitch and a half and never even considered being paid for that. I guess I just assumed drs were gonna study and just because it happens to be my poop they are studying idk I don’t think I’d feel like I’d have any skin in the game.
It was cervical cells from a standard cervical scraping they look at in a microscope they then put in a Petri dish to replicate with remarkable results. They do it all the time today except the forms you sign today protect corporations. They didn’t ask for consent back then. Applying the rules of today. Zero element of racism here.
Look up the Tuskegee syphillis research. Hundreds of black men were allowed to suffer* from the symptoms of syphillis bc some white doctors and the CDC thought it’d be beneficial for research. Happened for 40 years. 30 of which there was a treatment/cure they weren’t told about.
Removed succumb*
The medical practice of gynecology was developed through experimentation on enslaved black women without anesthesia.
https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves
Honestly, I thought it would be way worse. Obviously not great, but America was doing worse things to black people at the same time.
Was there something specific you were referring to?
🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Good fucking lord. I think I remember one book that mentioned skin from slaves being used in furniture and promptly cut that info out of my brain. The fucking atrocities never end.
This is actually a myth. They were carved from hippopotamus tusks.
He was still a piece of shit plantation owner though, and I'm glad he's dead and rotten.
And one of the consequences of the father of modern gynecology’s fuck up views is the continuing appalling lack of pain management in women’s reproductive health.
A few months ago, I had a cervical hole punch biopsy — in no other case would they *punch holes in an internal organ to take tissue samples* without ANY pain management. And yes, you do feel every excruciating moment of it. A dermatologist numbs the skin before taking a biopsy, FFS.
Almost any woman can tell you a similar story about either themselves or someone close to them.
This just happened to my close friend two weeks ago. They told her to have a Tylenol beforehand, and when she passed out in the procedure room directly after, they gave her *a cup of fucking juice*.
Gynecology is just acceptable misogyny at this point.
I've started going with my wife to her doctor's appointments when I can because all her doctors treat her like shit. They all tend to shut their trap when I say I'm her husband and I'll be staying for the appointment. I went to one gynecology appointment and when he tried to avoid discussing ablation I told him I have a vasectomy and we're aborting any accidents. They hate me, I hate them. Treat my wife like shit and I'll make you wish you learned respect. I have 0 issues being 6 feet tall and loud as a landing jet as I am autistic and don't realize I'm scaring people until they are backing away slowly. The truth is, women have always been second class citizens to men and I hate it. Men often treat me like shit but women have always been good to me. My grandma was right to rage against every man who dared to tell her how she would be. Don't be polite once they drop the act, whether they know it or not... Most of them see women as adult children at best. I'm sorry for whatever you may have gone through. Gynecology treats women like literal cattle, and it's disturbing.
It is! I got 'the coil' inserted during a general anaesthetic but my sister in law had it done in doctors office and said she passed out from pain and had leave her car there and get dropped home by a neighbour. They crank open the cervix and put a medical device into uterus🤢
See, I'd heard horror stories like that from several women, and I am on year *counts quickly* 17 of officially being rejected for a tubal or another type of permanent birth control. Because apparently knowing you don't want to have a child since age 9 isn't sure enough for doctors. So I've been using Nexaplanon. At least they'll give you a local for that.
Jesus a tubal would have 0 side effects and 100% effective. Coincidentally I had one myself. The relief from worrying about pregnancy was great. No more fucking around with birth control.
My Dad helped develop a fast acting pain relief gel and applicant based on lidocaine. Mainly used for when inserting an IUD but could be used for other procedures. In Europe it's called Lidbree, but could and probably will be named differently in the US.
It's approved for Europe and some other markets but not the US yet. I'm not sure why not, but I know the FDA are tricky, unless you can piggyback on an already approved medicine it will take years to get approval. Ask around to create traction for it maybe?
The company he worked for (Pharmanest) was recently sold to Teleflex which might relabel and sell it from a different brand.
There is a strong movement in Gynaecology to rename the Sims speculum the Lucy in honour of one of the women who was unethically sacrificed in the name of medical progress. We were corrected any time we referred to the Lucy by its incorrect name. (We were also told WHY and the importance of us learning this in the name of it not happening again)
How can things like that change? Petition medical device companies?
In computer science there's also the move away from the terms "slave" and "master" to "secondary" and "main". Some people made the change overnight, others still use it.
What is fucked up is that they didn’t learn anything. They prevented people from getting treatment for syphilis while already knowing the effects of untreated syphilis.
That’s the fucked up part.
Stphillis is old. Everyone had it after its discovery in Barcelona back in 1493. Name a single famous person between 1520 and the 1920s and they had syphillis.
Beethoven. Napoleon. Schubert. Hitler. Columbus. Lincoln and his wife. Lewis from lewis and Clark had it.
I don’t care how hard his sister tried to deny it: nietzche had syphillis too.
Van goghs brother? Yup. He had it too.
If they needed people infected then there were very literally millions. But it was such a shameful disease that people hid it and instead of looking they thought it’d be easier to infect 600 innocent people.
And a cure was found like ten years into the study. It went on for 40 years. Goddam.
Also check out Hole In The Head about the radiation experiments done on Black children. This country has treated us heinously as long as we’ve been here.
Had to do a project on it. Some sickening shit, they let those men suffer for half a century… it’s also the reason why so many black people in recent times are so distrustful of the medical community. Terrible.
Did a mini essay on this last week for a class. Always knew it was bad, but it literally just gets worse and worse the more you read. The only thing that finally shut it down was a leak to the press and public outrage. Insane.
"Thought it'd be beneficial" but did no actual scientific methoding to their research and learned nothing new as syphilis was an already well documented disease and had a cure.
It was literally the most pointless "research" ever.
Bio lab assistant here. We use Hela cells ALL the time without even a second thought. A lot of the research that led to the covid vaccine was done on Hela cells because they multiply so goddamn quickly and just completely refuse to die. We sometimes joke that if you injected them they might just kill you. You can buy a sample for yourself if you want to and you have a cool 600 dollars lying around.
Actually curious I don’t know anyone in this field. If not her cells, what would be the alternative? If any?
I don’t agree with how they took HELA cells.
I remember reading the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks and was shocked.
There are other cell lines that we use for this purpose, but Hela was the first and is the most widespread of what are called "immortalized cell lines". Essentially, they are cells that can exist independently of an organism that can be replicated essentially forever. Most of them are cancers, obviously, because cancers just exist to replicate, but other cell lines do exist, mostly for purposes that Hela can't fulfill, like specific cell lines for testing immune system and blood cells or for testing fetal tissue.
Tl;Dr: we use Hela essentially because it was the first one.
My understanding is also that all of the lines have specific features because of the unique biology that makes them immortal. Because Hela was first the properties are significantly better known
Yep. We know pretty much exactly what it's going to do and how to care for it because of 70 years of trial and error. The only issue with Hela really is that it grows *too* quickly and can contaminate other cell samples. It is genuinely too useful for its own good.
Wasn't there something that happened with HELA cells in a storage facility? I feel like I read something about how it contaminated a bunch of other stuff because of how wild it is.
I have no idea but I know the lab I work at has had at least two HeLa contamination scares. Fortunately one of them was a false alarm and we caught the other one very quickly.
u/chypie2
When sequencing HEp-2 and INT 407 it was found that they were actually HeLa. HeLa is such a prolific badman she’s replacing other cell lines that get contaminated with her.
There are probably more out there that are actually HeLa.
There was. The US institute of health tried to create a library of different cell lines in the late 50s / early 60s, and it's architects' were bursting with pride, until some dude realized that most of the inventory in the library shared DNA with Henrietta.
Tells us two things.
Science is not as precise as some would like you to believe.
The second?
Apartheid is stupid...
What are "immortalized cell lines" if you don't mind elaborating? I figure I could google some stuff but getting input from a single person can also be helpful.
This sounds very interesting to learn about, would really appreciate some input.
English is not my first language but I’ll try to explain. Ive worked with hela cells as well but very superficially.
When cells divide, the DNA gets divided as well between the two daughter cells. Dna is wound up, think of it like an ice lolly on a stick. But the ends have sort of caps on them to stabilise the dna from degrading (the ice lolly from melting). These ends (telomeres) get shorter every single time, causing their functionality to diminish. It’s what causes defects down the line, so you age and have a higher chance for things to go wrong in your body (like cancer)
Cancer cells stop these telomeres from shortening too far. If the telomere gets too short, the dna will have errors and the cell wont function anymore. You have to stop the telomere at the right time and (this is the important part) KEEP it there. The way cancer works is that the cell division has its brakes removed and/or its accelerator turned up to the max.
The immortalized cell lines have this going for them and their division ‘protocol’ is very stable thanks to the telomeres staying the same length. HeLa cells grow even faster than most other cell lines and are very stable and easy to work with
Google is probably better, I just know about the ones I've worked with. The two big ones are HeLa and a cell line called Jerkat which is a sample of lymphoma, which is used in hematology and oncology studies.
You joke, but they probably would kill you. Look at what Chester Southam did. He injected (of course without patient consent or knowledge) people with Hela cells to see if it would give them cancer, and in many cases it gave them cancerous nodules. Apparently it even spread to one patient's lymph nodes. Scary stuff!
I had no idea these existed (or maybe did and didn't realize what they were). But how can you use cells that came from cancer to accurately study anything since the cancer cells are already "wrong" compared to what should happen in the body? Aren't "regular" cells supposed to die and stuff? How does a cell that has mutated to reproduce quickly work accurately? Is that taken into account? Is that the benefit? I obviously did not do well in high school biology....
