M Hey, everybody, This is Chuck and welcome to this week's Saturday Stuff You Should Know Selects episode. Uh. This week was my pick, and I picked the episode on the HeLa Cells because I think this one had a great mix of history and science. History episodes are some of my favorites, and we got to tell a little bit of the story of the great Henrietta Lacks and um on the science end, we got to kind of delve into the importance of HeLa cells. So I hope you enjoy it this time around. If you've heard it before, give it another listen. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant's with me, and Cherry's with me, and that means that the three of us all together make it s w Should Know. Hey, man, Hey, you can see it good? You see? So I'm pretty excited about this one. Actually, oh yeah, it's been a long time coming. We have tons of people email us about this book. This lady in read a lax and her helok felt HeLa Heila, it's Henrietta Lacks. It's probably a laugh I hear that, but I think it's Heila and Helos probably the way to go. We'll go, well, we'll just do our own thing, okay. Um, but yeah, this has been like a really big fan request over the years. Yeah, but it ties in. We did a show on right do you own your We have a right to privacy after you die? Yeah, and I think that's when we got the most feedback about this. Yeah, for sure, it ties in heavily. It definitely ties in heavily. There's a big movement about basically respecting the dead, you know, whether you're a an ancient mummy or a woman from Baltimore and the who died in the fifties, Like how much of an expectation of privacy and how much of a right to what makes you you? Do you have after you die? And the plight of Henrietta lacks Um has definitely raised this national discussion about it, and you know, great, I guess it is the only way to put it, Like, it's really good that people are talking about this. And it's not just privacy. There's also um a lot of allegations of racism, profiteering. It's a really morally complicated story, but a pretty interesting one too, because at the end of the day, this lady has done more to further science been possibly any one person on the planet. Yeah, Jonah Sauk, you say he is he la cells? Yeah? Is that gonna bug you every time I say that? No, it's fun. Okay. I I've adjusted my brain so I hear it the way that I want to now, So go ahead, great. Uh, what we're talking about are the cells of a woman, an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks who in uh in Baltimore, Maryland. She was pregnant with her fifth child and she felt what she described as a not to her family inside her midsection, and after childbirth, it was discovered that she had a lump on her cervix and had cervical cancer about a year after she gave birth. Yeah, and um, the only place that would treat African Americans at the time in that area was JOHNS Hopkins in Baltimore, which is sad in its own right. So, uh, while she was sick and being treated, one of her doctor's doctor, how are you going to pronounce this? Is it gay or gay? Gay? Gay? He was in her doctor he was he ran the tissue culture lab. Yeah, but he um, they sent part of her service away to a lab to get tested, and it turns out that it was pretty remarkable in the way that her cells divided. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta understand this guy, Dr Gay. It's g g e y. I would say gay gay? Is that what you were saying? It could be g I just gonna call him Dr Gay. Isn't everyone named Clark's so easy? Yeah? I'm boring though. Um So, Dr Gay is basically this guy who he his wife and an assistant run this tissue culture laboratory at Johns Hopkins. And for literally decades, this man has been trying to find a line of human cells that will continue to reproduce and not just die when placed in culture. One day he got a sample of some cells taken from the tumor in Henrietta Lacks's cervix, and he put them in culture and they started to divide. And they divided again after that, and they divided again after that. In every twenty four hours, the population of soul cells and culture divided doubled. And this guy said, Holy cow, this is it, Like, this is the first time I've seen a line of immortal human cells. This could advance science forever. By this time, I think henri Alax was dead because was it a biopsy or was it from her autopsy? Do you know it was from the biopsy? But um, she passed away on October fourth, nine, and I think all of this happened postmortem, and we should like, I don't in any way want to diminish what happened in between the time of her biopsy and the time doctor gaze like eureka, like this woman had um. She she got treatment, UM, but I mean the treatment at the time was fairly primitive. Apparently radiation treatment meant that you, um, you sewed little radioactive tubes into the cervix and left them there. That was radiation treatment. There was X ray treatment. She was in a tremendous amount of pain. Um, and she she died horribly from this extremely aggressive case