195 1 year, henrietta lacks died at the age of 3 1 year. But her infinitely divided cells and her name remain in this world forever. In a sense, this is actually a kind of "eternal life".
At present, her cells have been brought to laboratories all over the world, and they have been cultured in large quantities and replicated indefinitely. Strictly speaking, it is difficult to count how many such cells exist at present.
But scientists still preliminarily estimate that if her cells are concentrated now, they can weigh 50 million tons, equivalent to 100 Empire State Building. These cells can circle the earth three times together.
/kloc-in October, Henrietta went to a cancer clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She didn't realize that she would get eternal life in a sense.
Without her knowledge or consent, Howard Jones, her surgeon, took a tissue biopsy of her cancerous uterus and gave it to George Otto Gay.
George Otto Gay, a physician and cancer researcher in a Baltimore hospital, was shocked by the ability of cells to replicate in laboratory culture.
Under normal circumstances, normal cells cultured by human beings will die within a few days after the cells divide to a certain number. This process is called aging. Normal cells can divide 56 times, which is the so-called hayflick upper limit.
This poses a problem for researchers, because experiments using normal cells cannot be repeated on the same cells, and the same cells cannot be used for extended research.
The same is true of cancer cells isolated in the past, and the number of divisions is limited. But Henrietta's cancer cells are constantly dividing, and as long as these cells get the right nutritional combination, they can grow indefinitely.
Henrietta's cancer cells became the first human "cell line" established in culture. The researchers named these cells, HeLa cells, after the first two letters of her name.
Researchers believe that the reason why Hella cells do not suffer from programmed death is that they maintain a kind of telomerase, which can prevent the gradual shortening of chromosome telomeres, which are related to aging and death.
The main reason why these cells can produce telomerase is that these cells mutate due to human papillomavirus infection.
Since then, Hella cell has become the most widely used human cell line in biological research and played a key role in many biomedical breakthroughs in the past half century.
This cell line was originally used for cancer research, but Hella cell has brought many medical breakthroughs, with nearly 65,438+0.65,438+0.00 million patents and 70,000 research papers using Hella cell. Five related studies also won the Nobel Prize.
For example, Jonas Salk used Hella cells to develop polio vaccine in 1954, and AIDS researchers used Hella cells to identify and isolate human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1980s.
In 2008, Harald zur Hausen led a research on the connection between human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, and shared the Nobel Prize with Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, the discoverers of HIV.
The second is to study the role of telomerase in preventing chromosome degeneration. In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn, carol greider and Jack Szostak won the Nobel Prize.
In recent years, Hela cells have played a key role in the "omics" revolution from genomics to transcriptomics and protein's genomics.
Hella cells are also used to test the effects of radiation, cosmetics, toxins and other chemicals on human cells. They have played an important role in gene mapping and the study of human diseases, especially cancer.
However, the most important practical application of HeLa cells may be the development of the first polio vaccine. In H 1952, Jonas Salk tested his polio vaccine on these cells and produced it in large quantities.
Although Haila cell line has brought amazing scientific breakthroughs, these cells will also bring problems. The most important problem of HeLa cells is that it will cause serious pollution to other cell cultures in the laboratory.
Many studies on contaminated cell lines have to be abandoned. Some scientists refused to let HeLa cells into their laboratory to control other research projects from being affected.
Another problem of Hella cell is that it has no normal human karyotype, that is, the number and appearance of chromosomes in the cell. Henrietta Lachs herself, like other humans, has 46 chromosomes, which are diploid, that is, 23 pairs of chromosomes.
However, the genome of HeLa cells has 76 to 80 chromosomes, which is a triploid, including 22 to 25 abnormal chromosomes. The extra chromosomes come from human papillomavirus.
Although HeLa cells are similar to normal human cells in many ways, they are no longer normal human cells, and they are constantly evolving. Some people think that these cells are not entirely human, but belong to a microorganism.
Therefore, their use is limited.
In any case, Hela cells are still lying quietly in major laboratories around the world, multiplying indefinitely and doubling within 24 hours. These cells are truly "immortalized cells".
Henrietta Lachs has also become an "immortal" figure in human history.