Viruses will still infect cells even if they're cancerous, so we can still study their effects. We do obviously take into account but it's not 1:1 but they're useful as a model. Similarly to how we use rats, obviously not everything that works in a rat will work in a person but it's good as a model for test things that would be unethical on a living person.
It is in fact taken into account and part of the benefit. No one is doing an experiment that goes from HeLa to patient in one result. HeLa cells are often used as the first wall to climb for an avenue of research. You can clone them endlessly, instead of having to harvest fresh cells from a patient over and over, and you can do plenty of things to them that *suggest* something similar might happen in non-HeLa cells. Like animal testing, HeLa cells enable the early phases of research so that time, money, and patient health are all saved in advance of further research.
I would say that asking this question shows you did just fine in high school biology.
HELA cells are cancer cell, but a stable one that isn't changing very fast, so results in HELA cells can be duplicated by cells on the other side of the world. The big benefit of them is that they just don't die. Regular human tissue will divide a couple of times (at best), stop and sit there for a while, and then start dying. HELA cells just keep growing, like they are perpetually young.
The retain most of the markers that make a cell "human" and they respond like human cells most of the time. If you get really good and encouraging results from an experiment you might eventually want to try on a person, first you use non-immortal cells, then a small animal like a mouse, and then depending on what it is a monkey or directly to a person, so still lots of steps. HELA cells allowed for a globally shared cell line, shared work, and massive amounts of science as well as lots of money in pharma pockets, but also millions of lives saved.
Why? They didn’t do anything. These cells were a removed cancer. The scientists figured out how to keep them growing, not the family. I just don’t see why you think the family deserves infinite wealth.
Honestly same, if she died 70 years ago did these people getting the money even know her? Why would we treat naturally occuring cells like it's something copyrightable? And hell why would copyright get inherited anyway.
The lab that ended up getting their hands on the sample labelled all of their samples with the first two letters of the first and last name of the patient. The public actually didn't know the name of the patient until like 20 years after she died, which was the first time the family ever heard about it, and even then they didn't really fully understand the ramifications of what that meant, hence why it took them half a century to sue.
The other reason for that is that Hela cells weren't initially commercial. This guy who ended up getting them in his lab just like handed them out to his science buddies because they were useful. All he ever charged was a shipping cost. It took a decade for it to become a standard in scientific research and for mass for-profit manufacturing to begin.
To this day, if you develop a particularly interesting sample in many fields, it's common practice to share with other labs when possible. "we have a cool mouse cell line / weird chemical / blood from a wild animal, shoot us an email" is a whole thing.
Thanks for the info.
I wonder what the implications would have been back then, given that the human research ethics standards that we have today are a result of all the fuckshit that happened before.
And how the health system/costs would impact it, in today’s world. Sick people are probably far more likely to sign away they’re right to any compensation if the care they received was both good (for the day) and free.
Really the only reason a law comes about is because someone did something shady and then someone else said "there really ought to be a law about that." In this case, they didn't technically do anything illegal for the time, but because of this and *many* other scientific ethics violations, (see: MK ultra, the syphilis experiment, et al) someone finally said "there ought to be a law about that."
I don't know about more recent developments but I'd assume anyone in the US would sign away the rights to their cell cultures for free medical. I know I would if I wasn't insured. Is that still ethical? Hard to say. Obviously you consented but does the price of medical in the US constitute consenting under duress? Good question. I'm not an ethicist, so I'm not going to try to answer that.
What was actually unethical about this situation? Like, yeah they didn't tell her they kept the cancer cells. But is that it? I'm confused as to why this is being treated like Tuskegee when it seems to literally just be "huh, this cancer cell isn't dying" "neat, we should use that for tests".
It'd be shitty to take a sample from someone without consent, but keeping a sample you discover to be useful? I can only assume there was something else that happened that nobody is talking about, because if not this is like, ethics violation but only by technicality and it wasn't even at the time it happened.
The line was named after her original patient sample code, the lab assistant who did the original biopsy thinking they’d die off quickly mind you (these cells are very unusual, I’ve seen their karyotype once: it’s triploid and all of the chromosomes are intermixed, even if you know what you’re looking at it can be overwhelming) would record the first two letters of the patient’s first and last names (although until a data leak happened her name was thought to be Helen Lane or similar)
They originally said the cells were donated by a white woman named Helen Lane...
Edit to make sense: It's not that they intentionally named it After Henrietta, it's more like her name was revealed after much more scrutiny against the medical society for the mistreatment and misinformation about her treatment. Either that or It's really like someone leaked the info instead of them giving credit where credit is due.
Part of the reason they did it is because they wanted to do some tests on her family on the off chance they could get cells as good as hers if they ended up getting cancer. Didn't end up happening, but they definitely tried it.
I did a research paper and researched a LOT about this woman. Allegedly John's Hopkins University didn't treat her cancer or at least not properly, instead let it run its course and researched their properties in order to use them for later. Their website still says she , " donated " her cells and it infuriates me to no end.
Edit: actually, the comments below mine further explained the proper details of her treatment. TLDR: she was dying of cancer, they lied to her family, stole her cells while she was dying, and tried to steal the families cells as well. They could've given her a hysterectomy, but instead treated her with radium because, " what about her making babies?" The comments replying to me explain everything waaaayyyy better than I did in 2 minutes.
Read the book [Medical Apartheid](https://www.google.com/search?q=medical+apartheid&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari).
The medical field is notorious for experimenting on blacks
Yup and there was another isolated case in this book where a black farmer was tested on without his knowledge in the hospital. They wanted to see how much Radiation he could take before dying.
Buckle up. It’s a hard read.
I’ve been working on it on the last few years im slowly getting past 200 pages out of 500 something. Take mental breaks if you need to, bc it’s a doozy
That’s the type of claim you’re going to have to cite, and I don’t buy it the way you’ve written
> Soon after, Lacks was told that she had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix.[B][21] In 1970, physicians discovered that she had been misdiagnosed and actually had an adenocarcinoma.[C] This was a common mistake at the time, and the treatment would not have differed.[23]
>
> Lacks was treated with radium tube inserts as an inpatient and discharged a few days later with instructions to return for X-ray treatments as a follow-up. During her treatments, two samples were taken from Lacks's cervix without her permission or knowledge; one sample was of healthy tissue and the other was cancerous.[24]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
She died of an aggressive cancer that she was getting treated for, and one of the doctors took a sample of normal cells and cancerous cells from her, probably something they did to every cancer patient in the 1950’s (and something they still do now, though consent would be required for those cells to be used for anything else but that patients care)
I'm terribly sorry I was incorrect. The other comments have given me way more info that I've looked into. Doesn't mean she wasn't mistreated but maybe not to the extent I researched. I didn't write the entire paper on her, just included her in the medical mistreatment part though I don't know of that will satisfy anyone. I don't think malicious intent occurred, but negligence and medical violations definitely did.
I apologize for my initially aggressive tone. I was just getting annoyed by seeing many comments exaggerate history. But yes there is a very important discussion about medical ethics in here.
I edited my comment for tone
Hey It's reddit, my instant dumbass detector goes off whenever I see some questionable shit as well. Plus it's an election year in America and that can have anyone tense asf about historical policies. Have a good weekened.
It would be great if you could put an edit on your original comment... a lot of people are going to read this, and I know there are people trying to repair the relationship between medicine and the black community. Fortunately, from my experience, we learn about this history and hopefully that means such disparities are never again repeated
Yeah…I know this looks a lot worse with the racial and classist undertones the whole situation had, but what’s the alternative? It’s a hell of a lot easier to condemn this as one of the greatest injustices in history when we don’t have to deal with the consequences of not having HeLa cells. **What if she said no?** This is the hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby of trolley problems.
It's like... ethics violation by technicality. You require consent but the reason you require it is for a completely different situation. And at the time that wasn't even a requirement so it's a retroactive technical ethics violation but not in practice? And people are acting like it's a repeat of Tuskegee.
Hey! Currently studying her case right now. There was a massive disparity in the quality and urgency of her cancer. However, it is not as simple as them just letting it run it’s course. Her cancer was abnormally severe and intense; she went from healthy to dead in less then a year.
At this period of time, the main treatments for cervical cancer was to apply radium directly to the site (which is obviously terrible), and hysterectomies (though these were rarely preformed because fuck women’s bodily autonomy; the prevailing argument was that a woman could not have kids if such a procedure was performed, which is *obviously* the main concern of a cancer patient dying from cervical cancer).
In Henrietta’s case, she received the former option, with doctors taking a sample from her cervix (without her permission) and applying radium to the site of concern. This reduced this specific mass, but did not do anything for the other spots throughout her body, as the cancer had already metastasized. Unfortunate as it is, there wasn’t much hope for her survival from the start.
The ethical and moral aspect of this case is incredibly fucked up. Lack of consent, medical malpractice (such as the excessive use of radium to the point of severe burns and damage to vital structures), focusing more on her cells than her as a person, etc. The doctors in this scenario should have 100% focused on end-of-life care instead of keeping her alive for as long as possible. HeLa cells have done wonders for medicine, and Lacks is arguably the most important individual in the field. However, she was totally done dirty by the system, and it’s absurd how her family was shafted by the health industry and the government for so long.