of cervical cancer. At the time UM, and she died in her family was poverty stricken. Uh. They a lot of them didn't grow up to be very well educated. And by the time this rolled around, the the public awareness of Henriett Alacks's plight or post death, UM, her family couldn't even afford healthcare for the most part, which is a great irony of this whole thing. So let's let's talk about what what happened after she died in her m her cells continued on. Well, he named them, first of all, and it's it's a common thing to name the cells after the person from which they came, and so a lot for many years people I thought they said it was a lady named Helen Lane or Helen Larson, right, because they're trying to create anonymity, like you're trying to protect the donors identity, and they were actually trying to throw pull off by saying they were lying it was Helen Lane or Helen Larson. Yeah, I don't know about that. And on an anonymity, why would they name them after the person? Then? I don't know. I think that they're trying to protect their their name. Why would they name them after I think rather than calling it at the time that Henrietta lacks cells, HELO was good enough. Interesting. I would think if you're trying to protect them, you wouldn't call it anything remotely close to the right exactly. Well that's what they do now, Okay. Um, So anyway, people didn't really check a lot because it's just no one really cares that much in the medical community, like who did these come from? It was really common at the time and still to take tissue samples and use them without consent. And that's one of the big issues that came about later is she never knew that her cells were going to be used in this way. Right. Not only did she not know, her family had no idea too. Yeah, but we should point out it wasn't like against the law or anything, and there was nothing shady going on because it was commonplace. Right. We should also point out that Dr gay I never sought to profit from these things. Now, he would send them off to people for free. Um, you have to buy them now of course. Uh. And they're all different kinds of strains that range in prices from two fifty bucks to like thousands of dollars for example. Yeah, and we'll we'll talk about that in a little while, and like you can get online and buy them. Yeah, right, I went today and I added some to the cart, and then I was like, I'm just kidding, did you that car is like Bryant? Yeah. I just was curious, so how easy it would be, And I don't know if there was a something later on in that process that I would have to fill out or something, but I added it to the cart. Uh. No, I don't think you have to fill anything out to get human culture. Really. Yeah, you don't have to prove that you're like a researcher or some kind. I don't think so. No, as long as it's not like, um, a bio hazard, I think interesting. And I know some places that charge it different prices for nonprofits as well for the Yeah, but just that much of a discount, Like I saw somewhere, it would be like maybe you or I would pay two fifty bucks, but if we had, if we were a five O one C three, we'd pay like a hundred ninety. That's not bad sixty. Yeah, I just thought it'd be more. Okay, all right, so let's talk a little bit about why. Well, first of all, we don't really know for sure why herselves were so unique. Okay, so they think they might have figured it out. I saw that in nature, Yes I didn't. I don't know. I don't know. If I thought that was solid, you didn't buy it. Well, I don't think they even went on record saying it's super solid. It's just a theory. So I from from what I understand the what's her name, Rebecca Sclute? Yeah, she's who wrote the book The Immortal Henry at a Las, Yes, which is being options by Oprah Yeah for HBO. Yeah, that would be a good one for a movie. Um. So she apparently buys it. And because she was saying that for many many years after the book came out, well for a couple of years after a book came out, because it came out in two thousand and ten, and this explanation came out this year. Um that they had to tell people on book tour, like, we have no idea why herself kept growing and growing and now we have a better understanding. But the explanation, Chuck and I are referring to everybody. Um, so you get cervical cancer from the human pepioma virus. There's two else, so it's b O right, Okay, HPV and UM apparently, which is very common by the way, Yes, um, but that's what cervical cancer comes from Florida, I understand right. Okay, So the HPV and Henrietta Lacks had insinuated its own genetic material into her DNA right above a gene called mike m YC and this gene, it's a regulatory gene, so when it starts to when it's expression starts to get hay wire, it can lead to cancer. So they think that the placement of this HPV is what causes these cells to grow and divide so quickly and so robustly, because these HeLa cells are an immortal line of cells. When you put them in the right conditions, you take one cell, it