Accidental Blogger

As I stirred in a tablespoon of yogurt culture in scalded milk cooled to a lukewarm temperature, I think back to when I first got it from a friend, a few days after landing in the US. The culture of bacteria (smuggled in past the noses of the US Dept of Agriculture and the Customs, as the story goes, by some Indian Auntie,who pretended that it was baby food) has now been going on for the last 17 years. I will pass it on to my kids, so they can make their own yogurt with those strains. Maybe that bacterial culture will still be around several generations after we have all died.

But this blog post is about another cell, of the human kind. It was the first human cell to be cultured in petri dishes that survived and thrived, reproducing so rapidly that it became the first human cells to be successfully 'immortalized'. Previous attempts to culture human cells had largely ended in failure, as they survived for short durations but never reproduced well enough to create a self-sustaining population of cells. But these cells, taken from the cancerous cervix of a woman named Henrietta Lacks in the early 1950's, became the first to thrive and multiply in vitro, making it possible to use them for thousands of research studies for the years to come. This was the HeLa cell,  becoming for several decades the mainstay of laboratories the world over.

I first heard about HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks in this interview with the author of the recent best-seller "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. Skloot details how she became interested in the life of the woman behind the cells that were so widely used. So little was known about Henrietta Lacks initially that she was often identified by the wrong name, Helen Lane, before her actual name was finally published in a little-read research paper. Obsessed  with the human story behind of the cells, Skloot spent several years researching the story of Henrietta Lacks, and in the process, gained an entree into a very different culture from her own white middle-class background, entering the milieu of a poor African-American sharecropping family from Clover, Virginia.

The book is less about the cells themselves and more about the Lackses, starting with Henrietta and ending with her daughter Deborah's tale and her struggles to come to terms with what was done with her mother's cells.

Henrietta's consent to remove and culture her cells was not obtained in the detailed form that we are accustomed to now when undergoing medical procedures. It was not the culture of the 1950's to do so. Nobody explained what it meant to her, nor did they alert her family to the implications of what they were doing. Even removal of extra cells after her death was done surreptitiously through a deliberately uninformed autopsy request to her husband. It was only several years later that her family found out about how famous and widely used the HeLa cells had become, raising all sorts of doubts in their minds as to whether it would still hurt their dead mother in some way. Skloot takes a  journey into the heart of another culture, in pursuit of the person behind those millions of vials of cells. Or so it seems. By the end of the book, we are left wondering about how much cultural relativism plays into our perceptions of the whole story.

Do we see the Lackses as poor, ignorant and exploited? Do we consider that we are bound to make reparations of sort to the family of the woman whose cells have been the source and impetus for so much of modern cell biology and important medical discoveries? These questions are raised, but as with many things, there are as many answers as there are people. Or cultures.

More on the book and an excerpt: here.

Another post on the ethical queries posed by what we now know about the woman and family story behind the cells.