The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Part 11

"Lord," Sadie said. "Hennie must a hurt somethin worse than death."

For several days, Henrietta's corpse lay in the hallway of the home-house, doors propped open at each end to let in the cool wet breeze that would keep her body fresh. Family and neighbors waded through the field to pay respects, and all the while, the rain kept coming.

The morning of Henrietta's funeral, Day walked through the mud with Deborah, Joe, Sonny, and Lawrence. But not Elsie. She was still in Crownsville and didn't even know her mother had died.

The Lacks cousins don't remember much about the service-they figure there were some words, probably a song or two. But they all remember what happened next. As Cliff and Fred lowered Henrietta's coffin into her grave and began covering her with handfuls of dirt, the sky turned black as strap mola.s.ses. The rain fell thick and fast. Then came long rumbling thunder, screams from the babies, and a blast of wind so strong it tore the metal roof off the barn below the cemetery and sent it flying through the air above Henrietta's grave, its long metal slopes flapping like the wings of a giant silver bird. The wind caused fires that burned tobacco fields. It ripped trees from the ground, blew power lines out for miles, and tore one Lacks cousin's wooden cabin clear out of the ground, threw him from the living room into his garden, then landed on top of him, killing him instantly.

Years later, when Henrietta's cousin Peter looked back on that day, he just shook his bald head and laughed: "Hennie never was what you'd call a beatin-around-the-bush woman," he said. "We shoulda knew she was tryin to tell us somethin with that storm."

CHAPTER 13

The HeLa Factory

Not long after Henrietta's death, planning began for a HeLa factory-a ma.s.sive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio.

By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio epidemic in history. Schools closed, parents panicked, and the public grew desperate for a vaccine. In February 1952, Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh announced that he'd developed the world's first polio vaccine, but he couldn't begin offering it to children until he'd tested it on a large scale to prove it was safe and effective. And doing that would require culturing cells on an enormous, industrial scale, which no one had done before.

The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)-a charity created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who'd himself been paralyzed by polio-began organizing the largest field trial ever conducted to test the polio vaccine. Salk would inoculate 2 million children and the NFIP would test their blood to see if they'd become immune. But doing this would require millions of neutralization tests, which involved mixing blood serum from newly vaccinated children with live poliovirus and cells in culture. If the vaccine worked, the serum from a vaccinated child's blood would block the poliovirus and protect the cells. If it didn't work, the virus would infect the cells, causing damage scientists could see using a microscope.

The trouble was, at that point, the cells used in neutralization tests came from monkeys, which were killed in the process. This was a problem, not because of concern for animal welfare-which wasn't the issue then that it is today-but because monkeys were expensive. Doing millions of neutralization tests using monkey cells would cost millions of dollars. So the NFIP went into overdrive looking for a cultured cell that could grow on a ma.s.sive scale and would be cheaper than using monkeys.

The NFIP turned to Gey and a few other cell culture experts for help, and Gey recognized the opportunity as a gold mine for the field. The NFIP's March of Dimes was bringing in an average of $ 50 million in donations each year, and its director wanted to give much of that money to cell culturists so they could find a way to ma.s.s-produce cells, which they'd been wanting to do for years anyway.

The timing was perfect: by chance, soon after the NFIP contacted Gey for help, he realized that Henrietta's cells grew unlike any human cells he'd seen.

Most cells in culture grew in a single layer in a clot on a gla.s.s surface, which meant they ran out of s.p.a.ce quickly. Increasing their numbers was labor-intensive: scientists had to repeatedly sc.r.a.pe the cells from one tube and split them into new ones to give them more s.p.a.ce. HeLa cells, it turned out, weren't picky-they didn't need a gla.s.s surface in order to grow. They could grow floating in a culture medium that was constantly stirred by a magnetic device, an important technique Gey developed, now called growing in suspension. This meant that HeLa cells weren't limited by s.p.a.ce in the same way other cells were; they could simply divide until they ran out of culture medium. The bigger the vat of medium, the more the cells grew. This discovery meant that if HeLa was susceptible to poliovirus, which not all cells were, it would solve the ma.s.s-production problem and make it possible to test the vaccine without millions of monkey cells.

