Immortal

The first lecture on kidney transplant was about perfusion during my conference today. Perfusion – the imperfect art and science of keeping an organ alive after it has been removed from a human body – is striving for vitality of an organ without blood and oxygen supply. The technique isn’t perfect, but hopefully can buy time for the transplant team to find the matched organ transplant recipients. For patients, they can recover quicker with better quality of the kidney organ. For surgeons, they can get some sleep after the first organ recovery surgery, before the second transplant surgery.

The perfusion machine and technology seem promising. Even so, perfusion keeps a donated organ alive outside the body for a finite number of hours. That's why I found the story of immortal human cells of Henrietta Lacks astonishing. Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman who died of an aggressive cervical cancer at the John Hopkins. She could not go elsewhere for treatment in 1951, because that was the only charity hospital accepting black patients at the era of Jim Crow. If Henrietta showed up at white-only hospital, she would have been sent away. At Hopkins, she could at least be segregated in coloured wards, the only place black patients were allowed to go.

To this day no one’s entirely sure why her full-fledged tumour wasn’t picked up when she delivered a baby two months prior to the diagnosis. Not even at the six weeks' return visit postpartum. There’s no way of knowing exactly what happened during her checkups. Rebecca Skloot, who authored a science biography of Henrietta Lacks, wasn't sure, too.

George Gey, head of tissue culture research at Hopkins, had been trying for years to develop the perfect culture medium – not a perfusion machine, not yet – to keep cells growing outside a human body. That means liquid recipe like witches’ brews to feed cells in a test tube or Petri dish. He tried the plasma of chickens, purée of calf fetuses, special salts and blood from human umbilical cords.

Hailed as “the world’s most famous vulture feeding on human specimens”, George Gey drove to local slaughterhouses at least once a week to collect cow foetuses and chicken blood. His ongoing experiment to find the perfect medium was never successful, until he took a sliver of cervix tumour from Henrietta Lacks. George Gey’s assistant dutifully labeled the culture using the first two letters of the patient's first and last names. That means HeLa for Henrietta and Lacks. Unlike other human cells, her cells kept growing and turned not the immortal HeLa cell line.

The success of HeLa cells in scientific contribution is infinite. On the other hand, the tarnished story of biomedical research by exploitation of vulnerable subjects without consent turned out to be a legacy that lasted forever.