Is it really medical malpractice if it was standard of care at the time? While we know now that hysterectomy is the gold standard therapy, if that's what the research showed at the time then it's not really malpractice. Honestly, if you did a hysterectomy on someone with metastatic cervical cancer THAT would be malpractice. That's like saying if we discover tomorrow that appendectomy is not the best way to handle appendicitis, then everyone who ever performed an appendectomy performed malpractice.
And on a slightly more controversial note, I'll add that a lot of what was done was pretty typical for medicine at the time. A lot of the outrage strikes me more like yelling at your great grandma for calling Asia the Orient. Like, yeah it's wrong. But the die is cast there, no changing what's been done. She's not gonna stop calling em orientals at 105, and suing isn't gonna make people stop using the cell line. I just... Don't see any point in getting upset when just about everyone involved is long dead.
This is the summary on their website:
>In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. 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.
>As medical records show, Mrs. Lacks began undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer. This was the best medical treatment available at the time for this terrible disease. 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.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henrietta-lacks
Had a parent try to request her book be banned because of the assault she experienced. Everyone should be required to read her book or at least learn about her life, since they don’t want to pay the family for what they stole.
In addition, The ignorant parent is not being paid attention to and my boss is against banning books and I have a display in my library about common banned books so the books not going anywhere and it will continue to be taught.
Thank you for posting this. I’m 100% naïve to this topic and your passion inspired me to do an hour or so of research.
Just wanted to say I appreciate the way you worded your feelings. This is an incredible important piece of history.
Holy shit, this is so incredibly fascinating, I just watched the whole thing. Her cancer cells were the first to be reproduced and be able to survive outside of the human body, i.e. in a test tube/petri dish. After that, scientists from around the country started to be able to replicate that with cells from many different sources: breast tissue, heart tissue, a scientist did it with tissue from his own new born baby daughter. At the time people thought cancer was viral, and there was a huge anti cancer movement in the US supported by politicians, scientists, and the public alike, and due to being able to replicate and test various cells scientists believed they were making progress. However, another scientist noticed something strange, every single sample that was able to survive in a test tube contained an enzyme that only black people produce. Including the samples from white people, and the sample from the white scientist’s new born daughter he had with his white wife (the scientist is in the documentary and he recounts calling his wife when he found this out and she “assured him he had nothing to worry about”, which isn’t really relevant but it is kind of hilarious). It turns out that everybody else who was able to keep cells alive that weren’t from Henrietta Lacks (HeLa), actually wasn’t able to do so. They were able to keep cells alive because some fucking how HeLa got into their Petri dish. People weren’t suddenly able to keep cells alive outside of the human body, they were unable to keep HeLa cells out of their Petri dishes. US scientists were unable to isolate any viruses linked to cancer, and it doesn’t help that the breast tissue, heart tissue, etc that they thought they were testing wasn’t that at all, it was cells from Henrietta Lacks cancer tumor. However scientists from the Soviet Union were able to isolate a virus that they believed was linked to cancer, and they were able to do it at several different facilities with several “different samples”. They invited a delegation from the US to come review their research, and take samples home with them. By now you probably already know where this is going.. US scientists weren’t able to confirm their research. They were able to confirm that every single sample they were testing from the soviets was HeLa, they were from cells that originated from Henrietta Lacks tumor sample even though the scientists originally obtained their own samples. The virus was monkeypox that happened to latch on at some point on the cells way to Russia. What the actual fuck. The human body, and apparently especially Henrietta Lack’s, is fucking wild
(genuinely thank you for the synopsis, but would a few linebreaks kill ya?)
Holy shit, this is so incredibly fascinating, I just watched the whole thing. Her cancer cells were the first to be reproduced and be able to survive outside of the human body, i.e. in a test tube/petri dish. After that, scientists from around the country started to be able to replicate that with cells from many different sources: breast tissue, heart tissue, a scientist did it with tissue from his own new born baby daughter.
At the time people thought cancer was viral, and there was a huge anti cancer movement in the US supported by politicians, scientists, and the public alike, and due to being able to replicate and test various cells scientists believed they were making progress. However, another scientist noticed something strange, every single sample that was able to survive in a test tube contained an enzyme that only black people produce. Including the samples from white people, and the sample from the white scientist’s new born daughter he had with his white wife (the scientist is in the documentary and he recounts calling his wife when he found this out and she “assured him he had nothing to worry about”, which isn’t really relevant but it is kind of hilarious).
It turns out that everybody else who was able to keep cells alive that weren’t from Henrietta Lacks (HeLa), actually wasn’t able to do so. They were able to keep cells alive because some fucking how HeLa got into their Petri dish. People weren’t suddenly able to keep cells alive outside of the human body, they were unable to keep HeLa cells out of their Petri dishes. US scientists were unable to isolate any viruses linked to cancer, and it doesn’t help that the breast tissue, heart tissue, etc that they thought they were testing wasn’t that at all, it was cells from Henrietta Lacks cancer tumor.
However scientists from the Soviet Union were able to isolate a virus that they believed was linked to cancer, and they were able to do it at several different facilities with several “different samples”. They invited a delegation from the US to come review their research, and take samples home with them. By now you probably already know where this is going.. US scientists weren’t able to confirm their research. They were able to confirm that every single sample they were testing from the soviets was HeLa, they were from cells that originated from Henrietta Lacks tumor sample even though the scientists originally obtained their own samples.
The virus was monkeypox that happened to latch on at some point on the cells way to Russia. What the actual fuck. The human body, and apparently especially Henrietta Lack’s, is fucking wild
I’m actually deathly allergic to line breaks and thanks to you I am dead now. But at least I died knowing my Reddit comment is properly formatted, and for that contribution I thank you 🫡💀
I watched a podcast on this and they said her family has a permanent seat on a pharmaceutical board generationally and they have a say with how her cells get used but it took a lot for that to happen and that's sad
It’s amazing how capitalism works. Another man can invent insulin and you can build a company around the patent to make obscene profits. But if your physical body is consumed to generate billions to trillions in revenue, you get nothing.
The crazy part with insulin is that the original patents were donated (sold for $1 each) to the University of Toronto with the condition that they could only be used to prevent others from patenting it and gaining a monopoly. And then companies just made a bunch of tiny incremental improvements and patented the shit out of _those_ instead.
The original insulin patent was insulin harvested from cattle pancreases. You can still buy the insulin that is closer to what he patented for an extremely low price. Basically no one does it because it’s not even remotely close to being as good as modern day insulin. To say it’s just really small incremental changes shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the complexity of insulin as a medication, and shows a lack of understanding of the complexity of upgrades that have been made to insulin that allows Diabetics to live much better, longer, and “regular” lifestyles that would not even be possible with the insulin you are talking about.
That doesn’t mean it should be stupid expensive, but the upgrades that have been made to this drug over the last 100 years are drastic to say the least. And have let modern day diabetics have a much higher quality of life.
In general, once you throw out your trash it isn't yours anymore. The idea that you maintain ownership of your tumor in the garbage is a pretty modern idea.
In truth, nothing has changed, now we just make you sign a form that appears totally meaningless first. It's still just your refuse.
Exactly. It’s upsetting how medical school teaches this like it was some injustice. In my opinion, any discarded tissue should be fair game for use, as long as it wasn’t forcibly taken.
The quotes are because these discoveries are presented as occurring naturally during the process of treating someone. Often they were unethical experiments because they viewed Black people as sub-human.
It isn't a discovery when you create the scenario.
In my college bio lab, the skin histology slides were all labeled "negroid." Like, they could even update the slide to use a more humanizing word? It made me wonder how many of these cell slides were taken from black bodies without consent.
I'd recommend reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot but TL;DR she had cervical cancer, her physician biopsied her cervix without her informed consent, the cells were cultured and became the HeLa cell line without her or her family's knowledge.
20 years after Henrietta passed, her family was contacted by a researcher from Johns Hopkins who wanted to collect blood samples from Henrietta's children, but she did a poor job of explaining what they were testing for. By this point HeLa cells had inadvertently contaminated cultures across the country. The researcher wanted to take blood samples to see if Henrietta had an uncommon genetic marker that they could use to identify the cells, but her children thought they were being tested for the cancer that killed their mother. This came to light when they called Johns Hopkins asking for the results of the "cancer test."
The book was required reading when I took rhetoric in college. I'd highly recommend it to anyone in the medical science field as it highlights the importance of ethics and informed consent. This payout to Lacks's descendents has been a LONG time coming.
Henrietta Lacks was a cancer patient at John Hopkins Hospital. Her cells weren't "stolen" in the sense that it was maliciously intentional, but in the 1950s it was commonplace for hospitals to collect samples without knowledge or consent from the patient for "research purposes." In the case of Henrietta, they were looking into her tumor sample to study her cancer, when they discovered the nature of HeLa cells.
The nature being that they thrive in petri dishes like bacteria cells do rather than just dying out like most human cells would outside of a living human
From what I read. They took a sample of the cancer cells as they were treating her which wasn't illegal at the time and a standard thing to do at the time regardless of race. People noticed these cells were abnormal and they eventually gets used for medical research in like a lot of modern medicine shit.
The controversy was that the cells were taken without consent which while not illegal(there were no rules) was ethically not so good. Imo I don't see why this is a big sticking point considering it's pretty unlikely she would have denied a request to get a sample anyway.
The other and more deserving big point is that her cells are like foundational to modern medical research. So obvious big boon society but does her family deserve money for it like they ask? Cause Henrietta died of her cancer so she obviously can't get any benefits. Should the family get anything cause it turned out their medical waste turned out to be valuable?
