The Cellular Legacy of Henrietta Lacks
This is a collection of over 300 HeLa cells. They’re from a famous cell line derived from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951. Her cells have led to numerous significant medical findings because, unlike most human cells, they continue to divide forever. This allows for an unlimited supply of similar cells for research purposes.
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DownloadThe Cellular Legacy of Henrietta Lacks
This is a collection of over 300 HeLa cells. They’re from a famous cell line derived from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951. Her cells have led to numerous significant medical findings because, unlike most human cells, they continue to divide forever. This allows for an unlimited supply of similar cells for research purposes.
What am I looking at?
This is an image of a culture of HeLa cells in various stages of the cell cycle. The nuclei of these cells are blue (1). Their cytoskeletons are gray (2). And their mitochondria are green (3). Most of these cells are in the interphase stage of the cell cycle (the normal phase) – but if you look closely, you can see cells in almost every other stage of cell division, too.
Biology in the background
These are known as HeLa cells because they were originally isolated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She went to Johns Hopkins Medical Center in 1951 and was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She died that same year. While treating her, doctors took a biopsy of her cancer cells and cultured them in a lab. The cells were found to be immortal – they continued to divide every 24 to 48 hours without dying. This made the cells extremely valuable scientifically because they could be studied generation after generation. Even after all this time, these cells are still widely used in research.
But the story of HeLa cells has a twist to it. This cell line that is so prevalent in research was established without the consent of Henrietta Lacks or her family. In 2010, a book titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks told her story and the story of her cells – widely used for decades without patient consent. In 2023, the Lacks estate settled a lawsuit accusing a biotech company of making billions of dollars using HeLa cells without the family’s consent.
HeLa cells can vary in size depending on the culture conditions, but they can grow to be as large as 40 micrometers across, or roughly half of the width of a human hair.
Technique
This image was created using confocal microscopy.
Tom Deerinck, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research