Free The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Page A

medium, just enough to keep them alive for a short time. Sometimes pilots or stewards tucked the tubes in their shirt pockets, to keep the cells at body temperature as if they were still in an incubator. Other times, when the cells had to ride in the cargo hold, Gey tucked them into holes carved in blocks of ice to keep them from overheating, then packed the ice in cardboard boxes filled with sawdust. When shipments were ready to go, Gey would warn recipients that the cells were about to “metastasize” to their cities, so they could stand ready to fetch the shipment and rush back to their labs. If all went well, the cells survived. If not, Gey packaged up another batch and tried again.
    He sent shipments of HeLa cells to researchers in Texas, India, New York, Amsterdam, and many places between. Those researchers gave them to more researchers, who gave them to more still. Henrietta’s cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules. As Gey flew from one lab to another, demonstrating his culturing techniques and helping to set up new laboratories, he always flew with tubes of Henrietta’s cells in his breast pocket. And when scientists visited Gey’s lab to learn his techniques, he usually sentthem home with a vial or two of HeLa. In letters, Gey and some of his colleagues began referring to the cells as his “precious babies.”
    The reason Henrietta’s cells were so precious was because they allowed scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. They cut HeLa cells apart and exposed them to endless toxins, radiation, and in fections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa cells into immune-compromised rats, which developed malignant tumors much like Henrietta’s. If the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter—scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again.
    Despite the spread of HeLa and the flurry of new research that followed, there were no news stories about the birth of the amazing HeLa cell line and how it might help stop cancer. In Gey’s one appearance on television, he didn’t mention Henrietta or her cells by name, so the general public knew nothing of HeLa. But even if they had known, they probably wouldn’t have paid it much mind. For decades the press had been reporting that cell culture was going to save the world from disease and make man immortal, but by 1951 the general public had stopped buying it. Cell culture had become less a medical miracle than something out of a scary science-fiction movie.
          I t all started on January 17, 1912, when Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon at the Rockefeller Institute, grew his “immortal chicken heart.”
    Scientists had been trying to grow living cells since before the turn of the century, but their samples had always died. As a result, many researchers believed it was impossible to keep tissues alive outside the body. But Carrel set out to prove them wrong. At age thirty-nine he’d already invented the first technique for suturing blood vessels together, and had used it to perform the first coronary bypass and developmethods for transplanting organs. He hoped someday to grow whole organs in the laboratory, filling massive vaults with lungs, livers, kidneys, and tissues he could ship through the mail for transplantation. As a first step, he’d tried to grow a sliver of chicken-heart tissue in culture, and to everyone’s amazement, it worked. Those heart cells kept beating as if they were still in the chicken’s body.
    Months later, Carrel won a Nobel Prize for his blood-vessel-suturing technique and his contributions to organ transplantation, and he became an instant celebrity. The prize had nothing to do with the chicken heart, but articles about his award conflated the immortal chicken-heart