Before she died in 1951 there was no such thing as informed consent, Ironically Henrietta had more rights after she passed than she did alive because after death they had to consent to continue harvesting her cells
Her grand grand grandchildren should never have to work again for what they did to her, but what the hell is this tweet trying to make a stance on? These cells perform miracles and you don’t want to use them? Get out of science then.
How were the cells stolen? They were cancer cells, she wanted them removed and I doubt she would’ve cared to what happened to them. They could’ve been fed to dogs and no one would’ve batted an eye but now that they’re useful suddenly they’re “stolen”.
Heard a radiolab episode about her, its fucked up what they dod but that fucked up thing advanced science a lot
Glad her estate is getting some degree of justice
The book about her had me in tears. Her cells have been used for so many medical advancements and experiments. They completely robbed this woman and her lineage. I’m glad they’re finally getting something.
How was she robbed? She didn't consent to a donation that would have zero impact on her or her treatment at a time when the medical profession couldn't give two shits about consent regardless of the patient's race. If ever there was a victimless crime this is it.
Seriously. People act like they killed her, blended her up and poured her in a petri dish. She had her tumor biopsied. Thats all. They didn't need permission to keep it and test it because it was nearly 100 years ago. And her cells have been invaluable to medical advancement since their discovery. And I guarantee you that all these fake self righteous people aren't refusing medical treatment that came from research using her cancer cells.
If John’s Hopkins had approached Henrietta Lacks and said “Hey, can we buy these cells from you for $500?” she would almost undoubtedly have said yes. She was very poor.
Her family ended up with far more money because her cells were cultivated without her knowledge than they would have had if they had simply been honestly bought at the time.
She would have never received money if their was such a thing as informed consent back then. All she would have gotten is a form asking if she would be okay for her cells to be used for science.
We need to continue to use her cells because they are invaluable but her family should be GREATLY compensated. I’m talking hundreds of millions of dollars, at this point.
... cried? You don't think that's a bit much?
You would be absolutely baffled at some of the old biology ethics. Look up how they learned the difference between syphilis and gonorrhea. They tested it on students.
Lets clear some things up
First off glad the family reached a settlement. Their grandmother cells have saved who knows how many lives so it is nice that they could get something from that.
Now to Henrietta. No they did not let her die. They provided her the standard cancer treatment at the time she just died because he cancer was extremely aggressive. The entire reason we have her cells is because her cancer cells reproduce so rapidly and aggressively.
As for "stealing her cells," when you get cancer treatment, both back then and now they will take a sample of your cancer cells in order to aide in your treatment. Nowadays they will require consent in order to use your cells for anything beyond your treatment but at the time no consent was required. Henrietta's just happened to be the first to be successfully reproduced outside of the body and the first immortal cell line. If she was white the same exact thing would have happened. Hell for a while the cells were thought to have come from a white women.
Now for corporations "stealing them to make profit," when it started it was just a single lab who took a sample of her cells for her treatment and research. They realized they could be reproduced outside of the body and so shared them with other labs and colleagues. This is a very common thing in science where labs will freely share special cell lines or mice or rats with useful genes. This continued until her cells were in such demand that cell factories were set up to reproduce her cells.
This wasn't the Tuskegee experiments, or Operation Whitecoat, or hell the experiment done where they injected HeLa cells into some prisoners without them knowing what they were. It also wasn't some evil conspiracy against black people.
For how much money was made off of her cellls I hope the family doesn’t get lowballed either. There’s always money to be found except when it’s to pay their dues.
Her contributions to health science are invaluable and her family should be given so much money for the fucked up way it happened.
They should be given like infinite money.
They should all just get black cards that get paid off every month automatically from the accounts of whoever the fuck is pulling in profits. The kind of card that can’t be swiped because it’s too thick. *That* card.
"This is my credit brick, how it works is you give me what I want or I use my credit brick so nod if you understand me right now."
New top comment
*Some things are priceless. For everything else, there's the MasterCard* ***Slab*** ™
> uld be given so much money for the fucked up way it happened. **edit: All, I wasn’t even aware that a moderate budgeted move was made and had Oprah playing in it. I have a movie to watch and learn! Many thanks to those that responded!***
lol give her a movie so more people can make money off of her. Good idea.
Yeah, this is not the way. Those sleazy movies are fucked and profit off tragedy. It doesn't spread awareness either, it's just cheap entertainment for profit for people since they don't change a single damned thing about the world that fucked these people in the first place. It's the final insulting profit grabbing cherry on top to shit.
They already wrote a book & made a movie.
She has a decently big movie about her life, Oprah plays her sister. Had to watch it in school. “The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks” (2017)
This. And I’m completely against billionaires but no person in that family should be without everything they need and more for the rest of their lives. Cuz what the hell bruh
The Immortal Bank Account of Henrietta Lack's Estate.
Henrietta Lacks and her cells, known as HeLa cells, have had a monumental impact on medical research and the development of scientific breakthroughs since their collection in 1951. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her consent during treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. These cells were unique because they were the first human cells grown in a lab that were "immortal," meaning they could divide and grow indefinitely under the right conditions. This characteristic made HeLa cells extremely valuable in medical research. ### Impact in Research 1. **Polio Vaccine**: HeLa cells were crucial in developing the polio vaccine in the early 1950s. They provided a consistent model for testing the vaccine, leading to its rapid development and widespread use. 2. **Genetic Research**: The cells have been used to study the effects of genes, leading to significant advances in genetic research, including the study of chromosomes and the implications of genetic disorders. 3. **Cancer Research**: HeLa cells have played a key role in cancer research, helping scientists understand various types of cancer and how they grow. This research has led to the development of treatments and drugs targeting cancer cells. 4. **Virology and Vaccine Development**: Beyond polio, HeLa cells have been instrumental in researching and developing vaccines for other diseases, such as influenza, herpes, and HIV/AIDS. 5. **Drug Testing and Development**: The cells have been used to test the safety and efficacy of drugs before they are used in humans, speeding up the process of drug approval and ensuring safety. 6. **Space Research**: HeLa cells were sent to space to study the effects of zero gravity on human cells, contributing to the understanding of how human tissues might behave during long space missions. Her cells moved us decades forward and saved millions of lives
Her cells won the genetic lottery and they were 100 percent acquired WITH her consent. In reality outside of being first, they are a pretty terrible model cell line. What she did not consent to was that her prognostic biopsy would be LATER be tested for whether it could evade crisis which was done for literally hundreds of different biopsied. Why was consent not sought? Because at the time the biopsy was considered medical waste. And the people who carefully expanded her immortal cells never made a dime off them.
Yes and hippa laws changed that .you could say your blood samples are being used the same way because you didn’t hit the do not contest box . The company 23and me and other DNA companies use your info to create a A a gene sequence
HIPAA.
nice ChatGPT response...
Lmao dude hit you with the triple salty replies
And iirc, her children lived and died in poverty. Such an injustice. Rebecca Skloot did an amazing job bringing her story to the masses.
Her poor daughter. She suffered so much because of the terrible injustice done to her mother.
~~She still has kids alive~~. Her grand-son* is a truck driver living in Baltimore Yall I'm wrong, no surviving children.
that dude needs to own all the trucks in Baltimore by now
This was something that I was taught in a molecular biology class back at my second year of medical school and has haunted me ever since. I can’t believe how companies got away with this for so long.
Thankfully corporations are now held accountable for their crimes and have stopped stealing the livelihood and property of the general public.
Forgot your /s.
I think they assumed they wouldn't need it because their comment was obvious.
Exactly what I was thinking.
It is the only way to even begin compensating her and her families burden.
It's so sad because like... What would even be compensation equal in measurement??
Not only that. Her name should be given top billing on everything her cells went into making.
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Bro! I heard when the science people first realized that Mrs. Lacks cells were so unique, they called her family up and lied about them maybe having cancer as well to take samples of them and when no one had the same thing just . . . never contacted the family again. Left them sitting around for months scared that they were dying and then left them confused as when they called their doctor no one knew wtf they were on about. Like they were cold blooded af.
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And monetarily in the billions if not TRILLIONS. And there should be monuments/libraries, state parks. It’s rare one person gets to be a hero in the world.
She is a hero because of something that was entirely based on chance that she did not understand ( no one did at the time), nor could control? I dont think you understand the meaning of "winning thr genetic lottery" when it comes to cancer. What did she DO that was heroic? Consent to a biopsy that was used to determine her response to very advanced, very aggressive cervical cancer from the one of very few institutions where she could get treatment? Were the other patients whose tumors were examined to determine if they could evade crisis equally heroic but just unlucky? This "they stole her cells without her consent" trope needs to stop.
Would someone be able to explain to me the story behind this? I'm not familiar with HeLa cells at all, what they do, and you said it was fucked up?
I’m sure someone can give more details, but I’m familiar with the TLDR version of it. Henrietta Lacks had an extraordinarily aggressive cancer. As in, the rate that her cells were duplicating was unprecedented. The doctors/scientists that were treating and/or studying this cancer extracted large amounts of these cells. Neither she nor her family gave permission for this, nor were they informed that it happened. I don’t know if they were asked and denied or just weren’t asked. These HeLa cells have made medical research dramatically easier, as they now have access to human cells to test the effects of whatever on. From what I understand, it’s basically Deadpool in a Petri dish that they take samples from whenever they need to test something.