So in April 1952, Gey and one of his colleagues from the NFIP advisory committee-William Scherer, a young postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota-tried infecting Henrietta's cells with poliovirus. Within days they found that HeLa was, in fact, more susceptible to the virus than any cultured cells had ever been. When they realized this, they knew they'd found exactly what the NFIP was looking for.

They also knew that, before ma.s.s-producing any cells, they'd need to find a new way to ship them. Gey's air freight shipping system worked fine for sending a few cells to colleagues here and there, but it was too expensive for shipping on a ma.s.sive scale. And growing cells by the billions wouldn't help anyone if they couldn't get those cells where they needed to go. So they began experimenting.

On Memorial Day 1952, Gey gathered a handful of tubes containing HeLa cells and enough media for them to survive for a few days, and packed them into a tin lined with cork and filled with ice to prevent overheating. Then he typed up careful instructions for feeding and handling, and sent Mary to the post office to ship them to Scherer in Minnesota. Every post office in Baltimore was closed for the holiday except the main branch downtown. Mary had to take several trolleys to get there, but she made it. And so did the cells: When the package arrived in Minneapolis about four days later, Scherer put the cells in an incubator and they began to grow. It was the first time live cells had ever been successfully shipped in the mail.

In the coming months-to test different delivery methods, and make sure the cells could survive long trips in any climate-Gey and Scherer sent tubes of HeLa cells around the country by plane, train, and truck, from Minneapolis to Norwich to New York and back again. Only one tube died.

When the NFIP heard the news that HeLa was susceptible to polio virus and could grow in large quant.i.ties for little money, it immediately contracted William Scherer to oversee development of a HeLa Distribution Center at the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute, one of the most prestigious black universities in the country. The NFIP chose the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute for the project because of Charles Bynum, director of "Negro Activities" for the foundation. Bynum-a science teacher and civil rights activist who was the first black foundation executive in the country-wanted the center to be located at Tuskegee because it would provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, many jobs, and training opportunities for young black scientists.

In just a few months, a staff of six black scientists and technicians built a factory at Tuskegee unlike any seen before. Its walls were lined with industrial steel autoclaves for steam sterilizing; row upon row of enormous, mechanically stirred vats of culture medium; incubators; gla.s.s culturing bottles stacked on their sides; and automatic cell dispensers-tall contraptions with long, thin metal arms that squirted HeLa cells into one test tube after another. The Tuskegee team mixed thousands of liters of Gey culture medium each week, using salts, minerals, and serum they collected from the many students, soldiers, and cotton farmers who responded to ads in the local paper seeking blood in exchange for money.

Several technicians served as a quality-control a.s.sembly line, staring through microscopes at hundreds of thousands of HeLa cultures each week, making sure the samples were alive and healthy. Others shipped them on a rigid schedule to researchers at twenty-three polio-testing centers around the country.

Eventually, the Tuskegee staff grew to thirty-five scientists and technicians, who produced twenty thousand tubes of HeLa-about 6 trillion cells-every week. It was the first-ever cell production factory, and it started with a single vial of HeLa that Gey had sent Scherer in their first shipping experiment, not long after Henrietta's death.

With those cells, scientists helped prove the Salk vaccine effective. Soon the New York Times would run pictures of black women hunched over microscopes examining cells, black hands holding vials of HeLa, and this headline:

UNIT AT TUSKEGEE HELPS POLIO FIGHT

Corps of Negro Scientists Has Key Role in Evaluating of Dr. Salk's Vaccine

HELA CELLS ARE GROWN

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus-and at the very same time-that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.

