Baltimore The Woman Who Never Died

Baltimore The Woman Who Never Died at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, United States. a young mother has left an unsuspected mark Texts of poems to make you think, unusual stories, Images, videos to make you travel. welcome to my blog

,,,01,,, Baltimore The Woman Who Never Died

,,,01,,, It all started in February 1951

in the research department on human tissue culture

at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, United States.

The professor in charge of this service is Doctor George Otto Gey.

With his wife, they've been trying for over 20 years,

in vain, to maintain cancer cells in culture in order to be able to study them.

Mission impossible, due to the low number of divisions,

the cell line grown outside of a human body

ended up extinguishing to the despair of the research couple.

In a room at Hopkins hospital reserved for blacks

(we are in the midst of racial segregation in the USA),

we present to Professor Gey a young mother

31 year old who comes for treatment

a malignant tumor in the cervix detected eight days earlier.

She is treated, like all the sick of the time,

radium. The gynecologist who follows her takes

a sample of his tumor and shows it to Dr. Gey.

The latter analyzes cancer cells

collected and then made an extraordinary discovery.

Not only are they immortal, but they proliferate without limit.

It is the presence of a particular enzyme

in the cells of Henrietta Lacks,

and which has not been found anywhere else,

which accelerates uncontrolled proliferation

by successive divisions. This discovery

was of great interest to George Otto Gey

because he could not only cultivate

human cells in vitro, but also

distribute them to other laboratories.

They were called HeLa cells (for Henrietta Lacks).

This cell line is,

at present,

the standard line for all cancer studies

and cell biology performed on human cells.

So all scientists work with these cells,

from the body of Henrietta Lacks.

They will even have made a stay in space

to find out if human cells could survive in the absence of gravity.

Today, the current number of HeLa cells available

around the world exceeds the number of cells present in the human body

(about one hundred trillion cells in an adult man).

You will understand, these are the cells of Henrietta Lacks

who have become immortal and not her.

Because if his cells were thriving at full speed

in the test tubes, they did the same in his body.

Henrietta died on October 5, 1951 from generalized cancer.

But this story does not end there and poses many

ethical questions starting with the fact

that the cells were originally collected

without permission from the patient or her family.

Then, and even if everyone can have

on this point a very personal answer,

one can wonder if cells taken from an individual,

and which therefore contain his DNA, always belong to him post-mortem?

The question was put to the California Supreme Court

who ruled that this was not the case and that therefore

Henrietta Lacks' cells could

be freely distributed and marketed.



Such herietta what will remain of me post mortem

will definitely be this blog

Only thing that will probably stay before

that computing and the internet in turn dies.



In any case, if you feel like it don't hesitate to share this article

to keep this blog alive, Thank you for reading me big kisses.