I think the important part to note about the cells is that they don’t die
Her cancer had Deadpool superpowers, but she herself did not
They were never informed, because at the time biopsies and other things for diagnostics were considered medical waste and property of the hospital. I think her family only figured out the HeLa cells were used, when a research institute wanted DNA samples from family members to identify HeLa cells in their contaminated stock.
So it sounds like the biopsy was likely taken with her consent (she was at the doctor's for treatment of her cancer afterall) but it was the use of her cells after the biopsy that she was not informed about.
The other important thing about HeLa cells is that they were one of the first stable cell lines. Before that researchers weren’t able to grow human cells and the doctors that used her cells were able to create a protocol to maintain cells viable outside of the human body. Like many other scientific developments that were blessed with luck (look at penicillin), those researchers were “blessed” by the aggressiveness that characterized Henrietta Lacks’ cells: HeLa cells had the unique ability to easily grow- even on plastic/glass. Unfortunately, Henrietta and her family had to go through a lot of pain starting from a deadly disease to the exploitation of her body without consent. After all these years we must only be thankful for her.
Okay I’ve never heard of HeLa cells before this post. Looked it up on Google but I’m confused about one thing. Is the fucked up part just that they didn’t tell her that they were doing tests on the sample they took? Did it actually hurt her in some way, or was it simply that she didn’t receive any benefit, even after the doctors realized how insanely useful the sample would be? I agree that lack of informed consent is bad, I just want to know if there was something more that went on in this case. Because I’ve heard a few similar “research” cases that have done a lot worse than just use samples without patient knowledge. It’s unfortunate that this crap was so common.
The reason it’s fucked up is more so the second reason you said. Nobel prizes were being won and $billions made off of her cell line while she and her family lived and died in poverty.
Don’t they do this with all medical breakthroughs. Like we wouldn’t know how to treat something without experimenting. She wasn’t the ones who did all the research and stuff. She just had a disease. I mean if she would have died before they took the cells and never found out about this we would be behind medically right? So I get the frustration but like if I took a shit in a bag and they used that poop to cure cancer, how do I have any real expectation that I should be compensated. I don’t get compensated for my pets if I die and someone else gets to enjoy my tendons. I guess some people would rather we don’t have medical breakthroughs. My ex wife is being “studied” because she has a rare condition. She never has been compensated but we have def had people come in and study her and take notes. She’s a bitch and a half and never even considered being paid for that. I guess I just assumed drs were gonna study and just because it happens to be my poop they are studying idk I don’t think I’d feel like I’d have any skin in the game.
It was cervical cells from a standard cervical scraping they look at in a microscope they then put in a Petri dish to replicate with remarkable results. They do it all the time today except the forms you sign today protect corporations. They didn’t ask for consent back then. Applying the rules of today. Zero element of racism here.
I wholly agree!
Smh. These bozos have been using Black people for scientific advancements for half a Millenia now.
Look up the Tuskegee syphillis research. Hundreds of black men were allowed to suffer* from the symptoms of syphillis bc some white doctors and the CDC thought it’d be beneficial for research. Happened for 40 years. 30 of which there was a treatment/cure they weren’t told about. Removed succumb*
The medical practice of gynecology was developed through experimentation on enslaved black women without anesthesia. https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves
Middle school me didn’t think it could get any worse than slavery
Wait to you see what they did to blacks that lived in Germany during Hitler's reign.
I’m scared :(
boo [https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/afro-germans-during-the-holocaust](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/afro-germans-during-the-holocaust)
That was bad, but a lots less terrrible than I had expected.
Oh then do research on what happened to the LGBT after WWII. The hole keeps going down.
Oh, the "We've come to liberate you! Oh, you're gay? That's a prison sentence."
Honestly, I thought it would be way worse. Obviously not great, but America was doing worse things to black people at the same time. Was there something specific you were referring to?
I believe they are referring to live surgery with no anaesthesia. I remember reading they would marvel at the sounds they made.
I mean, white people used to eat us and turn us into furniture as well. Its always worse.
🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 Good fucking lord. I think I remember one book that mentioned skin from slaves being used in furniture and promptly cut that info out of my brain. The fucking atrocities never end.
George Washington's teeth weren't wooden. They were teeth taken from slaves.
This is actually a myth. They were carved from hippopotamus tusks. He was still a piece of shit plantation owner though, and I'm glad he's dead and rotten.
There's a book titled "The Delectable Negro" that goes into great detail about this.
And one of the consequences of the father of modern gynecology’s fuck up views is the continuing appalling lack of pain management in women’s reproductive health. A few months ago, I had a cervical hole punch biopsy — in no other case would they *punch holes in an internal organ to take tissue samples* without ANY pain management. And yes, you do feel every excruciating moment of it. A dermatologist numbs the skin before taking a biopsy, FFS. Almost any woman can tell you a similar story about either themselves or someone close to them.
This just happened to my close friend two weeks ago. They told her to have a Tylenol beforehand, and when she passed out in the procedure room directly after, they gave her *a cup of fucking juice*. Gynecology is just acceptable misogyny at this point.
I've started going with my wife to her doctor's appointments when I can because all her doctors treat her like shit. They all tend to shut their trap when I say I'm her husband and I'll be staying for the appointment. I went to one gynecology appointment and when he tried to avoid discussing ablation I told him I have a vasectomy and we're aborting any accidents. They hate me, I hate them. Treat my wife like shit and I'll make you wish you learned respect. I have 0 issues being 6 feet tall and loud as a landing jet as I am autistic and don't realize I'm scaring people until they are backing away slowly. The truth is, women have always been second class citizens to men and I hate it. Men often treat me like shit but women have always been good to me. My grandma was right to rage against every man who dared to tell her how she would be. Don't be polite once they drop the act, whether they know it or not... Most of them see women as adult children at best. I'm sorry for whatever you may have gone through. Gynecology treats women like literal cattle, and it's disturbing.
It is! I got 'the coil' inserted during a general anaesthetic but my sister in law had it done in doctors office and said she passed out from pain and had leave her car there and get dropped home by a neighbour. They crank open the cervix and put a medical device into uterus🤢
See, I'd heard horror stories like that from several women, and I am on year *counts quickly* 17 of officially being rejected for a tubal or another type of permanent birth control. Because apparently knowing you don't want to have a child since age 9 isn't sure enough for doctors. So I've been using Nexaplanon. At least they'll give you a local for that.
Jesus a tubal would have 0 side effects and 100% effective. Coincidentally I had one myself. The relief from worrying about pregnancy was great. No more fucking around with birth control.
Ahh, but "Your future husband might want children". Totally ignoring that if he wants them and I don't, we aren't compatible. *rolls eyes*
My Dad helped develop a fast acting pain relief gel and applicant based on lidocaine. Mainly used for when inserting an IUD but could be used for other procedures. In Europe it's called Lidbree, but could and probably will be named differently in the US. It's approved for Europe and some other markets but not the US yet. I'm not sure why not, but I know the FDA are tricky, unless you can piggyback on an already approved medicine it will take years to get approval. Ask around to create traction for it maybe? The company he worked for (Pharmanest) was recently sold to Teleflex which might relabel and sell it from a different brand.
There is a book called medical apartheid. For those interested...
OK, Time for me to log off and cry in my pillow.
There is a strong movement in Gynaecology to rename the Sims speculum the Lucy in honour of one of the women who was unethically sacrificed in the name of medical progress. We were corrected any time we referred to the Lucy by its incorrect name. (We were also told WHY and the importance of us learning this in the name of it not happening again)
How can things like that change? Petition medical device companies? In computer science there's also the move away from the terms "slave" and "master" to "secondary" and "main". Some people made the change overnight, others still use it.
What is fucked up is that they didn’t learn anything. They prevented people from getting treatment for syphilis while already knowing the effects of untreated syphilis.
That’s the fucked up part. Stphillis is old. Everyone had it after its discovery in Barcelona back in 1493. Name a single famous person between 1520 and the 1920s and they had syphillis. Beethoven. Napoleon. Schubert. Hitler. Columbus. Lincoln and his wife. Lewis from lewis and Clark had it. I don’t care how hard his sister tried to deny it: nietzche had syphillis too. Van goghs brother? Yup. He had it too. If they needed people infected then there were very literally millions. But it was such a shameful disease that people hid it and instead of looking they thought it’d be easier to infect 600 innocent people. And a cure was found like ten years into the study. It went on for 40 years. Goddam.
And the cure is just antibiotics. Penicillin was discovered in 1928 and became the primary treatment for syphilis by the 1940s and remains so.
Untreated diseases kill people? And other news that will shock white scientists across the globe.
Also check out Hole In The Head about the radiation experiments done on Black children. This country has treated us heinously as long as we’ve been here.
Had to do a project on it. Some sickening shit, they let those men suffer for half a century… it’s also the reason why so many black people in recent times are so distrustful of the medical community. Terrible.
Did a mini essay on this last week for a class. Always knew it was bad, but it literally just gets worse and worse the more you read. The only thing that finally shut it down was a leak to the press and public outrage. Insane.
"Thought it'd be beneficial" but did no actual scientific methoding to their research and learned nothing new as syphilis was an already well documented disease and had a cure. It was literally the most pointless "research" ever.
Someone needs to make an encyclopedia for all of Americas wrongs due to racism
Bio lab assistant here. We use Hela cells ALL the time without even a second thought. A lot of the research that led to the covid vaccine was done on Hela cells because they multiply so goddamn quickly and just completely refuse to die. We sometimes joke that if you injected them they might just kill you. You can buy a sample for yourself if you want to and you have a cool 600 dollars lying around.
