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Curious and Concerned's avatar

The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot revealed the HeLa story for the first time, and is well worth reading.

HeLa cancer cells reproduce quickly, and are notoriously hard to control. HeLa cells used in labs often "jump" from one experiment's samples to another in the lab, off countertops or in the refrigerators. The results from many studies had to be discarded after a double check of, say, lung cancer cell lines were found to actually be HeLa cells that had infiltrated other studies without being detected. There needed to be a crusade of checking cell lines in order to keep research clean and honest; Walter Nelson-Rees' work is documented in the book A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy-And the Medical Scandal It Caused, by Michael Gold. Rees retired frustrated; the problem continues to dog the research field.

Here's a quote from The Immortal Life: "Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal." PCR testing (developed to provide material for studies, not as a diagnostic, is notably unreliable for detecting viruses) is now proposed to screen study cultures for the HPV-18 strain of Human Papilloma Virus which apparently resides in HeLa cells in perpetuity. Per WebMD, HPV-16 and HPV-18 account for about 70% of all cervical cancers. HeLa cells are nasty.

In horror I read the papers about adopting HeLa cells as a substrate for vaccine production. Can they reliably purify the extract of a vaccine culture to take out every single "immortal" cancer cell--and all of the virus which appears to drive the HeLa cells? Could a single HeLa cell which made it into a vaccine syringe multiply inside the recipient of a shot? In the 1950s, researcher Chester Southam began injecting HeLa cells under the skin of subjects and found that tumors formed.

The audacity of using such virile immortal cells as the medium for fake meat made me hang my head. Safety studies? Or do manufacturers (and investors) simply ASSUME stomach acid kills HeLA cells and the virus they carry? The stars align for a potential catastrophe.

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Boudicca's avatar

Can the future they're trying to push us into get any more revolting? My stomach is literally churning.

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