At first the Tuskegee Center supplied HeLa cells only to polio testing labs. But when it became clear that there was no risk of a HeLa shortage, they began sending the cells to any scientist interested in buying them, for ten dollars plus Air Express fees. If researchers wanted to figure out how cells behaved in a certain environment, or reacted to a specific chemical, or produced a certain protein, they turned to Henrietta's cells. They did that because, despite being cancerous, HeLa still shared many basic characteristics with normal cells: They produced proteins and communicated with one another like normal cells, they divided and generated energy, they expressed genes and regulated them, and they were susceptible to infections, which made them an optimal tool for synthesizing and studying any number of things in culture, including bacteria, hormones, proteins, and especially viruses.

Viruses reproduce by injecting bits of their genetic material into a living cell, essentially reprogramming the cell so it reproduces the virus instead of itself. When it came to growing viruses-as with many other things-the fact that HeLa was malignant just made it more useful. HeLa cells grew much faster than normal cells, and therefore produced results faster. HeLa was a workhorse: it was hardy, it was inexpensive, and it was everywhere.

And the timing was perfect. In the early fifties, scientists were just beginning to understand viruses, so as Henrietta's cells arrived in labs around the country, researchers began exposing them to viruses of all kinds-herpes, measles, mumps, fowl pox, equine encephalitis-to study how each one entered cells, reproduced, and spread.

Henrietta's cells helped launch the fledgling field of virology, but that was just the beginning. In the years following Henrietta's death, using some of the first tubes of her cells, researchers around the world made several important scientific advances in quick succession. First, a group of researchers used HeLa to develop methods for freezing cells without harming or changing them. This made it possible to send cells around the world using the already-standardized method for shipping frozen foods and frozen sperm for breeding cattle. It also meant researchers could store cells between experiments without worrying about keeping them fed and sterile. But what excited scientists most was that freezing gave them a means to suspend cells in various states of being.

Freezing a cell was like pressing a pause b.u.t.ton: cell division, metabolism, and everything else simply stopped, then resumed after thawing as if you'd just pressed play again. Scientists could now pause cells at various intervals during an experiment so they could compare how certain cells reacted to a specific drug one week, then two, then six after exposure. They could look at identical cells at different points in time, to study how they changed with age. And by freezing cells at various points, they believed they could see the actual moment when a normal cell growing in culture became malignant, a phenomenon they called spontaneous transformation.

Freezing was just the first of several dramatic improvements HeLa helped bring to the field of tissue culture. One of the biggest was the standardization of the field, which, at that point, was a bit of a mess. Gey and his colleagues had been complaining that they wasted too much time just making medium and trying to keep cells alive. But more than anything, they worried that since everyone was using different media ingredients, recipes, cells, and techniques, and few knew their peers' methods, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate one another's experiments. And replication is an essential part of science: a discovery isn't considered valid if others can't repeat the work and get the same result. Without standardized materials and methods, they worried that the field of tissue culture would stagnate.

Gey and several colleagues had already organized a committee to develop procedures to "simplify and standardize the technique of tissue culturing." They'd also convinced two fledgling biological supply companies-Microbiological a.s.sociates and Difco Laboratories-to begin producing and selling ingredients for culture media, and taught them the techniques necessary to do so. Those companies had just started selling media ingredients, but cell culturists still had to make the media themselves, and they all used different recipes.

Standardization of the field wasn't possible until several things happened: first, Tuskegee began ma.s.s-producing HeLa; second, a researcher named Harry Eagle at the National Inst.i.tutes of Health (NIH) used HeLa to develop the first standardized culture medium that could be made by the gallon and shipped ready to use; and, third, Gey and several others used HeLa to determine which gla.s.sware and test-tube stoppers were least toxic to cells.

Only then, for the first time, could researchers around the world work with the same cells, growing in the same media, using the same equipment, all of which they could buy and have delivered to their labs. And soon they'd even be able to use the first-ever clones of human cells, something they'd been working toward for years.

Today, when we hear the word clone, we imagine scientists creating entire living animals-like Dolly the famous cloned sheep-using DNA from one parent. But before the cloning of whole animals, there was the cloning of individual cells-Henrietta's cells.