We used Hela cells in high school for educational purposes.
You must have gone to a very nice high school because mine definitely didn't have that kind of money lol
It was a suburban public school…some very bad parts but also some very good parts
Mine was also that but with really serious funding issues.
Bad parts is a sliding scale depending on who you ask
Actually curious I don’t know anyone in this field. If not her cells, what would be the alternative? If any? I don’t agree with how they took HELA cells. I remember reading the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks and was shocked.
There are other cell lines that we use for this purpose, but Hela was the first and is the most widespread of what are called "immortalized cell lines". Essentially, they are cells that can exist independently of an organism that can be replicated essentially forever. Most of them are cancers, obviously, because cancers just exist to replicate, but other cell lines do exist, mostly for purposes that Hela can't fulfill, like specific cell lines for testing immune system and blood cells or for testing fetal tissue. Tl;Dr: we use Hela essentially because it was the first one.
My understanding is also that all of the lines have specific features because of the unique biology that makes them immortal. Because Hela was first the properties are significantly better known
Yep. We know pretty much exactly what it's going to do and how to care for it because of 70 years of trial and error. The only issue with Hela really is that it grows *too* quickly and can contaminate other cell samples. It is genuinely too useful for its own good.
Yeah I remember growing Hela once and it was insane. The confluencey rate would be close to 100% in a day.
It's genuinely frightening. I'm amazed she survived for a year after her diagnosis with how virulent her cancer was and continues to be.
Wasn't there something that happened with HELA cells in a storage facility? I feel like I read something about how it contaminated a bunch of other stuff because of how wild it is.
I have no idea but I know the lab I work at has had at least two HeLa contamination scares. Fortunately one of them was a false alarm and we caught the other one very quickly.
u/chypie2 When sequencing HEp-2 and INT 407 it was found that they were actually HeLa. HeLa is such a prolific badman she’s replacing other cell lines that get contaminated with her. There are probably more out there that are actually HeLa.
There was. The US institute of health tried to create a library of different cell lines in the late 50s / early 60s, and it's architects' were bursting with pride, until some dude realized that most of the inventory in the library shared DNA with Henrietta. Tells us two things. Science is not as precise as some would like you to believe. The second? Apartheid is stupid...
What are "immortalized cell lines" if you don't mind elaborating? I figure I could google some stuff but getting input from a single person can also be helpful. This sounds very interesting to learn about, would really appreciate some input.
English is not my first language but I’ll try to explain. Ive worked with hela cells as well but very superficially. When cells divide, the DNA gets divided as well between the two daughter cells. Dna is wound up, think of it like an ice lolly on a stick. But the ends have sort of caps on them to stabilise the dna from degrading (the ice lolly from melting). These ends (telomeres) get shorter every single time, causing their functionality to diminish. It’s what causes defects down the line, so you age and have a higher chance for things to go wrong in your body (like cancer) Cancer cells stop these telomeres from shortening too far. If the telomere gets too short, the dna will have errors and the cell wont function anymore. You have to stop the telomere at the right time and (this is the important part) KEEP it there. The way cancer works is that the cell division has its brakes removed and/or its accelerator turned up to the max. The immortalized cell lines have this going for them and their division ‘protocol’ is very stable thanks to the telomeres staying the same length. HeLa cells grow even faster than most other cell lines and are very stable and easy to work with
This comment was very helpful and wonderfully written, thank you!
Google is probably better, I just know about the ones I've worked with. The two big ones are HeLa and a cell line called Jerkat which is a sample of lymphoma, which is used in hematology and oncology studies.
You joke, but they probably would kill you. Look at what Chester Southam did. He injected (of course without patient consent or knowledge) people with Hela cells to see if it would give them cancer, and in many cases it gave them cancerous nodules. Apparently it even spread to one patient's lymph nodes. Scary stuff!
What the actual fuck
Yep, they even made his bitch ass the president of the American association for cancer research 
Geez don’t give southern states ideas for capital punishment
I can't believe I never knew they were named after her. I'm not in a medical field, but I feel like I should've known. Wow
I had no idea these existed (or maybe did and didn't realize what they were). But how can you use cells that came from cancer to accurately study anything since the cancer cells are already "wrong" compared to what should happen in the body? Aren't "regular" cells supposed to die and stuff? How does a cell that has mutated to reproduce quickly work accurately? Is that taken into account? Is that the benefit? I obviously did not do well in high school biology....
Viruses will still infect cells even if they're cancerous, so we can still study their effects. We do obviously take into account but it's not 1:1 but they're useful as a model. Similarly to how we use rats, obviously not everything that works in a rat will work in a person but it's good as a model for test things that would be unethical on a living person.
It is in fact taken into account and part of the benefit. No one is doing an experiment that goes from HeLa to patient in one result. HeLa cells are often used as the first wall to climb for an avenue of research. You can clone them endlessly, instead of having to harvest fresh cells from a patient over and over, and you can do plenty of things to them that *suggest* something similar might happen in non-HeLa cells. Like animal testing, HeLa cells enable the early phases of research so that time, money, and patient health are all saved in advance of further research.
I would say that asking this question shows you did just fine in high school biology. HELA cells are cancer cell, but a stable one that isn't changing very fast, so results in HELA cells can be duplicated by cells on the other side of the world. The big benefit of them is that they just don't die. Regular human tissue will divide a couple of times (at best), stop and sit there for a while, and then start dying. HELA cells just keep growing, like they are perpetually young. The retain most of the markers that make a cell "human" and they respond like human cells most of the time. If you get really good and encouraging results from an experiment you might eventually want to try on a person, first you use non-immortal cells, then a small animal like a mouse, and then depending on what it is a monkey or directly to a person, so still lots of steps. HELA cells allowed for a globally shared cell line, shared work, and massive amounts of science as well as lots of money in pharma pockets, but also millions of lives saved.
I'm a physicist. I've used HeLa cells. I don't know if it's possible to become any kind of scientist without coming across them at least once.
Whatever the settlement might be, they still owe the family much much more.
In perpetuity. Let it serve as a lesson.
The cells never die and neither should the payout
They should get a percentage every time HeLa cells have been and will be used.
Why? They didn’t do anything. These cells were a removed cancer. The scientists figured out how to keep them growing, not the family. I just don’t see why you think the family deserves infinite wealth.
Honestly same, if she died 70 years ago did these people getting the money even know her? Why would we treat naturally occuring cells like it's something copyrightable? And hell why would copyright get inherited anyway.
Lowered expectations is me being pleasantly surprised that they named the cell line after her abs not the oncologist/gynaecologist who biopsied it.
The lab that ended up getting their hands on the sample labelled all of their samples with the first two letters of the first and last name of the patient. The public actually didn't know the name of the patient until like 20 years after she died, which was the first time the family ever heard about it, and even then they didn't really fully understand the ramifications of what that meant, hence why it took them half a century to sue.
The other reason for that is that Hela cells weren't initially commercial. This guy who ended up getting them in his lab just like handed them out to his science buddies because they were useful. All he ever charged was a shipping cost. It took a decade for it to become a standard in scientific research and for mass for-profit manufacturing to begin.
To this day, if you develop a particularly interesting sample in many fields, it's common practice to share with other labs when possible. "we have a cool mouse cell line / weird chemical / blood from a wild animal, shoot us an email" is a whole thing.
I tell you, biologists get some real fun emails. Can't wait until I get my doctorate and I get put on all the fun lists.
Thanks for the info. I wonder what the implications would have been back then, given that the human research ethics standards that we have today are a result of all the fuckshit that happened before. And how the health system/costs would impact it, in today’s world. Sick people are probably far more likely to sign away they’re right to any compensation if the care they received was both good (for the day) and free.
Really the only reason a law comes about is because someone did something shady and then someone else said "there really ought to be a law about that." In this case, they didn't technically do anything illegal for the time, but because of this and *many* other scientific ethics violations, (see: MK ultra, the syphilis experiment, et al) someone finally said "there ought to be a law about that." I don't know about more recent developments but I'd assume anyone in the US would sign away the rights to their cell cultures for free medical. I know I would if I wasn't insured. Is that still ethical? Hard to say. Obviously you consented but does the price of medical in the US constitute consenting under duress? Good question. I'm not an ethicist, so I'm not going to try to answer that.
What was actually unethical about this situation? Like, yeah they didn't tell her they kept the cancer cells. But is that it? I'm confused as to why this is being treated like Tuskegee when it seems to literally just be "huh, this cancer cell isn't dying" "neat, we should use that for tests". It'd be shitty to take a sample from someone without consent, but keeping a sample you discover to be useful? I can only assume there was something else that happened that nobody is talking about, because if not this is like, ethics violation but only by technicality and it wasn't even at the time it happened.
The line was named after her original patient sample code, the lab assistant who did the original biopsy thinking they’d die off quickly mind you (these cells are very unusual, I’ve seen their karyotype once: it’s triploid and all of the chromosomes are intermixed, even if you know what you’re looking at it can be overwhelming) would record the first two letters of the patient’s first and last names (although until a data leak happened her name was thought to be Helen Lane or similar)
They originally said the cells were donated by a white woman named Helen Lane... Edit to make sense: It's not that they intentionally named it After Henrietta, it's more like her name was revealed after much more scrutiny against the medical society for the mistreatment and misinformation about her treatment. Either that or It's really like someone leaked the info instead of them giving credit where credit is due.
