The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (20 page)

Soon after his paper was published, Coriell and a few other top tissue culturists called an urgent meeting to talk about the state of their field, which they worried was becoming a disaster. They’d mastered the techniques of cell culture and simplified them to such a degree that, as one researcher put it, they’d “made it possible for even the rank amateur to grow a few cultures.”

In recent years, using tissue samples from themselves, their families, and their patients, scientists had grown cells of all kinds—prostate cancer, appendix, foreskin, even bits of human cornea—often with surprising ease. Researchers were using that growing library of cells to make historic discoveries: that cigarettes caused lung cancer; how X-rays and certain chemicals transformed normal cells into malignant ones; why normal cells stopped growing and cancer cells didn’t. And the National Cancer Institute was using various cells, including HeLa, to screen more than thirty thousand chemicals and plant extracts, which would yield several of today’s most widely used and effective chemotherapy drugs, including Vincristine and Taxol.

Despite the importance of this research, many scientists seemed cavalier about their cultures. Few kept clear records of which cells grew from which donors, and many mislabeled their cultures, if they labeled them at all. For scientists doing research that
wasn’t
cell-specific, like investigating the effects of radiation on DNA, not knowing what kind of cell they were working on might not affect the outcome of their research. But if cells were contaminated or mislabeled in research that
was
cell-specific—as much research was—the results would be worthless. Regardless, the culturists who called the meeting said, precision was essential in science, and researchers should know what cells they were using, and whether they were contaminated.

According to Robert Stevenson, one of the scientists involved in the meeting, their goal was to keep the field from “degenerating into complete chaos.” The group encouraged researchers to use protective measures, like working under hoods with suction that pulled air and potential contaminants into a filtration system. And they recommended that the NIH establish a reference collection of cells: a central bank where all cultures would be tested, cataloged, and stored under maximum security, using state-of-the-art sterile techniques. The NIH agreed, and formed a Cell Culture Collection Committee made up of tissue culturists, including William Scherer, Lew Coriell, and Robert Stevenson. Their mission was to establish a nonprofit federal cell bank at the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), which had been distributing and monitoring the purity of bacteria, fungi, yeast, and viruses since 1925, but never cultured cells.

The scientists on the Collection Committee set out to create the Fort Knox of pure, uncontaminated cell culture. They transported cultures in locked suitcases and developed a list of criteria all cells had to meet before being banked: each had to be tested for any possible contamination, and they all had to come directly from the original source.

Cell number one in the ATCC’s collection was the L-cell, the original immortal mouse cell line grown by Wilton Earle. For cell number two, the committee contacted Gey asking for a sample from the original HeLa culture. But in his initial excitement, Gey had given all of the original HeLa cells to other researchers and kept none for himself. He eventually tracked some down in the lab of William Scherer, who’d used some of the original HeLa sample in their polio research.

Initially the committee could only test samples for viral and bacterial contamination, but soon a few of its members developed a test for cross-species contamination, so they could determine whether cultures labeled as being from one animal type were actually from another. They quickly found that of ten cell lines thought to be from nine different species—including dog, pig, and duck—all but one were actually from primates. They promptly relabeled those cultures, and it seemed they’d gotten the situation under control without attracting any bad publicity.

The media, it turned out, was far more interested in a bit of HeLa-related news that was almost as sensational as Alexis Carrel’s immortal chicken heart. And it all started with cell sex.

     
I
n 1960, French researchers had discovered that when cells were infected with certain viruses in culture, they clumped together and sometimes fused. When they fused, the genetic material from the two cells combined, as with sperm meeting egg. The technical name for this was
somatic cell fusion
, but some researchers called it “cell sex.” It was different from sperm-and-egg sex in several important ways: somatic cells were cells of the body, like skin cells, and their union produced offspring every few hours. Perhaps most important, cell sex was entirely controlled by researchers.

Genetically speaking, humans are terrible research subjects. We’re genetically promiscuous—we mate with anyone we choose—and we don’t take kindly to scientists telling us who to reproduce with. Plus, unlike plants and mice, it takes us decades to produce enough offspring to give scientists much meaningful data. Since the mid-1800s, scientists had studied genes by breeding plants and animals in specific ways—a smooth pea with a wrinkled one, a brown mouse with a white one—then breeding their offspring to see how genetic traits passed from one generation to the next. But they couldn’t study human genetics the same way. Cell sex solved that problem, because it meant researchers could combine cells with any traits they wanted and study how those traits were passed along.

In 1965 two British scientists, Henry Harris and John Watkins, took cell sex an important step further. They fused HeLa cells with mouse cells and created the first human-animal hybrids—cells that contained equal amounts of DNA from Henrietta and a mouse. By doing this, they helped make it possible to study what genes do, and how they work.

In addition to the HeLa-mouse hybrid, Harris fused HeLa with chicken cells that had lost their ability to reproduce. His hunch was that when those deactivated chicken cells fused with HeLa, something inside HeLa would essentially turn the chicken cell back on. He was right. He didn’t know how it worked yet, but his discovery showed that something in cells regulated genes. And if scientists could figure out how to turn disease genes off, they might be able to create a form of gene therapy.

Soon after Harris’s HeLa-chicken study, a pair of researchers at New York University discovered that human-mouse hybrids lost their human chromosomes over time, leaving only the mouse chromosomes. This allowed scientists to begin mapping human genes to specific chromosomes by tracking the order in which genetic traits vanished. If a chromosome disappeared and production of a certain enzyme stopped, researchers knew the gene for that enzyme must be on the most recently vanished chromosome.

