'Immortal' Cells Of Henrietta Lacks Live On In Labs
This interview was originally broadcast on Dec. 13, 2010.
The HeLa cell line — one of the most revolutionary tools of biomedical research — has played a part in some of the world's most important medical advances, from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization.
The cell's power lies in its immortality, or ability to be kept alive and grown indefinitely. But few people know that the cells originally belonged to a poor Southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks who was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University when her doctor reserved samples of her body tissue for his research. Lacks died of cancer 60 years ago, but her cells — taken without her knowledge or consent — are still alive today.
Writer Rebecca Skloot spent years researching Lacks and tells her story in The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.
Skloot tells NPR's Neal Conan that in 1951, when Lacks' cells were first harvested, there was a different understanding of what doctors could and could not do.
"We didn't even have the concept of informed consent that we have today," she says. "Taking of tissue samples was absolutely standard — but so was doing things like injecting people with radioactive material to see what kind of harm that would do."
Skloot says that 60 years ago, doctors could never have known what their experiments would lead to.
"They didn't know what DNA was, they didn't know what we could someday learn from these samples," she says. "So the idea that there would some day be rights associated with cells would just have been baffling to them."