To understand why cellular cloning was important, you need to know two things: First, HeLa didn't grow from one of Henrietta's cells. It grew from a sliver of her tumor, which was a cl.u.s.ter of cells. Second, cells often behave differently, even if they're all from the same sample, which means some grow faster than others, some produce more poliovirus, and some are resistant to certain antibiotics. Scientists wanted to grow cellular clones-lines of cells descended from individual cells-so they could harness those unique traits. With HeLa, a group of scientists in Colorado succeeded, and soon the world of science had not only HeLa but also its hundreds, then thousands, of clones.

The early cell culture and cloning technology developed using HeLa helped lead to many later advances that required the ability to grow single cells in culture, including isolating stem cells, cloning whole animals, and in vitro fertilization. Meanwhile, as the standard human cell in most labs, HeLa was also being used in research that would advance the new field of human genetics.

Researchers had long believed that human cells contained forty-eight chromosomes, the threads of DNA inside cells that contain all of our genetic information. But chromosomes clumped together, making it impossible to get an accurate count. Then, in 1953, a geneticist in Texas accidentally mixed the wrong liquid with HeLa and a few other cells, and it turned out to be a fortunate mistake. The chromosomes inside the cells swelled and spread out, and for the first time, scientists could see each of them clearly. That accidental discovery was the first of several developments that would allow two researchers from Spain and Sweden to discover that normal human cells have forty-six chromosomes.

Once scientists knew how many chromosomes people were supposed to have, they could tell when a person had too many or too few, which made it possible to diagnose genetic diseases. Researchers worldwide would soon begin identifying chromosomal disorders, discovering that patients with Down syndrome had an extra chromosome number 21, patients with Klinefelter syndrome had an extra s.e.x chromosome, and those with Turner syndrome lacked all or part of one.

With all the new developments, demand for HeLa grew, and Tuskegee wasn't big enough to keep up. The owner of Microbiological a.s.sociates-a military man named Samuel Reader-knew nothing about science, but his business partner, Monroe Vincent, was a researcher who understood the potential market for cells. Many scientists needed cells, but few had the time or ability to grow them in large enough quant.i.ties. They just wanted to buy them. So together, Reader and Vincent used HeLa cells as the springboard to launch the first industrial-scale, for-profit cell distribution center.

It started with what Reader lovingly referred to as his Cell Factory. In Bethesda, Maryland, in the middle of a wide-open warehouse that was once a Fritos factory, he built a gla.s.s-enclosed room that housed a rotating conveyor belt with hundreds of test-tube holders built into it. Outside the gla.s.s room, he had a setup much like Tuskegee's, with ma.s.sive vats of culture medium, only bigger. When cells were ready for shipping, he'd sound a loud bell and all workers in the building, including the mailroom clerks, would stop what they were doing, scrub themselves at the sterilization station, grab a cap and gown, and line up at the conveyor belt. Some filled tubes, others inserted rubber stoppers, sealed tubes, or stacked them inside a walk-in incubator where they stayed until being packaged for shipping.

Microbiological a.s.sociates' biggest customers were labs like NIH, which had standing orders for millions of HeLa cells delivered on set schedules. But scientists all over the world could call in orders, pay less than fifty dollars, and Microbiological a.s.sociates would overnight them vials of HeLa cells. Reader had contracts with several major airlines, so whenever he got an order, he'd send a courier with cells to catch the next flight out, then have the cells picked up from the airport and delivered to labs by taxi. Slowly, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials was born.

Reader recruited the top minds in the field to tell him what products they needed most and show him how to make them. One of the scientists who consulted for Reader was Leonard Hayflick, arguably the most famous early cell culturist left in the field today. When I talked with him he said, "Microbiological a.s.sociates and Sam Reader were an absolute revolution in the field, and I'm not one to use the word revolution lightly."

As Reader's business grew, demand for cells from Tuskegee plummeted. The NFIP closed its HeLa production center because places like Microbiological a.s.sociates now supplied scientists with all the cells they needed. And soon, HeLa cells weren't the only ones being bought and sold for research-with media and equipment standardization, culturing became easier, and researchers began growing cells of all kinds. But none grew in quant.i.ties like HeLa.