Scientists in laboratories throughout North America and Europe began fusing cells and using them to map genetic traits to specific chromosomes, creating a precursor to the human genome map we have today. They used hybrids to create the first monoclonal antibodies, special proteins later used to create cancer therapies like Herceptin, and to identify the blood groups that increased the safety of transfusions. They also used them to study the role of immunity in organ transplantation. Hybrids proved it was possible for DNA from two unrelated individuals, even of different species, to survive together
inside
cells without one rejecting the other, which meant the mechanism for rejecting transplanted organs had to be
outside
cells.

Scientists were ecstatic about hybrids, but throughout the United States and Britain, the public panicked as the media published one sensational headline after the next:

MAN-ANIMAL CELLS ARE BRED IN LAB … THE NEXT STEP COULD BE TREE MEN … SCIENTISTS CREATE MONSTERS

The Times
of London called the HeLa-mouse cells the “strangest hybrid form of life ever seen in the lab—or out of it.” A
Washington Post
editorial said, “We cannot afford any artificially induced mouse-men.” It called the research “horrendous” and said the researchers should leave humans alone and “go back to their yeasts and fungi.” One article ran with an image of a half-human, half-mouse creature with a long, scaly tail; another ran with a cartoon of a hippopotamus-woman reading the newspaper at a bus stop. The British press called the HeLa hybrids an “assault on life,” and portrayed Harris as a mad scientist. And Harris didn’t help the situation: he caused near-pandemonium when he appeared in a BBC documentary saying that the eggs of man and ape could now be joined to create a “mape.”

Harris and Watkins wrote letters to editors complaining they’d been quoted out of context, their story sensationalized to “distort, misrepresent and terrify.” They assured the public that they were just creating cells, not “trying to produce centaurs.” But it didn’t help. A public survey about their research was overwhelmingly negative, calling it pointless and dangerous, an example of “men trying to be gods.” And the PR problem for cell culture was only going to get worse from there.

19
“The Most Critical Time on This Earth Is Now”

W
hen Deborah was a junior in high school, at the age of sixteen, she got pregnant with her first child. Bobbette cried when she found out. Deborah stopped going to school and Bobbette said, “Don’t get too comfortable cause you’re goin to graduate.” Deborah yelled right back, saying she couldn’t go to school all big and pregnant.

“That don’t matter,” Bobbette said, “you’re goin to that special girls school where all the pregnant girls have big bellies just like you.”

Deborah refused, but Bobbette filled out the application for her and dragged her there for her first day of class. On November 10, 1966, Deborah gave birth to Alfred Jr., who she named after his father, Alfred “Cheetah” Carter, the boy Galen had once been jealous of. Each morning, Bobbette made Deborah’s lunch, got her to school, then took care of Alfred all day and most of the night so Deborah could go to class and study. When Deborah graduated, Bobbette made her get her first job—whether Deborah liked it or not, Bobbette was going to help her and that baby.

Deborah’s older brothers were doing fine on their own. Lawrence went into business for himself, opening a convenience store in the basement of an old townhouse; Sonny had graduated from high school, joined the air force, and grown into a handsome ladies’ man. He did some running around, but pretty much stayed out of trouble. Their younger brother, Joe, was another story.

Authority didn’t agree with Joe. He argued with teachers and brawled with other students. He dropped out of school in the seventh grade and ended up in court for “assault by striking” right after his seventeenth birthday. He joined the military at eighteen, but his anger and attitude got him in even more trouble there. He fought his superiors and other soldiers. Sometimes he ended up in the hospital, but more often than not, his fighting landed him in solitary confinement, a dark hole with dirt walls ominously similar to the basement where Ethel once locked him as a child. He preferred being in the hole because it meant no one would bother him. As soon as they let him out, he’d fight another soldier or get belligerent with an officer and they’d throw him back in. He spent nine months in the service, most of it sitting in the hole, growing angrier and angrier. After multiple psychiatric evaluations and treatments, Joe was discharged for an inability to adjust emotionally to military life.

His family had hoped the military would help control his rage and teach him some discipline and respect for authority. Instead, he came out of the military angrier than ever.

A week or so after Joe got home from the military, a tall, skinny neighborhood kid named Ivy walked up to him with a knife and asked if he wanted to start something. Most people wouldn’t have done that. At nineteen, Joe was at least four inches shorter than Ivy and only 155 pounds, but people in the neighborhood called him Crazy Joe because he seemed to enjoy violence. Ivy didn’t care. He’d been drinking heavily and shooting heroin for years, and he was covered in scars from fighting. He told Joe he was going to kill him.

Joe ignored Ivy the first time. Then, about three months later, on September 12, 1970, Joe was walking down an East Baltimore street with his friend June. It was Saturday night, they’d been drinking, and they’d just started talking up a group of young girls when three other men walked up the street toward them. One of those men was Eldridge Lee Ivy.

When Ivy saw Joe and June talking to the girls, he yelled, saying one of them was his cousin, and they’d better stop messing with her.

“I’m tired of your junk,” June yelled back.

The two started arguing, and when Ivy threatened to punch June in the face, Joe jumped between them, calmly telling Ivy he would do no such thing.