Seventy-four years ago today, on January 29, 1951 (December 22, 1950 in the lunar calendar), Hella immortal cells were discovered. On January 29, 1951, an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital for a physical examination and was diagnosed with cervical cancer. During treatment, doctors took tissue samples from her uterine tumors and sent them to George Gay's lab to grow them. Dr. Gay has been trying repeatedly for more than 20 years to grow human cells, but ultimately failed because human cells can only divide 40-50 times and then die. Until he got a sample of Henrietta Lacks' uterine tumor tissue, Dr. Guy was surprised to find that the cells isolated from the tumor tissue could grow, they proliferated every 24 hours, and had the ability to proliferate indefinitely. Dr. Guy named the cells after the first two words of Henrietta Lacks' first name and first name. From then on, Henrietta Lacks became HeLa. Unfortunately, due to the spread of cancer cells, Henrietta Lacks passed away in October 1951. The story we want to tell today is about a woman who died 65 years ago. Although she died of cancer and was in great pain before her death, the cancer cells extracted from her body are called immortal cells and can survive indefinitely. Her cells are being replicated, sold, bought and packaged today, helping scientists solve medical problems, but her real name has been forgotten. Her name is Henrietta Lacks. But most people call her a helacell. Let's start from the beginning. On the first day of February 1951, a woman was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital with excruciating abdominal pain and bleeding from her lower body. That day, she was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer. There was no better treatment for cancer at that time, but radium - a radioactive element that scientists at the time discovered was lethal to cells and used it to treat cancer. (Henrietta's medical record card) But the way they treated Henrietta actually hastened her death. The doctor who treated her put a test tube filled with radium into her cervix and sewed it up. At the same time, the doctor also took some of her cancerous tissue for research. It was the 1950s, and doctors had not yet known the harm of radioactive substances to the human body, so they would not control the dose of radiation therapy. No prior consent was required to collect diseased tissue from patients for research. (The doctor who studied Henrietta's cells and her photo and tombstone) In any case, the doctor's efforts did not cure Henrietta. Instead, her skin was scorched by the radiation, and the cancer became more aggressive and metastasized. Eight months later, she died of complicated uremia in great pain. " A tumor the size of a baseball has almost completely replaced Henrietta's kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus, and other organs are densely covered with small white tumors like pearls. " (Excerpted from American science journalist Rebecca Skloot's" TheImmortalLifeofHenriettaLacks ", the same below) And before the shadow of death came quietly, she was a mother of five children, just 31 years old, young and beautiful. In this photo, she is wearing dark lipstick, looking straight at the camera, her skin is smooth and her eyes are smart, unaware that in her body, the tumor is slowly growing. (Henrietta and husband David) At this point, our protagonist has left, but the story has just begun. At the Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the best in the country, Dr. George Gay was trying to grow human cells in test tubes, but was unsuccessful. The reason was that human cells had telomeres - small pieces of DNA-protein complexes at the ends of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, it loses a section of telomeres. After about 50 divisions, the cells can no longer divide, which is called the Hayflick upper limit. In this case, they got a slice of Henrietta's cancerous tissue. Mary, the assistant, threw the tissue into a test tube with culture medium, not holding out much hope. But soon, they were shocked. Hereita's cancer cells contain a telomerase enzyme that can add telomeres that have been lost in division indefinitely, causing them to have no limit to division and to proliferate endlessly. With sufficient nutrients, these cells can grow like crazy, doubling their number in 24 hours, unrestricted by the number of divisions and unrestricted by equipment. When most human tissue cultures are only covered in a thin layer on the wall of a test tube, these cells can accumulate savagely in the culture medium. These cells killed Hereita, but they made scientists ecstatic. They called it "helacell" and spelled together the first two letters of Hereita's first and last names. ( (Electronic 3D image of HeLa cells) The appearance of HeLa cells opened the door to virology and genetics for human beings. The winter of Henrietta's death, the worst polio epidemic in history broke out in the United States. In 1952, the University of Pittsburgh announced the development of the first polio vaccine, but it had