Henrietta Immortal Bashny.Net

Meet - is Henrietta Lacks, 1920 birth. A descendant of the white planters and black slaves, one of the daughters in the family with ten children, five children at most. She died in 1951 from cancer. And, in a very literal sense, but then it became an immortal and indestructible.

And what was going on - I will briefly describe below under the cut.





The fact is that cancer cells die Henrietta refused. A sample of the cancer, curiosity placed in a nutrient medium, multiplies rapidly, does not age, and pleases the science until now.

This world's first cell culture eternal name Gela. She had tried many experimental drugs and vaccines - for example, all have to tell her thank you for polio vaccination.

The cells survived and divided after shipment in the mail envelope, safely returned from space. Moreover, accidentally hitting the dust particles in the air, on clothes, on poorly cleaned instruments in the laboratory, Henrietta quickly infect other culture dishes, and confusing results are not a hundred experiments, to the extent that unravel - where the original fabric, and where Henrietta It became almost impossible. (That is, it has helped a lot later, but genetic analysis and comparison with the descendants of the family Lux).

According to some estimates, Henrietta uninvited lives in 10-20% of laboratory specimens in the United States. In 1972 he began a program of joint struggle against cancer, with the participation of doctors USA and the USSR. And the Soviet lab immediately got their dose of Henrietta, a mat and wild cries of slaughtered samples.

Henrietta's cells were entered into a close friendship with papillomavirus (look in the wiki, not good), and handed over to each other interesting snippets of DNA, so purely to copy on the tape and listen to it. After that it became unclear how many actually Henrietta chromosomes, and what she was now a species.

Here it is in the picture, the protagonist of 60,000 scientific articles. This year, her family first got the copyright on the use of her great-grandmother in the scientific and popular publications. From any monetary reward family refused.
via



Source: