Research: HeLa Cells

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HeLa Cells in Medical Research and Bioethics

Used in scientific research, the HeLa cells are known to be a type of immortal, tissue cultured cell line. A cell line is a group of cells taken from a person and used for scientific research (science.howstuffworks.com). When a cell type is known to be immortal, it refers to the cells being able to divide an indefinite amount of times, when cell survival conditions are met in a laboratory. The first human cell line to survive in a test tube, or in vitro, was the HeLa cells (science.howstuffworks.com). These cells were taken from a tissue of a tumor of a woman with cervical cancer back in the 1950s. Her name was Henrietta Lacks. There have been many advances in medicine and biomedical research because of her cells.

An African-American woman, Henrietta Lacks lived in Virginia, where she grew tobacco (www.smithsonianmag.com). At the age of thirty, she developed cancer. She had a husband and five children, whom she left orphaned when she died at thirty-one (www.esciencecentral.org). She received aggressive treatment, for that time, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, which was one of the only hospitals willing to accept African-American patients. While undergoing treatments, a physician removed a small tissue sample of a tumor and sent it for testing, without her knowledge. It was not that uncommon for things such as that to occur back then. While she may have signed and acknowledged her treatments, the removal of that tissue was not part of it. Once a sample had been removed from a patient, whether by surgery or biopsy, it was no longer considered to belong to the patient, and could be used and...

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...res or treatments. It just goes to show how important HeLa cells have been to medicine and researches.

Reference Page

Callaway, Ewen (07 August 2013). Deal done over HeLa cell line. Nature. Retrieved from www.nature.com/news/deal-done-over-hela-cell-line-1.13511

HeLa. (Wikipedia). Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

Berhanu, Alamin (2013). Reflection on Henrietta Lack’s Legacy. Biosafety & Health Education. Retrieved from www.esciencecentral.org/journals/reflection-on-henrietta-lackslegacy-jbhe.1000106.pdf

Zielinski, Sarah (22 January 2010). Cracking The Code of The Human Genome. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved from www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/henrietta-lacks-immortal-cells-6421299/?no-ist

Freeman, Shanna. How HeLa Cells Work. howstuffworks. Retrieved from science.howstuffworks.com/life/cellular-microscopic/hela-cell.htm

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