Engineering of Global Health

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 17.06.06

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction
  2. School Background and Rationale
  3. Content Background
  4. Content Objectives
  5. Content
  6. Teaching Strategies
  7. Classroom Activities
  8. Endnotes
  9. Appendix: Implementing District Standards
  10. Bibliography

HeLa Cells, Cervical Cancer, and the HPV Vaccine

Nancy V. Ibarra

Published September 2017

Tools for this Unit:

Introduction

Imagine that you were my seventh grade student and I told you that there was a woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, but whose cells are alive today. Sounds astonishing, even incomprehensible to many, but this is the case with the story of Henrietta Lacks.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor African-American tobacco farmer from Virginia. She was married with four children at the time. They were having a difficult time financially and decided that it was time for a change. She moved to Baltimore with her family so that her husband, David Lacks, could work in the steel industry. “The work was tough, especially for black men, who got the jobs white men wouldn’t touch.”1 The black workers at Sparrows Point, the steelmaking and shipbuilding community in which they lived, made about eighty cents an hour at most, usually less, while white workers got higher wages. While the pay was minimal, this was a considerable amount more than what they were making farming tobacco in Virginia.

A short time after giving birth to her fifth child, Henrietta was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She had been complaining about feeling a knot in her womb. When she finally went in for an examination, after some prompting from her close friend and cousin, it was found that she had cervical cancer. She became a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital during her cancer treatment, since it was the closest place to her that would treat African-Americans at the time. “David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred it but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients.”2

This was the time of Jim Crow and there was segregation all around, including hospitals. Jim Crow Laws affected every aspect of daily lives. Although black men had been given full citizenship in 1868 with amendment XIV,3 in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court established separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson.4 This decision came to mean that any law that was established led to different rules for blacks and whites. These laws came right after the Reconstruction Era, a period following the civil war where an attempt was made to redress the inequalities of slavery and its political, social and economic legacy.5 Reconstruction lasted only twelve years, and before long, Jim Crow was the law of the land. Based on the theory of white supremacy, from schools to playgrounds to hospitals, segregation was the law. While it was stated that these institutions were separate but equal, it was never that way. The facilities for blacks were mostly always inferior to that of whites. Henrietta Lacks was a cancer patient during this time.

Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent during a biopsy and became the first cultured human cells, since they divide indefinitely in a lab. Her cells were unique since they did not stop multiplying. Normally, cells in culture will go through several rounds of mitosis and eventually begin to die out. Cells in the body also divide, but stay within their organs and specialize. Cancer cells proliferate rapidly compared to normal cells. They do not stop proliferating when prompted by cues. They do not differentiate normally and remain as immature cells. They do not specialize or die. This is problematic because as they continue to proliferate, they grow into tumors, and this, a malignant tumor, is what was found in Henrietta’s cervix.

These cells that grew indefinitely in a cultured dish, became known as HeLa cells, He for Henrietta and La for Lacks. The cells could be used to conduct many experiments since the cells rapidly reproduced. According to Smithsonian.com, these cervical cancer cells were essential in providing the cells that aided in developing the polio vaccine by Jonas Salk, they went up in the first space mission to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity, and “many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.”6

Her story is extraordinary, if not for what her cells have given to scientific research, then because her family was completely oblivious to the fact that her cells are alive today. For her family, it is a story of discovery, revisiting the past and trying to understand the current situation of HeLa cells. Henrietta Lacks’ family was not aware that her cells were used for scientific research until the author of the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, began to contact the family after hearing about HeLa cells in one of her biology college courses. When Rebecca Skloot began to explain to Henrietta’s adult children about the HeLa cells, understandably, they had a very difficult time comprehending.7

While I would love to continue telling the story of Henrietta Lacks, I will make my connections to science, in particular the field of biology. While the book tells her story, in what seems to be a fictional narrative, it also covers a long list of content presented in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for Life Science. It is my intent in this unit and throughout my teaching to connect learning with historical or relevant, present, societal content. Taking science and looking at it through a historical or social lens provides opportunities for understanding. Not only are my students allowed to view the technological and medical advances that have taken place throughout our history, but they are also able to learn how these advancements did not always reach groups of people equally.

Primarily, I will concentrate on how certain racial groups have not always been treated fairly when it comes to medical research. For example, in the book, the author tells the story of Henrietta and the racism she experienced as she received treatment for her cervical cancer. She had to walk through the back door of Johns Hopkins Hospital and was held in the wing where all the people of color were admitted.  

If she would have been a white woman being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins, her tissue may have never been taken without her consent and we would not have HeLa cells. While people of color have not always benefited from breakthroughs in medical research, they have been instrumental in developing it.

The book makes reference to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which was conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health Service. Even after penicillin became the drug of choice to combat syphilis, the men in the study were not offered the antibiotic because it would affect the results of the study.8 They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths.9 One of Martin Luther King’s most famous quotes is “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

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