Virginia Woman's Tumor May Someday Explain the Science of Aging

LACKSTOWN, Va. — Henrietta Lacks never knew of the incredible gift she left to the world.

In February 1951, Mrs. Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American mother of five small children, went to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore with a problem. It turned out to be cervical cancer.

Surgeons removed her tumor and packed the site with radium in an effort to destroy any remaining cancer cells.

They were too late. When she died eight months later, the cancer had spread throughout her body.

But Lacks made possible more than 50 years of painstaking research that is beginning to explain the complex processes that occur in all living cells.

Scientists have come to realize that there is a mysterious connection between cancer and aging, and are beginning to ask if there is something about the immortal nature of cancer that will one day allow them to explain why we all get old and die.

"These findings seem to indicate that both cancer and aging represent complex biological tapestries that are often — but not always — woven by similar molecular threads," National Institutes of Health researcher Dr. Toren Finkel writes Thursday in the journal Nature.

"It is now possible to think about a time when we can start to control aging the way we are starting to control cancer," Finkel, chief of the cardiology branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said in an interview.

The progress and the hope rest largely on the ability to experiment on human cells growing in laboratory dishes, and Henrietta Lacks helped make that process possible.

She was born in this dry, hot community of gullied dirt roads and rundown houses, a place where pokeweeds grow out of the wheel wells of abandoned pickups and mean-looking dogs are chained to trees under signs reading, "Keep Out."

When she died in 1951, she was brought home and buried in an unmarked grave on land her ancestors obtained, along with the name Lacks, from former slave owners.

What neither Henrietta Lacks nor anyone in her family knew was that a small bit of her tumor had been turned over to Johns Hopkins researchers who had for years tried unsuccessfully to develop human cell cultures.

No matter how carefully the tissues were maintained, no matter how luxuriant the culture in which they were kept, they died, responding to some impulse that seemed to be programmed into them.

But on the day Lacks died, scientists at the Baltimore university announced they had succeeded in developing and sustaining human cell cultures.

They named the cell line "HeLa," but for many years no one outside of a few laboratories knew that the name was fashioned from "Henrietta Lacks," or that the immortal nature of the cancer cells that had been removed from her eight months earlier made the breakthrough possible.

Other cell lines have been developed since then, but the HeLa line was first. It was used by Jonas Salk in the development of polio vaccine, and in countless other scientific inquiries. Her cells have flown to outer space for experiments into the way human tissues respond to weightlessness.

Descendants of the original cells are still alive in laboratories all over the world.

Lacks' contribution to science has been recognized in a congressional resolution and by Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. A book about her is scheduled for publication next year.

None of the questions her cells helped answer were even contemplated in 1951 when she was laid to rest next to a small tobacco field, Finkel wrote in the Nature article, and few who attended her services knew that not all of her was being buried that day.

"The small part that remained in the laboratory would forever change science and help lead us to a clearer understanding of the barriers that separate normal cells from their cancer counterparts," he added. "These same barriers now appear to be intimately connected to how and why we age.

"Perhaps Henrietta's final gift to us is the growing realization that somewhere within the curse of the cancer cell's immortality there might also lie the secret of how we might understand and extend our own lifespan."