Can humans really achieve immortality? Let's start with HeLa cells

"Eternal life" has always been an important dream of mankind. Of course, this does not refer to immortality in the spiritual sense, but to living forever in the literal sense.

Telomeres exist at the ends of chromosomes in eukaryotic organisms. During the replication process, telomeres are constantly worn out and eventually consumed. As a result, cells can no longer divide and instead die. Due to this physical limitation, it seems impossible for humans to achieve literal immortality. However, there are exceptions to everything.

XX chromosome with protruding telomeres. Copyright image. Reproduction may cause copyright disputes.

An immortal cell

The most famous exception to this question is "HeLa" - not Norse mythology, nor the Marvel Universe, but a group of cells. In fact, the HeLa cell line is the first and most famous immortal cell line. It comes from a person named Henrietta Lacks. She is an African-American woman who was born in Virginia, USA on August 1, 1920.

Kadir Nelson's painting of Henrietta Lacks, now in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Photo credit: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

The story begins in 1951. That year, Lux was 31 years old. She knew she couldn't put it off any longer. She had to see a doctor.

She had felt something was wrong with her body for a long time. She felt like something was growing in her uterus, and she was often in pain and bleeding. At first, she thought she was just pregnant. However, the situation was getting worse. She had to go to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for help - the only hospital in the area that could treat black patients. After examining her, the doctor told her that it might be cancer.

Lux then underwent treatment during which doctors removed some cell samples from her cervix—something now generally believed to have been taken without Lux’s permission, or at least her knowledge—and sent them to George Otto Gey, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

Lux herself stopped the treatment. She was a poor woman whose family made a living by growing tobacco. She gave birth to her first child at the age of 14, and then gave birth to three more. She could not afford the cost of cancer treatment. However, in early August, she fell into severe pain and had to stay in the hospital. Two months later, she died in pain. The subsequent autopsy showed that the cancer cells had metastasized throughout her body.

Soon, she was buried in a corner of the family cemetery. There was not even a tombstone. She was just an ordinary member of the thousands of black women who died silently at that time.

But Guy observed some unusual signs: the cancer cells taken from Lux seemed immortal. Before this, medical researchers from all over the world had sampled many human cancer cells. Although these cells can survive and divide normally under laboratory culture conditions, they still adhere to the limitations of telomeres and die after a certain number of divisions. Therefore, researchers need to constantly obtain new samples.

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However, these cervical cancer cells from Lacks have a magical ability to maintain the length of telomeres, thus breaking the limit of cell division. More importantly, these cells divide very quickly, doubling in number about every 20 to 24 hours, far exceeding other cells in the laboratory at the time. Guy immediately realized the great value of this group of cells in medical research. As usual, he used the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks' name as the code name for this group of cells, which is the famous Hela cell line.

HeLa cell line contributes to human

Guy sent samples of the HeLa cell line to some medical research colleagues. Later, the HeLa cell line was commercialized and became an indispensable tool in medical research. American virologist Jonas Edward Salk used the HeLa cell line when studying the world's first safe and effective polio vaccine. The HeLa cell line plays an important role in various other medical research and biosafety studies.

Someone has counted that there are more than 10,000 patents related to the HeLa cell line alone, and as many as 60,000 related scientific research projects. Someone has estimated that from 1951 to the present, all the HeLa cells that have ever existed may weigh 50 million tons. If converted into the weight of an adult, it may be equivalent to half of the population of China...

Since her death, more than 50 million tons of cells produced by the HeLa cell line have been used worldwide. Image source: Wikipedia

Lux was unaware of all this, and neither were her family members or descendants.

In fact, Lux's children learned about their mother's death in an extremely dramatic situation.

In the 1970s, researchers discovered that there might be contamination between HeLa cell lines and other cell lines. In order to conduct tests to distinguish HeLa cell lines from other cell lines, someone found Lux's descendants and hoped to get blood samples from them for testing. This made Lux's descendants very confused. In this way, they finally knew what had happened over the past 20 years.

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In 2010, American journalist Rebecca Skloot published the book "The Immortal Hela". It was one of the best-selling books of that year and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 6 years. Through this book, people were surprised to find that Lux was probably the person who had the greatest influence on contemporary medical research, but her descendants did not have medical insurance. The Chinese version of the book was translated by Dr. Liu Yang and published in 2012.

In 2021, the Lacks family filed a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific, the company that sold the HeLa cell line. The lawsuit lasted for two years. On July 31, 2023, the day before Lacks' 103rd birthday, the two parties finally reached a settlement. Although the terms of the settlement were not made public, this most important and famous scientific ethics event in the history of human medicine finally came to an end at this moment.

However, people still haven't found the exact location of Lacus's burial. In 2010, Guy's colleague Roland Pattillo donated a tombstone for Lacus. On the tombstone, there is a sentence engraved: Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.

Planning and production

Author: Xu Lai, a popular science author

Review丨Sun Yifei Director of the Medical Education History Research Office of Hebei Medical University

Planning丨Xu Lai

Editor: Yinuo

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