will keep dividing indefinitely, And we should probably talk about why that's a big thing, why other people's cells don't normally do that. So before we move on, I think it's a good time for a message break. Hey, now we're back. Should we get into apoptosis? Apoptosis or cellular suicide is or program cell death because you pick many names. So from what I understand, program cell death is like this whole general idea that a cell self destruction, but there's different ways, and up poptosis is one of them. UM. Basically, when a cell is no longer needed, it commits cellular suicide. Uh, it's not abnormal or scary, UM. Healthy adults, we have billions of cells dying in our bone matter and intestines every hour. Yeah, and then your white blood cells come along, absorb all the detritus and move you move this this stuff out through your sweat. Yeah. It basically balances cell division out um tissue would grow or shrink if it wasn't for apoptosis. So it's a good thing, right. Um. Apparently we have web fingers as we develop in the womb, right, and thanks to apoptosis, these cells degrade and your fingers go back to to non webby versions of themselves. Well, they don't go back to or go to. Yeah. Basically all the cells, all the cells die in between your fingers, and you don't look like a man from Atlantis. Right. And this is also, like you said, I think a check on cancerous growth because cancer is well tumor is a cluster of cells that are growing out of control. One of the conditions of life is controlled growth. Cancer is uncontrolled growth. One way to keep that in check is to have cells have a lifespan, and they typically do in the healthy person. The cells divide um between forty and sixty times and then they die. That's what's called the hay Flick limit. Yeah, we've talked about that. Yeah, and do you remember what it was. We've talked about that a few times. Yeah, well, it's just so fascinating. It is. Uh So cancer cells, like we said, don't have the pc D and hers, thanks to Mike, are just the hardiest they had ever discovered, and uh I went on to be used in at least sixty cases uh in medical journals and articles. Well, this is probably written three months ago. You know. Um eleven thousand patents relate to the use of the he LA cells. And they're easy to store, they're easy to ship. They're basically the best cells out there to work with for most kinds of disease, although in viruses UM, although some doctors say they can be a little too robust and mess things up. So they these cells are. They're extremely robust, They divide very quickly, They're very hardy. They also apparently are airborne. Is one one way that they go and contaminate other cultures. They can easily be transferred on clothes or gloves or whatever, so they to some researchers, they basically are like invasive. They're an invasive cell line. Uh and by the early seventies they contaminated so many other cell lines UM that doctors had to figure out how way to identify HeLa cells from other cells. So they said, well, we'll just call the family and and I think nine day las Henriette's husband got a phone call that just completely con used him. And this is the first seat ever heard. This is the first the family found out that these cells, that that this was going on the family. This family had no idea. Yeah, but like we said, they weren't highly educated. So when someone calls from Johns Hopkins and says, your wife is still alive as cells in a lab, they were really confused. And the daughter even thought for a while that they had literally cloned her mom and that versions of the mom were living in London. Like, you know, she had no idea what they were talking about, right, if so? But not only that, the call apparently was later proven to be very misleading because they were saying, we need to find out if your kids have cancer. So well, what they wanted was to see if they had the same properties as their mom. They wanted they wanted the kids DNA so they could identify HeLa DNA and other cultures because it had become so invasive, right, so they were basically saying, you guys might have cancer. But really what they were after was their genetic material for for DNA typing. That's right. That's extremely misleading and mean because once the kids went in and got their um blood workups done, Johns Hopkins never called back, so they were just left to wonder what was going on. But I mean, think about it. So let's say somebody called you and said, hey, um, we think you might have cancer, come in and do some blood work. You go in and get your blood work done, and then they never call you back again. Wouldn't you be worried? I get on the phone. Sure. So, like we said, Chuck, this is a pretty morally complex situation. Um. When the family did finally find out, they also realized that this this their mother's cell line. Um was a multi billion dollar cottage industry and they hadn't seen a penny from it. Um. And so medical science kind of said, well, ho hold on, let me let's let us explain