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HeLa Cell Line Genome Data To Be Published
ananyo writes "Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, has brokered a deal with the family of Henrietta Lacks to release the genetic sequence of the HeLa cell line to researchers. The HeLa cell line was established in 1951 from a biopsy of a cervical tumour taken from Henrietta Lacks, a working-class African-American woman living near Baltimore. The cells were taken without the knowledge or permission of her or her family, and they became the first human cells to grow well in a lab. They contributed to the development of a polio vaccine, the discovery of human telomerase and countless other advances. Controversy erupted earlier this year after researchers published the sequence without the permission of the Lacks family. In a Q&A with the journal Nature, Collins explains how the deal was reached."
From all the money they earned with Henrietta's intellectual property, I mean.
Do I put Henrietta getting cancer down in the "good" column, or the "evil" column...?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lMrp_ySg8
They just happened to be Henrietta's. The real stars here are the people who conducted the research and actually did the work.
I mean, if someone used my cells to do something incredible for science, I don't feel like I am particularly deserving of any credit. Those cells have nothing to do with me as a person or my actions.
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The biger achievemnt here is not the genome, but the fact that we can work over legacy issues with the family and resolve those in an amicable way. The HeLa cell line (and probably many other lines) where established at time when taking patient consent for using clinical samples in research was not an established procedure. Since then we have learned a lot and accumulated huge amouts of data using HeLa and similar cell lines. So resolving the ethical issues from the past is quite important.
What is quite fascinating is that having its genome sequenced is probably not as big of a deal as it would have bee five or ten years ago. It no longer takes a lot of effort or money to sequence the genome of a cell. These days it won't even make a grad student project. Besides, there is no such thing as one HeLa genome. These cells have been cultured for so long by so many labs that genomic rearrangements, mutations and epigenetic modifications have piled up to produce "breads" with somewhat different genomes and properties. I recall a student in our lab testing several of these "breads" to find out that an experiment will produce different result depending on which lab we sourced the cell line from.
Unless we're trying to sensationalize. We're already doing straight copypasta from TFA for the Slashdot summaries, so I guess we have to spice things up.
What do the editors do other than play Doom and eat cheetos and click 'Approve' on lousy submissions?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Tissue samples taken from your body, are not your property.
Also, Ms. Lacks is long dead, why does anyone care what her family says about anything? They aren't their cells.
It is being locked down after decades of being used in countless research projects. The family wants to protect their privacy, so the data is actually being locked down, not opened up as TFS implies. The data has been out there and only small parts of it are now going to be shared with researchers with a need to know.
... and that is:
The line of cells that was used for decades to develop drugs and treatments, and do other research, were not "normal" human cells at all, but cancer cells.
It wasn't until relatively recently that some scientists pointed out that maybe they weren't such a suitable medium for a lot of the research that had been done in the past.
To me is that essentially a part of Henrietta is still alive after all these years, you can't get this kind of genetic immortality through children.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I suppose this is as good a time as any to humbly encourage anyone who's benefited from research on Ms Lacks' stolen cells (all of you) to donate to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which attemps to right the wrongs of the past by providing education and medical care to the descendants of Ms. Lacks.
http://henriettalacksfoundation.org/
I learned about the HeLa cell line recently, because I've begun working with them. In the field, they are a sort of de-facto standard. It's amazing that the culture of her tumor has lived this long –– far longer than it took to kill its host –– in fact for decades more. Henrietta Lacks deserves respect and remembrance for her unwitting gift to humankind, which arose from her own personal tragedy.
Fun fact: There are cancers that one can "catch" from another infected individual. If you are a Tasmanian devil, Syrian hamster, or sexually promiscuous dog, that is.
See the Wiki or Harper's mag for details. http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/contagious-cancer/ –– Don't like pay-walls? Go to your local library!
I started reading the title to this post and initially got helium-lanthanum cell line and thought it was a battery story until I got to genome.
As a Personal Genome Project participant, I have a cell line at Coriell that anyone with $80 to spare can order. These days, they just infect your cells with Epstein-Barr, and instant immortality.
Why were the family concerns considered worth blocking research over? I find it unbelievable that an individual would be thought to "own" their dna.
I've seen comments on this article saying the researches deserve the credit for the work they did.
It's true, they do.
However you have to remember that these cells were part of a human being, a person. They're part of what ended their life, it's what killed them.
If you liked it to a criminal who killed someone, but then managed to do something for the scientific community, do we ignore the victim?
No it's not even quite the same, but I wanted to grab your attention for a moment with the fact that a young women died because of this.
She managed to leave humanity a gift without knowing it in her passing. They're still her cells, that we have kept alive.
So we need to have respect for her remains, as that's what they are. I'm sure all of us would like to know the next generation would honor our remains
if we were killed by something like that, a senseless death if you will. At least something came of it.
So yes, I believe she deserves credit as well. As they are part of her body, part of her being, continuing to help us.
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Consent was not required then, and now , the California supreme court decided that for medical waste *no* consent was required. In fact the cell could be harvested today without their consent. Where it begins to be an ethical problem is when the genome for the cell are published, genome they share and could negatively impact them if something special is found in it.
But the bigger asshole were the journalist/press which within years revealed the true name of the family. At least the scientist had the forsight to give it a random name starting with He and La.
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