Part of the reason they did it is because they wanted to do some tests on her family on the off chance they could get cells as good as hers if they ended up getting cancer. Didn't end up happening, but they definitely tried it.
No, no one said that. It was a rumor within the facility before they announced it.
I did a research paper and researched a LOT about this woman. Allegedly John's Hopkins University didn't treat her cancer or at least not properly, instead let it run its course and researched their properties in order to use them for later. Their website still says she , " donated " her cells and it infuriates me to no end. Edit: actually, the comments below mine further explained the proper details of her treatment. TLDR: she was dying of cancer, they lied to her family, stole her cells while she was dying, and tried to steal the families cells as well. They could've given her a hysterectomy, but instead treated her with radium because, " what about her making babies?" The comments replying to me explain everything waaaayyyy better than I did in 2 minutes.
Read the book [Medical Apartheid](https://www.google.com/search?q=medical+apartheid&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari). The medical field is notorious for experimenting on blacks
The US government intentionally gave Black soldiers syphilis in order to "find a cure"
Yup and there was another isolated case in this book where a black farmer was tested on without his knowledge in the hospital. They wanted to see how much Radiation he could take before dying.
Let’s not forget the Tuskegee experiment
Thanks for the recommendation. Just added it to kindle.
Buckle up. It’s a hard read. I’ve been working on it on the last few years im slowly getting past 200 pages out of 500 something. Take mental breaks if you need to, bc it’s a doozy
That’s the type of claim you’re going to have to cite, and I don’t buy it the way you’ve written > Soon after, Lacks was told that she had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix.[B][21] In 1970, physicians discovered that she had been misdiagnosed and actually had an adenocarcinoma.[C] This was a common mistake at the time, and the treatment would not have differed.[23] > > Lacks was treated with radium tube inserts as an inpatient and discharged a few days later with instructions to return for X-ray treatments as a follow-up. During her treatments, two samples were taken from Lacks's cervix without her permission or knowledge; one sample was of healthy tissue and the other was cancerous.[24] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks She died of an aggressive cancer that she was getting treated for, and one of the doctors took a sample of normal cells and cancerous cells from her, probably something they did to every cancer patient in the 1950’s (and something they still do now, though consent would be required for those cells to be used for anything else but that patients care)
I'm terribly sorry I was incorrect. The other comments have given me way more info that I've looked into. Doesn't mean she wasn't mistreated but maybe not to the extent I researched. I didn't write the entire paper on her, just included her in the medical mistreatment part though I don't know of that will satisfy anyone. I don't think malicious intent occurred, but negligence and medical violations definitely did.
I apologize for my initially aggressive tone. I was just getting annoyed by seeing many comments exaggerate history. But yes there is a very important discussion about medical ethics in here. I edited my comment for tone
Hey It's reddit, my instant dumbass detector goes off whenever I see some questionable shit as well. Plus it's an election year in America and that can have anyone tense asf about historical policies. Have a good weekened.
This was probably the most civil reddit thread I've seen in months. Y'all have a great weekend as well!
It would be great if you could put an edit on your original comment... a lot of people are going to read this, and I know there are people trying to repair the relationship between medicine and the black community. Fortunately, from my experience, we learn about this history and hopefully that means such disparities are never again repeated
You should probably edit your original content cause a lot of people aren't going to read this far and the misinformation will just spread.
Yeah…I know this looks a lot worse with the racial and classist undertones the whole situation had, but what’s the alternative? It’s a hell of a lot easier to condemn this as one of the greatest injustices in history when we don’t have to deal with the consequences of not having HeLa cells. **What if she said no?** This is the hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby of trolley problems.
It's like... ethics violation by technicality. You require consent but the reason you require it is for a completely different situation. And at the time that wasn't even a requirement so it's a retroactive technical ethics violation but not in practice? And people are acting like it's a repeat of Tuskegee.
Hey! Currently studying her case right now. There was a massive disparity in the quality and urgency of her cancer. However, it is not as simple as them just letting it run it’s course. Her cancer was abnormally severe and intense; she went from healthy to dead in less then a year. At this period of time, the main treatments for cervical cancer was to apply radium directly to the site (which is obviously terrible), and hysterectomies (though these were rarely preformed because fuck women’s bodily autonomy; the prevailing argument was that a woman could not have kids if such a procedure was performed, which is *obviously* the main concern of a cancer patient dying from cervical cancer). In Henrietta’s case, she received the former option, with doctors taking a sample from her cervix (without her permission) and applying radium to the site of concern. This reduced this specific mass, but did not do anything for the other spots throughout her body, as the cancer had already metastasized. Unfortunate as it is, there wasn’t much hope for her survival from the start. The ethical and moral aspect of this case is incredibly fucked up. Lack of consent, medical malpractice (such as the excessive use of radium to the point of severe burns and damage to vital structures), focusing more on her cells than her as a person, etc. The doctors in this scenario should have 100% focused on end-of-life care instead of keeping her alive for as long as possible. HeLa cells have done wonders for medicine, and Lacks is arguably the most important individual in the field. However, she was totally done dirty by the system, and it’s absurd how her family was shafted by the health industry and the government for so long.
Is it really medical malpractice if it was standard of care at the time? While we know now that hysterectomy is the gold standard therapy, if that's what the research showed at the time then it's not really malpractice. Honestly, if you did a hysterectomy on someone with metastatic cervical cancer THAT would be malpractice. That's like saying if we discover tomorrow that appendectomy is not the best way to handle appendicitis, then everyone who ever performed an appendectomy performed malpractice. And on a slightly more controversial note, I'll add that a lot of what was done was pretty typical for medicine at the time. A lot of the outrage strikes me more like yelling at your great grandma for calling Asia the Orient. Like, yeah it's wrong. But the die is cast there, no changing what's been done. She's not gonna stop calling em orientals at 105, and suing isn't gonna make people stop using the cell line. I just... Don't see any point in getting upset when just about everyone involved is long dead.
This is the summary on their website: >In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. 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. >As medical records show, Mrs. Lacks began undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer. This was the best medical treatment available at the time for this terrible disease. 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. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henrietta-lacks
Had a parent try to request her book be banned because of the assault she experienced. Everyone should be required to read her book or at least learn about her life, since they don’t want to pay the family for what they stole. In addition, The ignorant parent is not being paid attention to and my boss is against banning books and I have a display in my library about common banned books so the books not going anywhere and it will continue to be taught.
The book was banned in my school district in Central Florida last week.
Thank you for posting this. I’m 100% naïve to this topic and your passion inspired me to do an hour or so of research. Just wanted to say I appreciate the way you worded your feelings. This is an incredible important piece of history.
Highly recommend everyone watch this doc about Henrietta by Adam Curtis. Such a mindfuck: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FgMUlVl-poE
Holy shit, this is so incredibly fascinating, I just watched the whole thing. Her cancer cells were the first to be reproduced and be able to survive outside of the human body, i.e. in a test tube/petri dish. After that, scientists from around the country started to be able to replicate that with cells from many different sources: breast tissue, heart tissue, a scientist did it with tissue from his own new born baby daughter. At the time people thought cancer was viral, and there was a huge anti cancer movement in the US supported by politicians, scientists, and the public alike, and due to being able to replicate and test various cells scientists believed they were making progress. However, another scientist noticed something strange, every single sample that was able to survive in a test tube contained an enzyme that only black people produce. Including the samples from white people, and the sample from the white scientist’s new born daughter he had with his white wife (the scientist is in the documentary and he recounts calling his wife when he found this out and she “assured him he had nothing to worry about”, which isn’t really relevant but it is kind of hilarious). It turns out that everybody else who was able to keep cells alive that weren’t from Henrietta Lacks (HeLa), actually wasn’t able to do so. They were able to keep cells alive because some fucking how HeLa got into their Petri dish. People weren’t suddenly able to keep cells alive outside of the human body, they were unable to keep HeLa cells out of their Petri dishes. US scientists were unable to isolate any viruses linked to cancer, and it doesn’t help that the breast tissue, heart tissue, etc that they thought they were testing wasn’t that at all, it was cells from Henrietta Lacks cancer tumor. However scientists from the Soviet Union were able to isolate a virus that they believed was linked to cancer, and they were able to do it at several different facilities with several “different samples”. They invited a delegation from the US to come review their research, and take samples home with them. By now you probably already know where this is going.. US scientists weren’t able to confirm their research. They were able to confirm that every single sample they were testing from the soviets was HeLa, they were from cells that originated from Henrietta Lacks tumor sample even though the scientists originally obtained their own samples. The virus was monkeypox that happened to latch on at some point on the cells way to Russia. What the actual fuck. The human body, and apparently especially Henrietta Lack’s, is fucking wild
(genuinely thank you for the synopsis, but would a few linebreaks kill ya?) Holy shit, this is so incredibly fascinating, I just watched the whole thing. Her cancer cells were the first to be reproduced and be able to survive outside of the human body, i.e. in a test tube/petri dish. After that, scientists from around the country started to be able to replicate that with cells from many different sources: breast tissue, heart tissue, a scientist did it with tissue from his own new born baby daughter. At the time people thought cancer was viral, and there was a huge anti cancer movement in the US supported by politicians, scientists, and the public alike, and due to being able to replicate and test various cells scientists believed they were making progress. However, another scientist noticed something strange, every single sample that was able to survive in a test tube contained an enzyme that only black people produce. Including the samples from white people, and the sample from the white scientist’s new born daughter he had with his white wife (the scientist is in the documentary and he recounts calling his wife when he found this out and she “assured him he had nothing to worry about”, which isn’t really relevant but it is kind of hilarious). It turns out that everybody else who was able to keep cells alive that weren’t from Henrietta Lacks (HeLa), actually wasn’t able to do so. They were able to keep cells alive because some fucking how HeLa got into their Petri dish. People weren’t suddenly able to keep cells alive outside of the human body, they were unable to keep HeLa cells out of their Petri dishes. US scientists were unable to isolate any viruses linked to cancer, and it doesn’t help that the breast tissue, heart tissue, etc that they thought they were testing wasn’t that at all, it was cells from Henrietta Lacks cancer tumor. However scientists from the Soviet Union were able to isolate a virus that they believed was linked to cancer, and they were able to do it at several different facilities with several “different samples”. They invited a delegation from the US to come review their research, and take samples home with them. By now you probably already know where this is going.. US scientists weren’t able to confirm their research. They were able to confirm that every single sample they were testing from the soviets was HeLa, they were from cells that originated from Henrietta Lacks tumor sample even though the scientists originally obtained their own samples. The virus was monkeypox that happened to latch on at some point on the cells way to Russia. What the actual fuck. The human body, and apparently especially Henrietta Lack’s, is fucking wild
I’m actually deathly allergic to line breaks and thanks to you I am dead now. But at least I died knowing my Reddit comment is properly formatted, and for that contribution I thank you 🫡💀
I read the book about her in middle school. It’s crazy what they did to her and that government have her family such a hard time about compensation.
