With the cells named HeLa, most of the world had no idea that it was the biological property of a Virginia mother who changed the world. Henrietta Lacks was the key that unlocked the door, leading to decades of medical advancements, including developments in the treatment of polio, Parkinsons, influenza, leukemia, and many more. For decades, scientists there had been trying to grow a cell line on which the medical industry could experiment in ways that they couldn’t do with living people. Without the knowledge of Henrietta or her family, tissue from the tumor that killed her was taken from her body and essentially made immortal at Johns Hopkins. In 1951, after having five children, Lacks discovered that she had cervical cancer, from which she would pass away at a tragically young age of 31. What’s even more fascinating about her story is that she didn’t even know how much good she would do in the world after she died. The lessons learnt from Henrietta are proving instrumental in developing policies and still empowering scientists in multiple ways.Henrietta Lacks is one of those people who greatly impacted your life and you don’t even know her name. These samples hold keys to ground-breaking research, innovation and discovery, and public confidence and trust are key to this process. Medical research is making exciting progress, but is highly reliant on the use of samples of biological material. Researchers today follow much stricter standards the rules of informed consent and privacy of information are very clearly laid out and each country has its own laws and codes of ethics to protect the donors. In 2013, Henrietta's family were granted a say over controlled access to the DNA sequence for research.Ī lot of work has been undertaken in the past few decades in terms of bioethics. This also started much needed discussions around ethical considerations and safeguarding the donors and their families.
#The immortal life of henrietta lacks torrent movie
The story came to broader public attention in 2010 with the publishing of Rebecca Skloot’s book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, which was later released as a documentary movie in 2017. Her family were not even aware of the existence of these cells till 1973. When Henrietta’s cells were taken from her body, the doctors did not ask for permission or consent from her or the family, which was not uncommon at the time. Henrietta’s extraordinary case didn’t only revolutionise medical science, but also transformed the field of biomedical ethics and informed consent. As the world faces the Covid-19 pandemic, HeLa cells are being used in multiple ways to develop diagnostic tests and to understand the interactions between this deadly virus and human cells. These cells are still growing robustly and being used routinely. Perhaps even more strikingly, HeLa cells were the first human cells to go into space in 1960, even before Yuri Gagarin (the first human to orbit the Earth) and, since then, they have been on several other space missions. HeLa cells appear in more than 111,000 scientific publications and more than 17,000 patents, and have led to countless breakthroughs, including two Nobel prizes. One of the earliest use for these cells was the pioneering research of Jonas Salk, who developed the first polio vaccine in 1953. They can be found in just about every biological laboratory in the world, and have been used for research on almost every disease. Nearly 70 years later these cells have now lived twice as long outside Henrietta’s body than they lived inside it.
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