HeLa Cells and the Life of Henrietta Lacks
Written by Erin Stacey
Thumbnail Photo by the Lacks Family
From a young age, we learn that cells make up all living things in the world. All cells adhere to the cell theory, from plant cells like dermal tissue cells and vascular tissue cells, to animal cells like nerve cells and fat cells. Cell theory was developed in the mid-nineteenth century and has three main principles;
"All living organisms are composed of one or more cells."
"The cell is the basic unit of structure and organization in organisms."
"Cells arise from pre-existing cells."
Typically cells will replicate a finite amount of times, for a human cell this is typically between forty to sixty times, but when they surpass this limit and can be propagated many times is when a cell strain then becomes a cell line. One of the most ground-breaking cell lines to date is the HeLa cell line. The HeLa cell line is the most frequently used human cell line due to its unique ability to divide infinitely – a hallmark characteristic of an immortalized cell line. About 70,000 studies have been published using HeLa cells, and they are also frequently used in the field of immunology.
The HeLa cell line comes with its own past, which has become the topic of many ethical debates in the medical and research fields in recent years. HeLa cells were named after Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year old black woman and mother of five. On August 1, 1920, Henrietta Lacks was born in Roanoke, Virginia, U.S. Henrietta was taken in by her grandfather, who just so happened to also be raising Henrietta's cousin, David, who went by the name Day.
Photo of Henrietta Lacks by the Lacks Family
Henrietta and Day Lacks would go on to get married on April 10, 1941, when Henrietta was 20 years old. At this point, they already had children together, with the first being born when Henrietta was only 14 years old. Henrietta and Day then settled in Turner Station, Maryland, where a need for strong workers in steel mills, like Day, was in high demand following World War II.
In 1951, after giving birth to her fifth child, Henrietta soon began to experience unexplained bleeding and found a lump on her cervix. Henrietta was then referred to the Johns Hopkins Hospital gynecology department in Baltimore. There, a biopsy was conducted that confirmed the presence of a cervical tumour. The standard treatment for cervical cancer during this time was radium treatments, specifically brachytherapy, which involved small glass tubes filled with
radioactive metal in fabric pouches being sewn into the cervix. During this procedure, Henrietta's surgeon, Howard Jones, removed two samples of cells from Henrietta, one sample from her healthy cervical tissue and the other sample from her tumour. Unfortunately, in the next few months, Henrietta's cancer would spread throughout her body, and she passed away on October 4, 1951, at just 31 years old. The samples taken from Henrietta were then given to George Otto Gey, a physician, cancer researcher, and head of tissue culture research at Johns Hopkins. At this time, Dr. Gey had been searching for an immortal cell line - one that could be extensively studied and live long enough to use in a prolonged research project.
When researching cancer cells, most cells are able to divide a few times before dying off, but Henrietta's did not. If fed the correct mixture of nutrients, Henrietta's cancer cells were able to continue dividing infinitely. In 1952, these cells were established as the first human cell line and were named after Henrietta (He-nrietta La-cks).
HeLa cells would soon be the most popular human cell line used in biological research, and were crucial in the development of many life-changing biomedical discoveries.
The most recent advancement involving HeLa cells has been the Covid-19 vaccine. Scientists were able to use HeLa cells to determine how cells get infected by SARS-CoV-2. Scientists began infecting HeLa cells with the virus but soon found that the cells did not infect easily. This meant that the HeLa cells lacked something that made the virus so infectious in humans. Other coronaviruses have been studied for years, and scientists knew that these viruses used a protein called ACE2 to enter cells and infect them. Scientists hypothesized that the novel coronavirus could behave the same way. To test this, scientists engineered the HeLa cells to express the same ACE2 protein. Upon infection of the virus into these newly engineered HeLa cells, scientists found that the novel virus could now quickly enter and infect the cells. This information on how the virus infects cells helped pave the way to the vaccines created today to combat the virus. However, these cells have been useful ever since their inception in many different ways.
HeLa cells have been instrumental in many biomedical breakthroughs for decades. For example, in 1953, HeLa cells were found to be effective in growing large quantities of poliovirus, the virus responsible for polio. As a result, scientists were able to understand the virus more clearly, and better comprehend what causes polio and how it infects the cell. With this information, the polio vaccine was eventually developed and resulted in the eradication of wild poliovirus in all continents except Asia.
In 1956, scientists used HeLa cells to test the effects of radiation from X-rays on human cells. From these studies, they learned the adverse impacts that X-rays can have on a person's health, like damaging the cells and impacting human cell growth. Also, in 1956, scientists used HeLa cells to develop cancer research methods. Scientists were able to create a way to test whether a cell line has cancer or not, with this method still being used today due to its reliability.
In 1964, HeLa cells were even used in the effort to explore space. In some of the first capsules sent to investigate outer space, HeLa cells were included to test how human cells are affected by things like radiation and microgravity.
In 1988, when the HIV-AIDS epidemic was in its early stages, scientists learned that HeLa cells could not easily be infected with HIV. This small piece of information gave scientists further insight into the basic understanding of how HIV infects people. Continuing to 2001, scientists discovered that the HIV and Ebola viruses enter the cell using similar mechanisms and, consequently, cause disease. With this newfound piece of knowledge, scientists were able to consult HIV research from previous years to create a more effective Ebola vaccine.
Two Nobel Prizes have recently been awarded to research that used HeLa cells. The first was awarded to researcher Harald Zur Hausen in 2008 for his research on the link between human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer. The other Nobel Prize was awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak in 2009 for their research on the role of telomerase enzyme in preventing chromosome degradation.
With how much good HeLa cells have done for the world, how could they be so ethically controversial?
To answer this question, we have to look back to 1951 when Dr. Jones performed a procedure on Henrietta Lacks and removed the sample of cancer from her cervix. Dr. Jones removed the sample from Henrietta Lacks without consent and without indication that her cells were being harvested. Henrietta was completely unaware that a sample had been taken, which was a common practice at the time. HeLa cells then exploded in popularity, unbeknownst to the Lacks family. It wasn't until more than 20 years later, in the 1970s, that Henrietta Lacks' family discovered the truth.
The ethical misuse of Henrietta's cells continued, with companies profiting from the use of her cells without payment to Henrietta's family. In addition, Henrietta's name, medical records, and even her cells' genome was shared publicly online and to the media – all without consent from her family.
Luckily, outcry from the public led to the genome being removed from public access. Subsequently, in 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted the Lacks family complete control over how data on the newly discovered HeLa cell genome could be used. Now, two Lacks family members have formed a group called the NIH's HeLa Genome Data Access, which is responsible for reviewing applications from researchers to access the HeLa sequence information.
The Lacks family has no intention of removing access to HeLa cells but instead embraces the advancements they could accomplish for humanity. Henrietta's grandson, Alfred Lacks Carter, has spoken on this issue, saying, "They were taken in a bad way, but they are doing good for the world." Unfortunately, there's no way to right the wrong committed, but talks on racial inequalities in medicine are long overdue. Even today, there are many injustices and racial inequities that plague our system. Ideally, with more discussion and awareness, we can begin to solve these issues within the medical field. To read more about ethics in the field of research, check out this article.