This woman lived only 31 years, but her cells lived forever and saved hundreds of millions of people

In 2018, the book "The Immortal Hela" was published in the United States, where author Rebecca Skloot spent ten years exposing the true origin of Hela, the Mother of Cells, for the use of humans. The Hela cell line is still active in biology and medical research today, and it has changed the history of human medicine for the benefit of all mankind. But many people do not know who the owner of Hela cells is. Today let's approach the story behind Hela cells.

Born in 1920 to an African-American tobacco farmer in the U.S., Heretta Lacks started her tobacco farming business as a child due to her family's poverty. 1950, after giving birth to her fifth child, Henrietta Lacks noticed a hard lump in her abdomen. So she went to the nearest local hospital, Johns Hopkins, which provided free treatment for poor blacks, and after Herretta Lux's visit, she discovered she had cervical cancer.

At that time, an average of 15,000 women died of cervical cancer each year in the United States, and the most common method used in hospitals was to kill cancer cells with radioactive metallic radium. Dr. Gay, the treating physician, inserted a test tube filled with radium into Heretta Lacks' cervix while also removing a small specimen of tissue from her cancerous area.

Medical technology was not yet advanced, and people did not know that radium could kill all cells. On October 4, 1951, at the age of 31, Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer and her body was buried in her family's yard.

Dr. Gay had been working on in vitro malignancy cell culture research. Previously, human cells cultured in vitro did not live long, and typically human cells stopped proliferating after 56 divisions. Dr. Guy's assistant, Mary, named the cancer cell tissue taken from Herretta Lax with her initials as Hela cells. A few days later, Mary noticed signs of growth in the test tube containing the Hella cells, but she didn't pay much attention to it because previous cells cultivated by Ping had similar conditions but stopped growing soon after.

However, the Hela cells seemed to be very resilient, showing no signs of death and also growing at an alarmingly large rate, doubling in number with every 24 hours that passed. This amazing discovery made Dr. Gay so ecstatic that he sent test tubes filled with Hela cells to colleagues in other countries for cancer research and pharmaceuticals.

At the time of the severe polio outbreak in the United States, the safety of the vaccine required large numbers of human cells for testing, and this is where Hela cells came in handy. These experiments, which could not be performed on living people, were instantly solved with Hela cells.

In 1956, Hela cells were sent into space for the first time with a Soviet satellite, and the United States carried Hela cells on its first manned space flight, proving that Hela cells multiply faster in space. 1989, scientists studied Hela cells and discovered that they contain a telomerase enzyme, which is the reason why Hela cells keep multiplying.

To date, Hela cells have been widely used in scientific research and medical experiments around the world, and scientists have grown Hela cells weighing 50 million tons in length, which could circle the Earth three times. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have benefited from Hela cells, which have not only helped humans develop drugs to treat leukemia, hemophilia, polio vaccines, etc., but also enabled cell cloning, in vitro fertilization, and the successful mapping of human genes, which is expected to find the secrets of STD transmission and human longevity. Up to now, there are five Nobel Prizes based on Hela cell research.

For a long time, people thought that Hela cells came from a woman named Helen Rahn, which is a misunderstanding. 20 April 1973, the authoritative journal of science "Nature" published a paragraph by biologist Douglas, and that's when the owner of Hela cells was confirmed. 22 years later, the family of Haretta Lux learned that although her body has been long in the ground, but his cells had lived on in the world. Hela's cells became public property, accelerating the course of medicine and biology, yet Helita's family continued to live in poverty.

In 2010, Dr. Gay donated a tombstone to Heretta Lacks, with an epitaph written by her grandchildren: "A remarkable woman, wife, and mother who touched the lives of many are here. Her immortal cells will continue to help humanity forever." Professor Roland of Morehouse Medical University in the United States, holds a memorial every year as a way to celebrate the contribution that Herretta made to humanity.

In 2013, a German biology research laboratory made the genetic research results of Hera cells public, a move that sparked discontent among Heraita Lux's descendants, who said that the extraction of Hera cells itself did not have Heraita's consent and that the public release of the genetic sequence would reveal the genes of Heritage, who is still alive, and violate their right to privacy.

The medical research dedicated to Hela cells continues, and the medical ethics issues it raises are inevitable. What is undeniable is that although Heretta Lacks lived only 31 years, her cells lived forever and saved hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and the contribution that Hela cells have made to humanity is immeasurable.