Great lives
Henrietta Lacks and the cells that built modern medicine
12 min
How cells taken without consent from a dying woman became immortal in the lab and powered decades of breakthroughs, while her family got nothing.
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Show notes
Surgeons at Johns Hopkins harvested tissue from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent during cancer treatment.
HeLa cells are functionally immortal because the telomerase enzyme constantly rebuilds their protective DNA caps.
Aggressive HeLa growth allowed the cells to survive on dust particles and contaminate other laboratory cultures.
Mass production of HeLa cells enabled Jonas Salk to develop the polio vaccine in the nineteen fifties.
The Lacks family remained unaware of the cells' existence for over two decades after Henrietta's death.
A twenty twenty-three settlement with Thermo Fisher addressed the economic disparity between biotech profits and family poverty.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Biopsy in Room 102 min
- 3The Miracle of HeLa3 min
- 4The Engine of Modern Medicine3 min
- 5The Cost of Progress3 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - PMC - NIH
- Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Transcript
- BBC Audio | Witness History | The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks
- The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks | Johns Hopkins Medicine
- Episode 70 Henrietta Lacks: HeLa, There, & Everywhere – This Podcast Will Kill You
- The Story of HeLa and Henrietta Lacks — Genetics Unzipped
- Henrietta's Tumor - Transcript
- SYSK Selects: How HeLa Cells Work - Stuff You Should Know | iHeart
- Henrietta Lacks — BIOETHICS FOR THE PEOPLE
- Life After Death: Henrietta Lacks
- Novartis settles with Henrietta Lacks' estate over use of her cancer cells to advance medicine | PBS News
- Henrietta Lacks
- ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’
- Johns Hopkins Magazine -- April 2000
- Henrietta Lacks, MSA SC 3520-16887
- HeLa
- A Troubled Past? Reassessing Ethics in the History of Tissue Culture
- Impact of HeLa Cells on Biomedical Research - Office of Science Policy
- Who was Henrietta Lacks? Here's how HeLa cells became ...
- Henrietta Lacks and the Controversy Behind Immortal HeLa Cells
- Henrietta Lacks:
- The Importance of HeLa Cells | Johns Hopkins Medicine
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