I, for one, welcome our new gelatenous masters…
I don’t think the identity was a secret. Or, at least it’s been know for decades. But I believe Lacks died without knowing her cells had been cultured.
That Wiki article put the use of those cells into an odd perspective; “Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her cells”.
I find that number suspect: That would put the total biomass of HeLa cells at about 10% of the biomass of all humans on the planet. That doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
When I learned about HeLa cells in my Developmental Bio class in the '70s, I swear the professor mentioned that the cells were taken from a woman named “Helen Lane.” (Maybe he actually said “something like Helen Lane” and I only remembered the name.)
Aren’t jellyfish really more than one animal? Like a sponge is kind of that way too? Well maybe not more than one animal but rather an animal with no central brain or center?
They were STOLEN?!
Apparently they originally used the name Helen Lane or Helen Larson to preserve her anonymity.
Essentially, yeah. More like harvested and cultured without her consent. Someone just wrote a book about her, and was interviewed either on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. The story’s pretty fascinating.
Jellyfish are amazing! They are in the phylum Cnidaria and the more you know about these amazing guys, the more it makes sense that someone would call them immortal.
Check them out!
I guess in a way that is true. They are one animal, but sponges especially can ‘regenerate’, which is pretty amazing!
10% seems low. 6 billion humans at, say, 40kg each. That’s 240 million tonnes. I imagine the average weight of humans will be lower than 40kg. Many adults weigh 40kg, and over 1/3 of humans are sub-adult. Added to that, the biomass of humans sans gut contents will be lower again. So the mass of HeLa cells would seem to be closer to 1/5 the total human biomass even on the low side.
Which make sit seem even less reasonable. What have they been doing, growing these cells in pod somewhere?
I wonder if that wasn’t supposed to read 50 million kg, which seems much more reasonable.
I don’t think the gut contents would make much difference, and 40 kg is pretty light for an adult. But I had forgotten to account for children, so your figures are probably better than mine. In any event, that’s a Hell of a lot of HeLa.
I remember seeing a documentary a while ago, about a man who during routine testing, it was discovered that he had some form of “wonder blood”, or something, but the lab who discovered it weren’t going to tell him, and it was only because he got suspicious about them keeping on calling him back that he ended up finding out what was going on.
Anyone else remember something like this?
Yes, we are. Multiple pods at multiple locations, but I still think the number is really high. Just about any biomedical lab that uses cell lines will use HeLa and has been since the late 50’s.
I keep 4 flasks of 25 mL of HeLa out at any one time. I harvest the flasks three times a week. Each time, I get 100 million cells or so. The packed cell volume each time is somewhere around 250 uL from 100 mL of media. Since a cell is mostly water, that would be 750 ug of cells a week. Multiply that by 50 and you get 37500 ug or 37.5 g of cells a year for one researcher using the cells.
If you do a medline search on “HeLa” you will get 62147 results. I am going to assume that each paper took one years worth of HeLa cells. That is 2330512 g or 2330 kg of cells. We will double that number to account for the number of studies that happened that but weren’t published, so 4660 kg of cells. If you include pharmaceutical companies that don’t publish their results and having the cells as teaching tools, we will quadruple the number. So 18640 kg of cells. The only way the number of “50 million metric tons” makes sense is taking into account the volume of the media used and converting that to weight.
Even then it appears to make no sense.
Looking at your figures as typical we have:
4 x 25mL
= 100mL x 3 times a week
= 300 mL a week x 52 weeks a year
= 15 lites/researcher per year x 30 years
= 468 litres/researcher total.
So we would require over 100 million researchers working on these cells every year for the past 30 years to produce “50 million metric tons”. Let’s be extreme and say that the average researcher uses 10 times more material than you do, that’s still 10 million researchers working in this field in any given year. To give some perspective, that’s more than the total number of doctors in the world today, and 3 times more than the total number of doctors 30 years ago.
The problem is that they claim to have produced 1/5 of the total human biomass in just 30 years. About 1/5 of the human population is under 35. So they would need to have been producing this stuff as fast as babies are being born and growing up. Assuming that the culture media needed to produce this stuff are even harder to produce than food for humans and assuming that the technicians growing it are paid above the global median wage (both reasonable assumption IMO) such a production rate would make HeLa production the world’s single largest industry.
Thanks, Blake
I didn’t want to do the math for the media.
I think that the most likely explanation for that number is that someone misplaced or misinterpreted a metric prefix somewhere (“micro” turning into “mega”, or the like), or dropped a minus sign on an exponent.
Well, someone had to, because obviously the media cited in the Wikipedia article didn’t. 
Regarding Henrietta Lacks…
… wow.
It was only well-publicized recently, but it was never a secret. I first read about her in the 80’s in (I think) a Reader’s Digest article.