For Henrietta Lacks, immortality comes in a test tube

Nearly 60 years ago, a beautiful African-American woman died of aggressive cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, and she was just 31. She left behind five children. She also left behind some of her cancer cells, which were taken to a Johns Hopkins laboratory run by Dr. George Gey.

Gey had been on a 30-year quest to grow human cancer cells in the lab to promote research into curing malignancies, but no matter how he tried to improve their care and feeding, the cells always seemed to die out quickly.

Not Lacks' cells, though.

Dubbed HeLa, for the first two letters of her names, these cancer cells grew, and grew, and grew, becoming the world's most successful and widely used cancer-cell line.

The story of those cells and of the Lacks family, many of whom never had steady health insurance, despite their mother's contribution to science, is told in a new book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," by Rebecca Skloot.

It took Skloot 10 years to write the book, which was released Feb. 2, and already has been excerpted in Oprah Winfrey's magazine, O, and featured on ABC World News.

The 37-year-old author, who now teaches at the University of Memphis, did much of her research while living in Pittsburgh. She said recently that "I wouldn't trade those 10 years for anything, because there is no way I could have understood the story if it hadn't taken me that long."

After Gey discovered what a miracle he had growing in his petri dishes, she wrote, he began giving HeLa cells away to scientists all over the world. The cells soon assumed a central role in biomedical research.

They were used to help develop Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. They were employed during the Cold War to test radiation exposure on human cells. They were fired into orbit to examine the effect of weightlessness on biological processes.

And they are still used today.

HeLa cells, which are infected with one strain of the human papillomavirus, helped in the formulation of Gardasil, Merck's cervical-cancer vaccine.

Dr. John Lazo, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Drug Discovery Institute, said he has worked with HeLa cells for 20 years and has published two-dozen papers in which they played a critical role.

"In fact, I use them much more today than I did in the previous decade."

HeLa cells are still valuable today for testing various anticancer compounds. He called them "well-behaved" — they grow at a predictable rate in flat layers that make them easy to see under a microscope.