HeLa

Well, not always, but if the cell line is immortal, so it keeps dividing forever and basically doesn't degrade or die off, they can.

So, of course, the most famous example is the HeLa cells that were taken from a cervical cancer patient named Henrietta Lacks in 1951.

They're still used widely in labs today.

Of course, they were taken without her consent, and that was common practice at the time.

But it does raise pretty serious ethical questions when it comes to things like exploitation of black patients and the genetic privacy of Henrietta Lacks and her family.

Now, her original tumor sample has been dividing ever since that first sample.

And cell banks and suppliers ship out vials of HeLa cells to labs everywhere and Estimates put the total mass of HeLa cells that have grown since 1951 at somewhere in the tens of tons.

Wow.

With my doctorate, my lens really expanded, and I thought that I needed to do more for things locally, but nationally and internationally, I worked closely with the Henry Lacks family.

specifically looking at the HeLa cell, but meaningly kind of getting the word out how people need to get screwed.

Locally, again, I just talked about that, just helping people on the bedside and helping patients get services.

But I do a lot of international work now.

And she never knew the scale of her impact.

Henrietta's cells, otherwise known as HeLa, became the foundation of modern biomedical science.

They contributed to the polio vaccine, cancer research, gene mapping, IVF, AIDS research, COVID-19 studies, and countless medical breakthroughs.

Her cells traveled the world, but her name did not.

has come across to you in a way that feels disrespectful.

And this was all in the context of whether the DNA sequence of HeLa cells, which are the cells derived from Henrietta Lacks, were going to be posted publicly or not.

And that sequence would contain within it some information about her relatives.

So people did have a stake in this.

Gay gave her cells a code name.

He called them HeLa cells.

It was like H-E for Henrietta and then L-A for Lax.

HeLa cells.

He's like, no, no, no.

So literally though, like nobody else knew Henrietta's identity.

Great, you know? Is it? I don't know, Paul.

Great.

And You know, I'll give the cardiac analog.

There's still a lot of folks who are using Cho and HeLa cells transfected with cardiac ion channels for their own drug discovery pipelines in industry.

Where I'm saying, hello, we have a human cardiomyocyte that you can use instead.

It's actually, it's not an adult cardiomyocyte, but it's better than a Cho or HeLa cell for cardiac drug discovery.

Yeah.

So how do you how do you approach that? Like when you're telling people that you're an IPS biologist and you're telling people that this is what you do, like how do you you know, how do you like spread the good word about these cells?