to be tested in humans to see if it worked. They thought of HeLa cells. The experiment was very successful: HeLa cells are more susceptible to viruses than ordinary human cells. They are easy to feed, easy to reproduce, and cheap in large quantities. With the help of these cells, scientists finally proved that the vaccine was effective. Soon after, polio was finally conquered, and HeLa cells began to be known to the medical community. Henrietta is dead, but her cancer cells are still alive and found in every medical or biological laboratory in the world. They contain her DNA, so she has, in a sense, immortality. Some scientists used her to test the effects of certain chemicals on human cells, eventually developing chemotherapy methods. They also used HeLa cells to develop drugs for herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia and Parkinson's disease. They used HeLa cells to test the harm of environmental pollution to the human body. Some scientists used her to study the human genome and genetics. Scientists used culturing HeLa cells and reproductive iterations to figure out how genes are expressed and regulated, which eventually led to the maturation of cloning technology - they cloned HeLa cells before they successfully cloned Dolly the sheep. Some scientists used her to study how to overcome terminal diseases. They injected HeLa cells into rats and made them grow tumors similar to Heretta's. Scientists relied on them to study immune control and the spread of cancer cells. Using HeLa cells, scientists are gradually exploring the principles of cancer and possible treatments. We have no way of knowing how many "HeLa" cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if all the grown "HeLa" cells could be piled up, they could weigh 50 million tons. Another estimates that if all the grown "HeLa" cells were arranged from start to finish, they could circle the earth at least three times, equivalent to more than 100 million meters, and she herself is only 1.5 meters tall. Without HeLa, many modern medical breakthroughs would be impossible to talk about. But do people remember Heretta? For a long time, no. For many scientists, HeLa cells are just experimental materials. They know it was once human, even a black woman who died in the 1950s, but many people do not know her real name and experience. She was also a woman, a wife, and a mother. Like most previous generations of black Americans, Henrietta Lacks was born as a black tobacco farmer who was trafficked to the United States from Africa. Her childhood was filled with poverty and violence, and she did not go to school. She spent her childhood in tobacco fields, giving birth to her first child at the age of 14, and they had five children in total. After her death, researchers hoped to dissect her body for research. Her husband was reluctant, but doctors convinced him that it might help his child avoid cancer, and eventually agreed. During the autopsy, researcher Mary noticed that her toes were painted with bright red nail polish, and at the end of her life, when she was dying, Henrietta still wore nail polish. Long after that, Mary, in her twilight years, recalled the incident and said: "My mind began to imagine her sitting in the bathroom, slowly applying color to her toenails. At that moment, for the first time, I realized that all the cells we have used for so long, and all the cells we have sent, have been taken from this living woman." But her descendants did not benefit from these cells. Even though her cells have supported billions of industries and helped to achieve a series of medical breakthroughs, her children were mostly impoverished and did not receive enough education to help them understand what their mother had contributed to medicine. When she died, her daughter Deborah was only 3 years old. In contrast to her mother's "immortality," her life was marked by sexual harassment by her adoptive father, early pregnancy, heartbreak with men, divorce and long periods of poverty. Her mother was not by her side when she was suffering. She would often wake up late at night, lying in bed crying, wondering what had happened to her mother. And she didn't know until her twilight years that her mother was actually alive - in the form of cells. Deborah died in 2009. "Maybe I'll come back as a HeLa cell like my mother did, so we can do good things for the world together," she said. "I think I'll like the ending." She misses her mother all her life, but HeLa cells don't feel sadness, they just divide, multiply, and grow endlessly. They may live forever, but what about Heretta? If no one mentions her, she will be quickly forgotten by history, along with the fleeting joys and hardships of her short life. Let's close this article with a quote from Elie Wiesel. "We must never see anyone as an abstract being. On the contrary, each person is a complete universe, with his own secrets, his own treasures, and his own pains and triumphs. "Scientific progress is usually based on great costs, in fact, all progress is true, and this time, Henrietta Lacks was the victim. Let's remember her.