HELA CELL EXPERIMENTS

The most famous account for the use of the HeLa cells was from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Southam conducted clinical research on people without their informed consent, in which he injected cancer cells (HeLa cells) into their skin to see if their immune system would reject the cancer cells or if the cells would grow. The cells originate from Henrietta Lacks, who suffered from a form of cervical cancer. In an effort to treat her, they placed radium tubes within her cervical region to test how it impacted her cancer. But while under the knife, doctors made the most of the opportunity and extracted the cancer cells from her body without her consent, thus creating the first immortalized cell line which is still used to this day.

He obtained funding from the government and injected live cancer cells into patients at Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, as well as hundreds of convicts from Ohio State Prison. The goal of the injections was to increase immunity to cancer as well as hopefully find a vaccine for cancer. The HeLa cells had to be mass-produced for the experiments using the cell cultures and petri dishes. Normal cells, when placed on a tissue culture dish, form one layer of cells and stop their due to contact inhibition which makes them stop mitosis (cell replication) when they are in contact with another cell, but cancer cells are not prone to contact inhibition so they form into big clumps within the petri dishes. This made production and distribution of them to the Ohio Prison very efficient.

The inmates were misinformed and were told that they faced “no grave danger. Any cancer that took would spread slowly and could be surgically removed. Many of the patients would develop tumors that would be surgically removed, others would have the cancers move to other regions of the body, but for most, the prisoners would develop cancers too severe to treat and would end up dying. As for those in the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, Dr. Southam would inject the cancer cells into elderly cancer patients to examine the body's response, and miraculously the patients would not develop any new cancer. The doctors did not take a liking to Dr. Southam’s experiments as it was in violation of the Nuremberg code, and they would eventually report his unethical experiments to the State of New York.

 

Sources:

Griffin, Diane E. “Measles Vaccine.” Viral Immunology, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., Mar. 2018, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5863094/.

Osmundsen, John A. (26 January 1964). "Many Scientific Experts Condemn Ethics of Cancer Injection". The New York Times.

“Results of Tests for the Species of Origins of Cell Lines by Means of the Mixed Aglutination Reaction, “ Experimental Cell Research 28 (September 1962)

“Science, Medical Research & Experimentation, & Litigation.” The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lackx, 2011, www.laguardia.edu/henriettalacks/science.html. (Broken Link)

Infinite. “Infinite.” Infinite Unknown”, 7 Mar. 2011