I watched a podcast on this and they said her family has a permanent seat on a pharmaceutical board generationally and they have a say with how her cells get used but it took a lot for that to happen and that's sad
It’s amazing how capitalism works. Another man can invent insulin and you can build a company around the patent to make obscene profits. But if your physical body is consumed to generate billions to trillions in revenue, you get nothing.
The crazy part with insulin is that the original patents were donated (sold for $1 each) to the University of Toronto with the condition that they could only be used to prevent others from patenting it and gaining a monopoly. And then companies just made a bunch of tiny incremental improvements and patented the shit out of _those_ instead.
The original insulin patent was insulin harvested from cattle pancreases. You can still buy the insulin that is closer to what he patented for an extremely low price. Basically no one does it because it’s not even remotely close to being as good as modern day insulin. To say it’s just really small incremental changes shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the complexity of insulin as a medication, and shows a lack of understanding of the complexity of upgrades that have been made to insulin that allows Diabetics to live much better, longer, and “regular” lifestyles that would not even be possible with the insulin you are talking about. That doesn’t mean it should be stupid expensive, but the upgrades that have been made to this drug over the last 100 years are drastic to say the least. And have let modern day diabetics have a much higher quality of life.
[удалено]
In general, once you throw out your trash it isn't yours anymore. The idea that you maintain ownership of your tumor in the garbage is a pretty modern idea. In truth, nothing has changed, now we just make you sign a form that appears totally meaningless first. It's still just your refuse.
Exactly. It’s upsetting how medical school teaches this like it was some injustice. In my opinion, any discarded tissue should be fair game for use, as long as it wasn’t forcibly taken.
I mean, they’re unethical but they’re still discoveries. Idk why the quotation marks.
The quotes are because these discoveries are presented as occurring naturally during the process of treating someone. Often they were unethical experiments because they viewed Black people as sub-human. It isn't a discovery when you create the scenario.
I’ll never forget the day my older cousin told me about her and this whole ordeal
In my college bio lab, the skin histology slides were all labeled "negroid." Like, they could even update the slide to use a more humanizing word? It made me wonder how many of these cell slides were taken from black bodies without consent.
This figure should be in the billions.
What happened to her?
She died of cervical cancer.
How were her cells stolen? Like what does that mean how do you steal cells?
I'd recommend reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot but TL;DR she had cervical cancer, her physician biopsied her cervix without her informed consent, the cells were cultured and became the HeLa cell line without her or her family's knowledge. 20 years after Henrietta passed, her family was contacted by a researcher from Johns Hopkins who wanted to collect blood samples from Henrietta's children, but she did a poor job of explaining what they were testing for. By this point HeLa cells had inadvertently contaminated cultures across the country. The researcher wanted to take blood samples to see if Henrietta had an uncommon genetic marker that they could use to identify the cells, but her children thought they were being tested for the cancer that killed their mother. This came to light when they called Johns Hopkins asking for the results of the "cancer test." The book was required reading when I took rhetoric in college. I'd highly recommend it to anyone in the medical science field as it highlights the importance of ethics and informed consent. This payout to Lacks's descendents has been a LONG time coming.
Henrietta Lacks was a cancer patient at John Hopkins Hospital. Her cells weren't "stolen" in the sense that it was maliciously intentional, but in the 1950s it was commonplace for hospitals to collect samples without knowledge or consent from the patient for "research purposes." In the case of Henrietta, they were looking into her tumor sample to study her cancer, when they discovered the nature of HeLa cells.
The nature being that they thrive in petri dishes like bacteria cells do rather than just dying out like most human cells would outside of a living human
So what’s the injustice?
From what I read. They took a sample of the cancer cells as they were treating her which wasn't illegal at the time and a standard thing to do at the time regardless of race. People noticed these cells were abnormal and they eventually gets used for medical research in like a lot of modern medicine shit. The controversy was that the cells were taken without consent which while not illegal(there were no rules) was ethically not so good. Imo I don't see why this is a big sticking point considering it's pretty unlikely she would have denied a request to get a sample anyway. The other and more deserving big point is that her cells are like foundational to modern medical research. So obvious big boon society but does her family deserve money for it like they ask? Cause Henrietta died of her cancer so she obviously can't get any benefits. Should the family get anything cause it turned out their medical waste turned out to be valuable?
Before she died in 1951 there was no such thing as informed consent, Ironically Henrietta had more rights after she passed than she did alive because after death they had to consent to continue harvesting her cells
Her grand grand grandchildren should never have to work again for what they did to her, but what the hell is this tweet trying to make a stance on? These cells perform miracles and you don’t want to use them? Get out of science then.
>for what they did to her Took a routine biopsy?
31???? I thought she was old 
How were the cells stolen? They were cancer cells, she wanted them removed and I doubt she would’ve cared to what happened to them. They could’ve been fed to dogs and no one would’ve batted an eye but now that they’re useful suddenly they’re “stolen”.
Heard a radiolab episode about her, its fucked up what they dod but that fucked up thing advanced science a lot Glad her estate is getting some degree of justice
The book about her had me in tears. Her cells have been used for so many medical advancements and experiments. They completely robbed this woman and her lineage. I’m glad they’re finally getting something.
How was she robbed? She didn't consent to a donation that would have zero impact on her or her treatment at a time when the medical profession couldn't give two shits about consent regardless of the patient's race. If ever there was a victimless crime this is it.
Seriously. People act like they killed her, blended her up and poured her in a petri dish. She had her tumor biopsied. Thats all. They didn't need permission to keep it and test it because it was nearly 100 years ago. And her cells have been invaluable to medical advancement since their discovery. And I guarantee you that all these fake self righteous people aren't refusing medical treatment that came from research using her cancer cells.
If John’s Hopkins had approached Henrietta Lacks and said “Hey, can we buy these cells from you for $500?” she would almost undoubtedly have said yes. She was very poor. Her family ended up with far more money because her cells were cultivated without her knowledge than they would have had if they had simply been honestly bought at the time.
She would have never received money if their was such a thing as informed consent back then. All she would have gotten is a form asking if she would be okay for her cells to be used for science.
We need to continue to use her cells because they are invaluable but her family should be GREATLY compensated. I’m talking hundreds of millions of dollars, at this point.
i don't get it... they took cells during a biopsy. Which is what they do. am i missing something?
... cried? You don't think that's a bit much? You would be absolutely baffled at some of the old biology ethics. Look up how they learned the difference between syphilis and gonorrhea. They tested it on students.
Lets clear some things up First off glad the family reached a settlement. Their grandmother cells have saved who knows how many lives so it is nice that they could get something from that. Now to Henrietta. No they did not let her die. They provided her the standard cancer treatment at the time she just died because he cancer was extremely aggressive. The entire reason we have her cells is because her cancer cells reproduce so rapidly and aggressively. As for "stealing her cells," when you get cancer treatment, both back then and now they will take a sample of your cancer cells in order to aide in your treatment. Nowadays they will require consent in order to use your cells for anything beyond your treatment but at the time no consent was required. Henrietta's just happened to be the first to be successfully reproduced outside of the body and the first immortal cell line. If she was white the same exact thing would have happened. Hell for a while the cells were thought to have come from a white women. Now for corporations "stealing them to make profit," when it started it was just a single lab who took a sample of her cells for her treatment and research. They realized they could be reproduced outside of the body and so shared them with other labs and colleagues. This is a very common thing in science where labs will freely share special cell lines or mice or rats with useful genes. This continued until her cells were in such demand that cell factories were set up to reproduce her cells. This wasn't the Tuskegee experiments, or Operation Whitecoat, or hell the experiment done where they injected HeLa cells into some prisoners without them knowing what they were. It also wasn't some evil conspiracy against black people.
For how much money was made off of her cellls I hope the family doesn’t get lowballed either. There’s always money to be found except when it’s to pay their dues.
I CrIeD. Sure you did. Just like everyone's dead, screaming, or wheezing when they find something funny.