all the great things that your mother's cells have done. Right, And I mean there's they've been involved in some pretty spectacular scientific achievements. Yes, like we said, the study of viruses, everything from measles to mumps, um created vaccines. In fact, curing creating a vaccine for HPV. Yeah, so that she had. They ended up getting a vaccine for that from ourselves, which is pretty great. Like you said, Jonas Salk. With polio, which has been eradicated here in the West, we should explain how that happens to Like um, when you have a live human cell, you have an opportunity to do whatever you can to it and simulate what would happen in a normal human body. And with polio, they took the polio virus and injected the heli cell with the polio virus, and then they injected the heli cell with some of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, and the polio virus was eradicated in that heli cell. That's right, Yeah, you just figured out that your vaccine works. They've used it to study tuberculosis. Yeah HIV, we already said HBB Parkinson's. They've used a lot in Parkinson's research, and even in the transportation and standardization of just using cells like this period, because you know, they were so great and they wanted to use these, they had to figure out a better way to ship them back and forth. And just a lot of the standardization of these procedures are in place now because of everyone wanted to work with these cells, which is pretty great too, So okay, chuck. Um the family finds out about this, they spend basically decades saying like, hey, can somebody fill us in on what's going on here? How are you guys making money off of this? Like what's the deal? And we're just being ignored, And finally Rebecca Sclute gets some involved. Yeah, she's a science writer. I don't think we even mentioned that. Yeah, and the author of the Immortal Henrietta Lacks right, Yeah, I think it's The Immortal Life, The Immortal Life of Henriette A. Lacks Um. And over time Sclute kind of befriends the family and ends up writing this book and telling the story of Henriett of Henrietta Alacks and basically just captures the national attention. Basically says, this family, you can make a pretty good case, was totally exploited as a whole, or by the medical establishment as a whole, and let's talk about this, and that's exactly what happened as a result. Yeah, um, the family did look into getting money from it, but that is pretty much completely off the table because that opens up a can of worms that everybody's cells ever used in any experiment would have to be tracked back to their original family members and compensated. In the courts of resoundingly said no, no, no, we can't do that. Set halt medical research because we know it and we can't do that. There was a case in nineteen eighty where this this patient with leukemia um found out that his doctor had taken cells from a biopsy and created a cell line worth three billion dollars, and this case went all the ways Supreme Court. In the Supreme Court said sorry, man, yeah, once it's taken from your body, it doesn't belong to you any longer. To a lot of people still don't necessarily agree with, but that's the that's the status quo as it stands to think. Everybody's very protective of scientific um progress, especially in in eradicating diseases as they should be. However, earlier this year there was finally some good news for the Lax family. UH The National Institute of Health UM in I had to two of her descendants to be part of the HeLa Genome Data Access Working Group, which basically now they're a part of the UM the board which considers applications to use her cells. Yeah, because in addition, while this whole thing is going on, this whole national conversation about what should be done with the cell line, and um, you know what rights a a person has to their own cells. This European Scientific Agency cracked and published the HeLa genome, which they published Henrietta Lacks's genome just out there, open to the public. And it's been proven that you can you can find someone's identity out just from their genome, and you can also find out a lot about their descendants. So it was a big deal. This European agency took it down. But now it's been placed behind this UM. It's it's under like a password, lock and key in this database, so there's access to it. You can get access to but you to apply to that working group. That's right. So now the Data Access Group UM, they apply for permission, they agree not to contact the family members of Henrietta Lacks, agreed to use them only for biomedical research only, and UM, some of the family members will handle those requests along with uh, you know, the other people on the board. It's not like they're the only ones that are left to decide this of course, and um, like I said, they did ask about paying, and they said, maybe we can think of some other ways for you to make money off this, like patenting a genetic test for cancer based on your mom's cells. But