The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lax

The name of Henrietta Lax, a poor black woman from Virginia, has been written in medical textbooks, and her "immortal" cells have been used for decades for extremely important medical purposes. Who is Henrietta Lax, whose centenary was marked by the world last weekend?

This African-American woman from a poor family, originally from Virginia, who grew up on tobacco plantations, was diagnosed with cervical cancer at the beginning of 1951, when she was 30 years old. She was treated at "Jones Hopkins" because it was the nearest hospital that received African-American patients. During the examination, doctor Howard Jones took a sample of the growth from Henrietta's cervix and sent it to the pathological laboratory, where it was soon determined that it was cancer cells, a malignant epidermoid.

She was referred for radiation, and during the treatment, two more cell samples were taken from her and handed over to the American scientist of German origin, George Otto Gay. At that time, Otto Gay founded the Laboratory for Tissue Cultures and designed several devices that helped laboratory cell culture, so he began to "grow" cancer cells from Henrietta's cervix.
Unlike previous attempts to grow cells, which he managed to keep alive for only a few days, Gay discovered that some of Henrietta's cells were constantly growing and not dying after a few divisions, so he managed to create a cell line by multiplying them. In October 1951, Henrietta Lax died of cancer that metastasized throughout the body, but her cells formed from a tissue sample are still multiplying, living and dying in the laboratory. The chain of these cells has become immortal - it has been maintained for decades and is known as the HeLa cell line.

Apart from the fact that the data on the cultivation of immortal cells is fascinating, the essence of their cultivation is that they are used for numerous medical tests. In the following years, for example, they were used to make a vaccine for polio, which was tested on them. Then, HeLa cells were the first human cells to be successfully cloned in 1955, and at that time they were already in mass production and researchers were increasingly looking for them. They were used to examine AIDS, the effects of various drugs and chemicals, then cancer and a number of other diseases.

Thanks to them, the scientific community has obtained about 11,000 patents and about 20 tons of HeLa cells have been grown to date. Although it is not even known exactly where the grave site where Henrietta Lax was buried is, it is written on the subsequently placed tombstone that her immortal cells will continue to help humanity forever.

George Otto Gay also died of cancer. According to data from Rebecca Sklut's book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lax", when doctors tried to operate on him, he asked them to save a piece of liver tissue affected by cancer in order to grow it and save it for research as a new cell line.

However, the doctors did not listen to him, and during the operation, they concluded that the cancer had metastasized so much that it was not possible to operate on the patient.