Reply #1: The more I'm reading about the HeLa story, the more my imagination is fired

[Duer 157099]

Aside from the policy issues I bring up in the OP, just think about the sci-fi nature of this story!

Until today I had never known about how invasive this cell line was during the 60s/70s. I learned cell culture technique in the 1980s and perhaps by then, it was recognized that cross-contamination was a real issue and that protocols needed to ensure that it didn't happen. I can't imagine, using the techniques that I learned, that cross-contamination could even occur, so it's a mystery to me how it happened on such a widespread scale, that a "discovery" by the Soviets in the 70s was shown to be a result of cross contamination of their cell lines by HeLa cells! It seems that virtually every lab in the world that was doing cell culture in the 1970s had huge numbers of cell lines that they thought were one thing but were actually HeLa cells, because of how aggressive HeLa cells are, they take over every culture that they manage to get into.

So consider the organism that created this unrestricted growth (HPV-18, human papilloma virus 18).

At any other point in history, that greedy aggressive little bugger would've quickly killed off it's host and then vanished with the body.

But instead--because Henrietta Lacks' tumor cells were collected and cultured--that HPV-18 virus has succeeded beyond it's wildest Darwinian dreams! It is now EVERYWHERE, in numbers probably unachieved by any other organism/genome on the planet! Hopefully most of it is safely tucked away in liquid nitrogen freezers worldwide, but still, it's viable and can be resurrected at any time.

Just let that sink it for awhile. The magnitude of success by an organism that rather should have quickly died because of how quickly it kills it's host. But, one scientist intervened and essentially let the genie out of the bottle.

I just find this fascinating.

Also, apparently at one point there was controversy surrounding the issue of whether HeLa cells truly are human anymore, because of the number of transformations that they've undergone throughout the years. Some even suggested that a new genus should be described, based on the HeLa genome.

Mind blowing.