• UGI USER
  • Aug 12, 2023
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An immortal cell line and reparation, 70 years later.

Relevance :

GS3 Health, GS4 Ethics.

Context:

If much of the debate in health care is about equity, in a sense practically every innovation in biological care has been based on a con job, a steal. The biggest strike to rectify decades of wrong came last week, when biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific came to an agreement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells were removed from her without her permission when under treatment in a hospital in Maryland.

About:

  • These cells went on to become an immortalized cell line called HeLa (for Henrietta Lacks) used in scientific research.
  • It is reportedly the most commonly used cell line across the world, and yet neither the patient, a 31- year old poor, African American woman nor her family were acknowledged or compensated for the contribution.
  • The cells were taken from the patient when she was under treatment for cervical cancer. That wrong was righted last week.

Cell culture:

  • Cell culture is the process by which cells are grown in a petridish, in a lab in controlled conditions, outside of their natural environment.
  • These cells are used in critical and path breaking scientific research to develop drugs, vaccines (polio), study the effects of radiation, how pathogens affect humans, gene mapping and the list could go on.
  • Usually cells cultured in the lab from human cells could be kept alive for only a few days, subject to the phenomenon of cellular senescence, or the cessation of cell division.
  • However, all that changed when Henrietta Lacks appeared on the firmament of cell biology with a bunch of cells that behaved like nothing scientists had ever seen before, allowing them to create an ‘immortalised cell line’.

Immortalized cell line:

  • An immortalized cell line is a population of cells which would normally not proliferate indefinitely but, due to mutations, have achieved the ability to keep on dividing, never reaching the point of senescence.
  • Johns Hopkins biologist George Otto Gey was initially foxed by the fact that Henrietta’s cells were behaving differently when dunked in a culture medium and stirred in a roller drum – they were constantly multiplying and did not require a glass surface to grow.
  • It was observed that the cells doubled every 20–24 hours unlike previous specimens that died out.
  • He realized their potential and went on to turn this into what would probably count among modern science’s greatest tools – a widely shared immortalized cell line.
  • It is said that in the 1960s, HeLa cells that were taken on space missions to study the effects of space travel on living cells and tissue, divided even more quickly in zero gravity.
  • HeLa cells were the first human cells to be successfully cloned in 1953 by Theodore Puck and Philip I. Marcusat the University of Colorado, Denver.

The ethics behind:

  • There is no doubt she contributed unknowingly perhaps to several scientific discoveries, cures for maladies and vaccines, but Lacks herself did not survive, her permission was not sought to take her cells.
  • She might have been consigned to mortal transience, ironically despite her uniquely immortal cells and the benefit they conferred to the human race.
  • It was after a book was published that the timeline sets itself on a path of correction.
  • The National Institutes of Health , in the US reportedly set up a panel with Lacks family members to review requests to conduct further research on HeLa cells.
  • As Nature went on to record in an article after the announcement of compensation last week: The cells have been instrumental in at least three Nobel-prizewinning discoveries, but Lacks’s family was not compensated for those uses.

Conclusion:

Thermo Fisher Scientific’s settlement with the Lacks family is a gesture from the users themselves. Thermo Fisher in Waltham, Massachusetts, sells products derived from the cells. While the details of the settlement are still not in the public domain, one thing is certain: It will give the Lacks family agency over how the cells are used.

Source: https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/an-immortal-cell-line-and-reparation-70-years-later/article67178000.ece#:~:text=Henrietta%20Lacks’%20(HeLa)%20cells,continually%20been%20used%20for%20research’