An asteroid named for Henrietta Lacks honors her immortal legacy
Biohacker Andrew Pelling is making sure Henrietta Lacks gets the recognition she deserves for her contribution to medical science.
At what point does your body become not your own? And who should have access to your genome, and why? The ethical dilemma surrounding Henrietta Lacks — whose cervical cancer cells were harvested without permission in 1951 and have been used ever since in medical research — received a fresh airing as the film adaptation of best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks hit TV screens in late April 2017 — starring Oprah Winfrey as Lacks’ daughter.
Around the same time, but with far less fanfare, an asteroid was named for the woman who gave humanity its first immortal cell line — cells that, when removed from a body, do not die, but continue to live and divide. The asteroid previously known as “2010 LA71” has been renamed 359426 Lacks by the International Astronomical Union in honor of Henrietta Lacks. It all started with a suggestion by Andrew Pelling, TED Fellow and biohacker, famous for embedding human cells into plant cellulose — which may someday allow us to grow replacement organs for implants without having to manipulate DNA. [Watch his TED Talk, “This scientist makes ears out of apples,” below.]
Here, he tells us about his long association with the so-called HeLa line of cells, and how he has tried to call attention to Lacks’ predicament with previous art and science projects.
Why were Henrietta Lacks’ cells, specifically, useful and so famous? There must’ve been many patients around whose cells would have been available, and many cell lines in circulation.
Henrietta Lacks’ cells were the first human cells to work as an immortal line. Normally, our cells have a “lifetime” — a certain number of divisions before they undergo programmed cell death. Some cells can continue dividing forever due to a mutation — whether random or deliberately introduced by scientists. Because of the mutation, the cells aren’t perfect, and often over time they continue mutating. But they are useful models for basic scientific research.
Because Lacks’ cells were a cancer, they just divided and carried on growing, and the scientist who discovered this, George Otto Gey, was then able share them around the world. These so-called HeLa cells essentially became a consumable item in labs, and were extremely useful for conducting drug tests and screening, developing vaccines and so on without needing to constantly isolate cells from patients and animals.
The reason Lacks’ cells were so ubiquitous was that they became a standard, which helped create a baseline from which to compare data across experiments. For example, if one lab is working with my cells, and another is working with yours, we have different histories and genetic profiles, making the resulting data harder to compare.
The availability of HeLa cells contributed greatly to healthcare and medical research — including the development of the polio vaccine, human papilloma virus research, gene mapping and more — and organizations certainly profited from this cell line. Meanwhile, it was not until recently that Lacks and her family have been formally recognized, and they have never been compensated.
That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with HeLa cells. First of all, they started as a cancer, and they have mutated over time. So they are already unstable — a fact that is recognized these days, and a reason that scientists are now choosing not to use HeLa in their research. It’s also important to note that her genome is now protected: you need permission to use Lacks’ genomic data, and only for biomedical research purposes.
Why did you feel compelled to suggest that an asteroid be named after Lacks?
When fellow TED Fellow Carrie Nugent [watch her TED Talk, “Adventures of an asteroid hunter”] described her efforts to honor individuals by naming them after asteroids, I thought it would be a fitting way to immortalize Lacks. I had been thinking about the injustice of her situation for a long time, and it fit with my own agenda of trying to bring a discussion of this ethical dilemma to the public.
I’ve been using Henrietta Lacks’ cells for a long time in my own work. The ears made out of apple cellulose and human cells were actually created with HeLa cells, for example. However, our lab has used lots of other cell lines from humans, mice, rats, dogs, hamsters, and so on, as well as different types of cells — fibroblast, epithelial, bone, muscle. They all work. I used HeLa for the apple ear because I knew it represented a breakthrough and felt we needed to use a cell line that had meaning.
Usually, scientists and companies justify the use of her biological material as for the benefit of mankind — medical applications and so on. But it doesn’t address the real problem: that they were distributed without permission. That whole ethical dilemma has traditionally gotten ignored, forgotten and whitewashed, although things are finally changing.
Tell us about the art projects you’ve done using Lacks’ cells — and why.
After I started my own lab, I realized that many of my students were unaware of the story of Henrietta Lacks, as were many other scientists. The public were certainly not aware. I was always disturbed by the origins of HeLa, and never thought that the medical benefits justified exploiting this woman’s biological material without acknowledgment.
As a way of provoking discussion, I started making art with these cells. For the first project, I inserted a jellyfish gene into the cell line to make it glow green, then grew them as a skin on white Lego men. This was all purposely chosen — almost maliciously — to freak people out and to force a discussion about who these cells belonged to. Importantly, the process of putting jellyfish genes into HeLa is nothing new and is a routine protocol used around the world. Every product I used to create this work was off-the-shelf — highly standard supplies and protocols. The difference was that I certainly couldn’t justify the work by claiming that I was working on a vaccine or on a cure for cancer.
Later, my lab was invited to exhibit at the BioART: Collaborating with Life exhibition in Ottawa. Working with one of my students, Daniel Modulevsky, we created an installation called Repurposed-46, which featured 46 apple slices embedded with HeLa cells. This was a representation of the human genome in apple form: humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, so we have 46 chromosomes total. This project was a statement about our ability to control and manipulate HeLa cells in order to provoke a discussion about the issues surrounding their origin.
Do you think that the scientific community will change the way it uses HeLa — perhaps even retire it?
I think HeLa should be retired, and it is certainly losing favor, as it’s problematic not just ethically, but scientifically. As I said, HeLa’s genome is not stable: it has mutated to the point that some are even calling for it to be defined as a new species. It’s also unclear how results from petri dish–grown cell lines actually translate into human health: many positive results from in vitro trials often fail in human clinical trials. The more pressing concern isn’t the cells themselves, but the availability of her genomic data — which is what Lacks’ family was most concerned about.
Today, the ethics surrounding donation and use of biological materials removed from donors’ bodies is an ongoing debate. While patients who participate in medical research are protected by law, no laws govern rights over human tissues, though ethical guidelines requiring consent do exist. It should be noted that in Lacks’ time, permission to use a patient’s discarded cells wasn’t required or generally sought. Gey essentially open-sourced HeLa, giving it out to other scientists in the name of science. So in hindsight, while we can certainly recognize an ethical error, I would caution against demonizing the scientist. On the positive side, Lacks’ story has forced an important discussion. Hopefully it will continue to help drive the medical ethics discussion and provoke change for the better.
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
