HeLa Cells: Are They Important?

           Cancer is a growing disease throughout the world, causing more than one million deaths per year in the United States alone.  In order to decrease the number of deaths, and possibly prevent them altogether, research needs to take place.  For many years, researchers have been using cells called “HeLa cells” to perform their research on cancer.  These HeLa cells are a very important contribution to researchers, not only for advancements in cancer, but also for advancements in other fields.  They helped create the first polio vaccination, were tested in outer space, used for understanding cancer cells, and are continued to be used in most research. 

These cells were not concocted in a laboratory; they were extracted from a woman suffering from cancer named Henrietta Lacks.  Henrietta Lacks was a poor African-American woman infected with cervical cancer at the age of thirty.  While she was receiving treatment at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the doctors took some of her tumor cells without her knowledge.  The researchers soon found out that the tumor cells of Henrietta Lacks could be kept alive and grown.  The fact that they could grow and replicate was extremely shocking and they were deemed “immortal”.  “They can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists” (Zielinski, 2010).  In fact, the now called “HeLa cells” were being sold to other researchers across the world for millions of dollars.  Since these cells were being sold all over the world, most researchers used the “immortal” cells in their studies, allowing for great advancements to occur.  Even though the selling of Henrietta Lacks’ cells for profit could be considered unethical by many, without the spread of her cells to other scientists, some of the advancements in science might not have occurred.

The first great advancement in the sciences that involved the cells of Henrietta Lacks was the creation of the polio vaccine.  “Jonas Salk used HeLa cells to grow the polio virus and he tested the vaccine on HeLa cells before its use on human in 1955” (Cantwell, 2010).  It was not until he had used HeLa cells that his vaccine began to work, therefore, if these immortal cells had never been harvested, it would have taken several more years to create a polio vaccine.  It is also possible that without HeLa cells; there would still be no polio vaccine.  Henrietta’s cells were also used in “…helping to develop medicines to fight cancer, the flu and Parkinson’s disease, and in the research that led to gene mapping and cloning.  They were used to test the effects of atomic radiation and sent into outer space” (Claiborne, 2010).  Without the existence of HeLa cells, all of these advancements would have occurred at a much later date or not at all.  The cells of Henrietta Lacks’ are definitely the most influential in the science world because they have been used to acquire enormous amounts of knowledge, allowing the world to become much more advanced.