The author - Feijun
The origin of "immortal cells"
What conditions should a person remembered by history possess, is it a tyrant, a doctor or an inventor? In fact, it can also be an ordinary and insignificant person. The black woman in the picture was named Henrietta Lacks. She died of an illness in October 1951, but no one thought that in the future For decades, Lux's death has spared billions of people from disability, paralysis, and even death, her enormous dedication to medicine that she may not even understand.
As a poor African-American, Lux has been engaged in tobacco farming since her youth. She has 5 children, and her family has been living a poor life. Later, due to the needs of her husband's work, their family Moved to Maryland to live in .
And not long after, Lux, who was nearly 30 years old, discovered that her body was abnormal. After going to the only local hospital that accepts African Americans, John Hopps Hospital, Lux was confirmed. Suffering from cervical cancer.
At that time, the doctor used brachytherapy for Lux, and at the same time, without her consent, Lux's attending doctor sent a small piece of cervical cancer tissue from Lux to a man named George- Guy's Doctor Hands.
George, a professor of medicine, had been collecting and studying cancer cells from cervical cancer patients for many years, and without the same point, it didn't seem like much of a problem at the time.
Lux still failed to escape the clutches of death. In the early October of 1951, cancer took Lux's life. Except for Lux's relatives and friends, not many people care about Lux's birth and death. leave.
After 20 years, Lux's heating suddenly received a call one day and was asked if he would like to take blood. This operation confused Lux's family.
But later, there were more and more similar calls, and it was not until 1975 that Lux's family learned that Lux's cancer cells, which had been secretly used for research, were still "alive" and obtained a proper noun, Named HeLa cells line (HeLa cells), which is of epoch-making significance for human medical research.
Generally speaking, cells die soon after leaving the organism, and even if they can survive for a period of time, it is difficult to continue to divide, but Lux's cells have special properties, and her cells seem to be "immortal." "Yes, since Lux's cells were used for research, her cells have been proliferating non-stop, and this is the first immortal cell line born in human history.
Contributions made by the HeLa cell line
So far, there are more than 65,000 scientific documents related to HeLa cells and 11,000 related patent projects, and in the 21st century, HeLa cells continue to "glow" Fever”, making outstanding risks for medicine, with which five Nobel Prizes are associated in this century.
HeLa cells have saved billions of people without people's knowledge. Scientists have used the specificity of HeLa cells to create two vaccines, polio side and papilloma virus vaccine.
Polio, also known as polio, is highly contagious and can easily infect children under the age of 15. In the 1950s, a global epidemic broke out in the United States.
At that time, the doctor Jonas Salk had worked hard to develop a vaccine that could control polio, but was troubled by the fact that he could not find objects that could be tested in large numbers. Killed HeLa cells caught the attention of medical scientists.
In 1952, HeLa cells had become the ideal host cells for polio, and researchers at the Tuskegee Institute set up a factory to replicate HeLa cells. Zhou will ship about 20,000 tubes of HeLa cells for experiments, and it is precisely because of the "immortal" properties of HeLa cells that Salk can produce vaccines in a short period of time.
And over the next 60 years, more than 99 percent of polio has been eradicated worldwide. In the 1980s, medical scientist Harald Zur-Hausen discovered the HPV-18 virus in HeLa cells and developed the papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which is used to protect young people. Women are protected from cervical cancer-related viral infections and also reduce the deaths of patients with cervical cancer by 100 percent.
Hausen himself won the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 2008. In the following decades, HeLa cells were used as hosts for various viral infections, including AIDS, herpes, mumps, etc. There are also the development of various new vaccine drugs. Henry Harris and John Watkins and others also fused HeLa cells with mouse embryonic cells to create the first human-animal hybrid. The research kicked off a program to reprogram the human genome.
The secret of "immortality"
Normal human cells do not divide indefinitely. The lifespan and number of divisions of all cells are affected by " telomere ", a telomere that exists at the end of linear chromosomes in eukaryotic cells. A small piece of DNA-protein complex, whose shape is very similar to the toe of a shoe, is also the most easily damaged part. Every time a cell divides, the telomere will be worn a little bit, so the length of the telomere directly determines the lifespan of the cell. Also known as the "mitotic clock" of cell lifespan.
And if the somatic cells in the human body are mutated, it will exceed the normal cell division cycle, resulting in out of control. When the cells proliferate uncontrollably, it will cause cancer, but cancer cells are a complete "two-faced", in the human body Cancer cells can absorb nutrients from healthy cells and proliferate wildly, but when they reach the outside of the human body, cancer cells will die quickly, completely reluctant to give scientists time to study.
The special feature of HeLa cells is that the cells in the body of Lux who died of cancer produce a kind of telomerase that maintains telomere activity during division, so that even if cancer cells leave Lux's body The body can still continue to divide, and the growth rate of HeLa cells is amazing, doubling almost every hour.
So far, scientists have grown HeLa cells to 50 million tons. Even if such a huge number is calculated according to the global benchmark of 7.5 billion people and an average of 50 kilograms, HeLa cells are equivalent to % of the mass of all human beings. 13, a human needs to reproduce at least 18,000 generations to achieve the same quality, and it takes at least 450,000 years. In order to commemorate the great dedication of Lux's HeLa cells to mankind, in 2017, a small The planet is named after "359426-Lacks".
