Mother in a Petridish
The genetic connection with our mothers passes through a single cell that blossoms to multicellularity into the person we are today. But multicellularity is a wicked thing: even though we feel ourselves because of the cells that make us, not all cells are created equal. We do not care for the 500 million skin cells we shed daily, showering our beds, office desks, train seats and colleagues. We do not feel deeply for the hairs we loose, the cells we leave behind us when we flush the toilet, or exhale and that were once, undeniably, a part of us. Admittedly, most of these cells are dead. But what if they lived and went on to have lives of their own?
In 1951 a black woman named Henrietta Lacks was treated for cervical cancer in a hospital in Virginia (USA). To the surprise of scientists the cancer cells from her biopsy were ‘immortal’. Where other human cells ceased to multiply and grow after some time, hers kept on growing. It was the start of a prolific cell line, HeLa, the oldest human cell line in existence, that has been used to develop vaccines, cure disease, create tissues, grow human-mouse hybrids and went on to become the first human tissue in space. Henrietta Lacks’ cells were stolen without consent.
Electron microscopic photograph of HeLa cells (c) Matthew Daniels
Can you feel a connection to living cells?
A bitter feat for Henrietta’s grandchildren who grew up poor and didn’t have a share in the enormous profits made with their grandmother’s cells, only finding out about what happened twenty years after the act. Some family members found it hard to swallow the idea that their grandmother, somehow, was still alive.
Can you feel a connection to living cells that once belonged to someone you are related to or loved? Erika Johnson, one of Henrietta Lacks’ great-grandchildren, remembers the feeling of holding her great-grandmother in her hand when HeLa cells were used in a school experiment. Erika Johnson called it “surreal”.
A new posthuman species?
Evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen declared HeLa “a vigorous clone of human origin” and argued it to be a new species, Helacyton gartleri, due to their ability to replicate indefinitely, and their non-human number of chromosomes. Squeezed back into unicellular existence, these cells have taken on a life and ecological niche of their own. Whatever HeLa precisely is, it came from a young black woman, and flooded the world with her progeny, much like the African black foremothers of humanity.
Electron microscopic photograph of HeLa cells (c) Keith Porter
Chances are that every person on earth has had a direct or indirect encounter with HeLa cells. They are used in beauty products, genetic research and were used to develop COVID-vaccins. A strain of cells lives in nearly every academic hospital in the world. We are all connected to this cell line, be it the escalated, living legacy of a black mother, or a new species that she created from her womb. In some way or other we all relate to this woman, in the sense that she has influenced our lives.
That she was a black woman matters
It matters that she is a black woman, someone who did not have any say in the usage of her cells, a poor woman, a woman that the people she encountered in the hospital may not have thought much of, but who lived on, in the literal sense, to have an enormous impact on science and healthcare. Even if some scientific institution have been paying reparations to a foundation in the name of the Hicks family, still there are no statues in her name, children don’t learn about her in history books. Hers is a nearly forgotten, quiet, dark history while the present focuses on the next innovation for the future.