The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

Scientists knew they had to keep their cultures free from bacterial and viral contamination, and they knew it was possible for cells to contaminate one another if they got mixed up in culture. But when it came to HeLa, they had no idea what they were up against. It turned out Henrietta’s cells could float through the air on dust particles. They could travel from one culture to the next on unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers’ coats and shoes, or through ventilation systems. And they were strong: if just one HeLa cell landed in a culture dish, it took over, consuming all the media and filling all the space. Gartler’s findings did not go over well. In the fifteen years since George Gey had first grown HeLa, the number of published articles involving cell culture had more than tripled each year. Scientists had spent millions of dollars conducting research on those cells to study the behavior of each tissue type, comparing one to another, testing the unique responses of different cell types to specific drugs, chemicals, or environments. If all those cells were in fact HeLa, it would mean that millions of dollars had been wasted, and researchers who’d found that various cells behaved differently in culture could have some explaining to do. Years later, Robert Stevenson, who became president of the American Type Culture Collection, described Gartler’s talk to me this way: “He showed up at that meeting with no background or anything else...