In addition to the HeLa-mouse hybrid, Harris fused HeLa with chicken cells that had lost their ability to reproduce. His hunch was that when those deactivated chicken cells fused with HeLa, something inside HeLa would essentially turn the chicken cell back on. He was right. He didn’t know how it worked yet, but his discovery showed that something in cells regulated genes. And if scientists could figure out how to turn disease genes off, they might be able to create a form of gene therapy.
