The cancer that killed Lacks, an African American mother, became an essential tool in the field of medical research in the 20th century.
Even though I am a cancer researcher and use HeLa cells in my work, I sometimes find it hard to believe.
After the first two letters of her first and last name, the cells are called "HeLa", and they divide when most cells die. The ability to survive through endless generations of cells is what makes them valuable for scientists conducting experiments on human cells.
Scientists wanted a way to grow and study human cells in the lab in order to conduct studies that are impossible in a living person. Scientists were able to conduct research because of a source of cost-effective and easy-to-use cells that were grown in a petri dish.
HeLa cells have played an enormous role in many scientific discoveries.
The story of Lacks is an ongoing case of bioethics because the cells were taken from her during a routine Pap test and given to researchers without her consent.
The Lacks family has tried to take legal action against companies that benefited from the cells. The Lacks family and science were affected by HeLa cells.
How did Lacks cells become immortal?
She didn't know that her cells were carrying the human papillomaviruses, which cause one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases. There are more than 150 different types of the human immunodeficiency virus, but only a small group are known to cause cancer. 99.7% of the cancers in the cervix are positive for the human immunodeficiency virus.
The majority of people with high-risk HPVs are able to clear out the virus before it becomes cancer. Over 90 percent of cancers caused by the human immunodeficiency virus can be prevented with a vaccine. 10 percent of people with infections on their cervix get cancer. Unfortunately, Henrietta was one of the unlucky ones.
Her misfortune has made it possible to understand how the vaccine works. Many scientists, including me, have been investigating the causes of cancer since the discovery of the role of the human immunodeficiency virus in it.
The cancer-causing ability of the virus is linked to the production of two proteins. The two major human proteins that protect against cancer, p53 and retinoblastoma, can be destroyed by these viral proteins.
P53 and Rb are used to make sure cells don't accumulate harmful genetic mutations and stop dividing after a set number of cycles. My research has focused on how the human immunodeficiency virus interacts with different types of human cells.
Most cells divide around 40 to 60 times before they die off. The cells can divide forever because of the attacks on the sentinels.
After Lacks was exposed to the second-most-common high-risk type of the virus, her cells lost the ability to produce sentinels. Without growth checks in place, her cells were able to divide indefinitely and live on to this day, both in test tubes and 70,000 studies.
The Associate Professor of Immunology and Cell Biology is at West Virginia University.
This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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