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Henrietta Lacks Thesis

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Henrietta Lacks was born into a poor African American family of tobacco farmers in Roanoke, Virginia in 1920. She was sent to live with relatives in Clover, Virginia after the death of her mother. She later married her first cousin, Day, in 1941. After the Great Depression and World War 1 the couple moved to Bethlehem, Maryland where there was a job opportunity for Day at the steel mill. Here they bought a home in Turner Station. Henrietta and Day had five children: Lawrence, Elsie, David (Sonny), Deborah, and Joseph. While Henrietta was pregnant with her fifth child in 1951 she noticed a lump in her abdomen. She was referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Here she was diagnosed with …show more content…
In 1952 HeLa cells became the first living cells shipped through the postal mail. The Tuskegee Institution opened the first HeLa factory that same year. They were a nonprofit organization that supplied cells to laboratories and researchers. Later on the company Microbiology Associates began selling HeLa cells for profit. HeLa cells have been used to conduct thousands of researches and medical discoveries. It is estimated that there has been more than 60,000 studies published using HeLa cells. In 1952, HeLa cells were used to help develop a polio vaccine. These cells were also used to test a variety of other vaccines, which have since saved millions of lives. In 1965, HeLa cells became the first cells ever …show more content…
In 1966, the HeLa bomb dropped. During this time scientist discovered that HeLa cells could contaminate other cells very quickly and efficiently. It was revealed that HeLa cells could travel on something as small as a dust particle and that it only takes one HeLa cell to land in another cell culture to contaminate the whole thing. The HeLa bomb was one of the most important discoveries for scientists who were studying cancer. They now knew that cancer could not spontaneously appear like they had believed before. This was known as the HeLa bomb because this discovery was as surprising and brought an uproar around the science community that was equivalent to the reaction of a bomb. Scientist now had to be very careful and come up with special precautions so that they did not contaminate their other cultures. They also had to forget about all their past theories of how cancer came around and start from scratch. They now knew there was no such thing as cancer just appearing out of thin

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