The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Soon after Henrietta’s death, researchers begin to plan for a massive operation that will produce trillions of HeLa cells in order to help cure polio. At the end of 1951, the world is in the throes of the biggest polio epidemic in history. In February 1952, Jonas Salk announces that he’s developed a polio vaccine, but he needs to test it on a large scale. This will require an enormous number of cell cultures. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NIFP) begins to organize the largest field trial ever. They plan to inoculate two million children and then test their blood to see if they’re immune. This process, however, will require millions of tests in which blood serum from the vaccinated children is mixed with live poliovirus plus cells in culture. Should the vaccine work, the blood serum from the children will protect the cultured cells. Until now, however, the cultured cells have come from expensive monkeys, which must be killed in order to harvest their cells.

The NFIP turns to cell culture experts—including George Gey—to help find these cells. Gey recognizes how valuable an opportunity this is, as the NFIP is well funded, and cell culturists have wanted to produce cells on an industrial scale for years. HeLa is the perfect resource for Gey to offer to the NFIP.

Rebecca explains the difference between HeLa and other human cells. Most cells in culture grow in a single layer on their culture, running out of space quickly. HeLa cells, however, don’t need a glass surface to grow. They can grow suspended in a culture medium without any surface at all. In 1951, this meant that if HeLa was susceptible to poliovirus, scientists would be able to test the vaccine on it.

In April 1952, George Gey and a colleague from the NFIP advisory committee named William Scherer try infecting Henrietta’s cells with polio. As it happens, HeLa is in fact more susceptible to the virus than most cultured cells—in other words, it is exactly what the NFIP has been seeking.

George Gey knows that if he is going to be mass-producing cells, he will also need a new way to ship them. On Memorial Day, Gey tests a new way for the HeLa cells to travel, putting them in tubes with culture medium and packing them in a tin filled with ice. He then gives them to Mary Kubicek, who ships them to William Scherer in Minnesota. The cells arrive four days later, and begin to grow in an incubator—this is the first time that live cells have ever been shipped via mail.

The NFIP hears about HeLa and contracts William Scherer to create a HeLa Distribution Center at the Tuskegee Institute, “one of the most prestigious black universities in the country.” They choose this organization because of Charles Bynum, who is the director of “Negro Activities” for the foundation. A scientist, an activist, and “the first black foundation executive in the country,” Bynum wants to put the HeLa center there because of the opportunities and funding it will provide for young black scientists. The Tuskegee staff eventually expands to thirty-five, and produces twenty thousand tubes of HeLa every week.

HeLa helps scientists to prove that the Salk vaccine works, and the New York Times runs an article about “Negro Scientists,” mentioning HeLa. Rebecca notes the significance of “black scientists and technicians, many of them women, us[ing] cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white.”

Soon HeLa cells are available for sale, and any scientist can buy them for ten dollars. Although Henrietta’s cells are cancerous, they function similarly to normal cells, and react to many stimuli in the same way. HeLa quickly becomes widespread, used in labs internationally.

The timing, the Rebecca comments, is “perfect.” Scientists in the early fifties were just beginning to research viruses, and HeLa helps them to study how different types of viruses infect cells and reproduce. HeLa essentially helps create the field of virology. Scientists also use HeLa to research methods for freezing cells without killing them, enabling humans to send cells around the world and store them in between experiments. They can also freeze cells at different intervals during an experiment so that they can compare identical cells at different points in time. They hope that freezing cells will allow them to understand how normal cells become malignant, a process called “spontaneous transformation.”

HeLa also brings about standardization within the field of tissue culture. Before HeLa, different researchers used different “ingredients, recipes, cells, and techniques,” making it difficult to replicate each other’s experiments. Gey and his colleagues had created a committee to standardize techniques, but momentum doesn’t pick up until “Tuskegee [begins] mass-producing HeLa.” This standardization allows researchers to “work with the same cells, growing in the same media, using the same equipment.”

Scientists also use HeLa to advance their research in cellular cloning. Rebecca explains that HeLa did not grow from one of Henrietta’scells, but from a cluster of tumorous cells. Different “cells often behave differently, even if they’re all from the same sample.” Researchers want to grow lines from single individual cells so that they can compare different behaviors. Using HeLa, a group of scientists succeeds.

The cloning advances developed using HeLa lead directly to the ability to isolate stem cells, clone entire animals, and use in vitro fertilization. HeLa also powers the field of human genetics, when in 1953, a geneticist in Texas mistakenly mixes HeLa with the wrong liquid. This accident causes the chromosomes within the cell to swell and spread, allowing scientists to differentiate between them and count them. Eventually researchers are able to discover that “normal human cells have forty-six chromosomes.”

These developments eventually outgrow the TuskegeeInstitute’s production mechanism. At this point, a biotech company called Microbiological Associates gets involved. Its owners decide to use HeLa cells to create “the first industrial-scale, for-profit cell distribution center, creating a “Cell Factory,” located in Bethesda, Maryland. The biggest customers for this business are labs like NIH (National Institutes of Health), but scientists worldwide can call in orders at under fifty dollars.

Owner Samuel Reader recruits top scientists “to tell him what products they needed most and show him how to make them.” These scientists include Leonard Hayflick, who recalls the “revolution” that Microbiological Associates created within the field. Soon, researchers begin growing all different kinds of cells for research purposes. But none grow as fast as HeLa.

During the Cold War, researchers use HeLa to study the effects of radiation, and to see what will happen to cells at extreme conditions like spaceflight. Pharmaceutical companies use them to test drugs. Scientists “cut HeLa cells in half to show that cells could live on after their nuclei had been removed,” and test the effects of “steroids, chemotherapy drugs, hormones, vitamins, and environmental stress,” as well as many viruses or bacteria.

George Gey himself uses HeLa to study hemorrhagic fever, and to see if the cells will cause cancer in rats. For the most part, however, he tries to move on from HeLa, but the effects of the cell culture are inescapable. He spends much of his time traveling around the world “to help set up cell-culture facilities.”

Many of George Gey’scolleagues feel that he should publish research papers on HeLa so that he can be credited for his innovation, but he always claims to be too busy. After much prodding from Mary Kubicek and Margaret Gey, he finally writes a short abstract. Subsequently, Margaret begins simply writing and submitting his work for him.

As tissue culture continues to grow as a field, George Gey becomes tired of the “the widespread fixation on HeLa,” complaining to a friend and colleague, Charles Pomerat, that scientists are using HeLa for research that he could be doing. Pomerat replies that there is no way to restrict the use of HeLa, and he adds that Gey should have finished his own HeLa research before releasing it. Rebecca adds that “as soon as HeLa became ‘general scientific property,’ people started wondering about the woman behind the cells.”