Henrietta Lacks, the immortal woman (Part 1/2)

renzoarg (68)in #science • 7 years ago (edited)

It'd been a year since she felt something inside her, but, since she was pregnant of her 5th son she did not worry about it. Four months after giving birth, the pain was still there topping it off with constant bleeding. She walked into the Johns Hopkins Hospital, without knowing that she just took her first step into the path of immortality.

Henrietta Lacks - Source: http://ictr.johnshopkins.edu

The Johns Hopkins Hospital was a renowned place, but it wasn't able to dodge being part of the reflection of that era, perhaps one of the most cruel and tangible possible reflections: where the color of the skin determined whether a patient could become a valid guinea pig.

Even when it was the only public Hospital that took care of Black people in Baltimore, they still had a special wing so that they would not mix with the white patients. It was there where a nurse took Henrietta to a Doctor, where he found a hard and eroded mass in her cervix that bled at the slightest touch. Henrietta had Cancer. This kind of news, as usually happened within that ethnic group with any kind of health problem: reached the director of the Tissue Culture Laboratory in the Hospital, George Gey, that was mesmerized by the idea of immortalizing cells (along with his wife, that also did a lot of work!)

The obsession for cultures came from another obsession, the search for immortality. They dreamed about manipulating cells outside their bodies and watch them grow with nothing stopping them. If it can be done in a piece of glass, why not in the body of ill patients? What if we could implant new cells into them and "refurbish" them to be good as new? That kind of ideas was really trendy at that moment and were exposed by the mass media: As it usually happens when the media gets involved, it generated a totally wrong idea, premature and with no evidence of any kind of concept. Any resemblance with homeopathic "medicine" is a mere coincidence.

At that moment it was possible to study human cells out of their individuals they belonged to, but only for a few days; because, those cells died. What was being looked for, researched, was a cellular line that would divide, split, constantly; coming all originally from the exact same original one. They saw this as an alternative to test several treatments against countless amount of pathologies, basically: because that would remove the need of patients to experiment on! There was way too many cases of "accidents" where people died during medical tests.

By Dr. B. C. Brown (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain]

Gey nicknamed himself a "vulture", one that fed on humans nearly constantly. We are talking about a medics believed that since the patients were given a free treatment, it justified the use of them as guinea pigs in exchange. It was said that the Johns Hopkins Hospital would never run out of "materials" to work, given the high density of non-white population that went there. Lovely place to go get some ABs at!

Correction: Lovely place go get some antibiotics, being black.

Henrietta was told about her status and the treatment started. She was sedated and first (without her consent! ... You know, "consent is a white thing") they clipped a piece of tumor and stored it in a piece of glass.

In what was an immoral act, a revolution in cellular biology started.

Those little bits of Henrietta reached Mr. & Mrs. Gey, that had invented their own cultivation method with chicken blood plasma, calf fetus extract, salts and blood that came from human umbilical cords.

At this point, allow me to remark that if this worked, imagine what the ones that didn't were!

They cutted pieced of tumor in even smaller pieces and cultivated them. As they always did, they tagged it with the first characters of the patient's name. From that moment, and forever, Henrietta Lacks would become "HeLa".