they have not yet come up with any way to make money off of it. So a lot of other people have, Like you were saying, you can go online and buy a vial of cells for like two bucks or something like that. There's other ones that, um, you can buy that have HeLa cells that are like ten thousand dollars. And I read this explanation of all that that if you take one of those ten tho dollar vials, it has all these other patented processes and proteins and genes and things, and that that account for that increased amount of money, that increased cost. And then even the vile it's like, well, it costs money to produce these things and store them and ship them and all that. So the the idea that there's somebody out there that's just making tons of cash off this is not. That it's much more spread out and it's much less obvious, and um, there's really not that much of a bad guy in this story as much as you want there to be. And even the author of the book is like, there's there's a lot of like shifting sands in this and it's not cutting dry and black and white. And you know, at the end of the day, we want biomedical research to keep progressing. Yeah. I don't think anyone necessarily looking for a bad guy as much as they're looking for a good ending for that family. Well, it sounds like they got them. No, I mean they got an apology. Yeah, there's now endowed um scholarships and chairs at universities around the country in her name. And I think if you use HeLa cells now in a study, you say, these cells in this use in this study were donated by Henrietta Lacks. Yeah, I think that was part of the agreement. Yeah, I was talking money though, you know, I got you like, they're still poor and they still don't have medical coverage. Actually I don't know if that's true today, but yeah, yeah, Oh, there's also a Henrietta Lacks Foundation too. There is, Uh, you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well, if you want to learn more about Henrietta Lacks, you should probably go read The Immortal Life of Henrietta lacks by Rebecca's glute. Sure to check out the website Foundation all that Stuff, and you can also go on to how stuff works dot com and type henri alas in the search par Since I said search parts time for listener, maybe right, I'm gonna call this bio diesel dad. Um, Guys, after listen a ten easy ways to save money, I want to tell you about my dad's super cool garage biodiesel LOP. He got into homebrew biodesel about five years ago and since developed a very sophisticated setup which can produce a ninety gallon batch of biofuel in three to five days. UH. The simple rundown is that you filter use vegetable oil, boil off the excess water, and lie in methanol and filter filter filter. UH. He regularly gathers to used vegetable oil from various restaurants and bars around town who are happy to give it to him. UH. He uses the biodiesel to self sufficiently fuel my mom's SUV, his sedan, his truck, and his twenty six ft fishing boat. UH. No engine modification is required and can be mixed at any ratio with normal petroleum diesel. As far as money savings go, the raw chemicals only end up costing about a dollar per gallon, so I'll let you do the math. While I'm not recommending that everyone go out and build their own biodiesel plant in their garage, especially since I'm not sure how legal it is a permit, I was wondering that too. I thought you guys would find this interesting at least. I started listening to the show in September during the long drive moving to Stanford where I just started work as a grad student. And I've been a die hard fan ever since. And that is from Ben. Thanks Ben, and Ben's dad dude, I don't know his name, but good on you, sir. Yeah, it's pretty cool. French fire machine. Yeah uh oh, let's see if your family members are doing something pretty interesting, we want to hear about it from you. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash so if you should know, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you can join us at our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com

M Hey, everybody, This is Chuck and welcome to this week's Saturday Stuff You Should Know Selects episode. Uh. This week was my pick, and I picked the episode on the HeLa Cells because I think this one had a great mix of history and science. History episodes are some of my favorites, and we got to tell a little bit of the story of the great Henrietta Lacks and um on the science end, we got to kind of delve into the importance of HeLa cells. So I hope you enjoy it this time around. If you've heard it before, give it another listen. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant's with me, and Cherry's with me, and that means that the three of us all together make it s w Should Know. Hey, man, Hey, you can see it good? You see? So I'm pretty excited about this one. Actually, oh yeah, it's been a long time coming. We have tons of people email us about this book. This lady in read a lax and her helok felt HeLa Heila, it's Henrietta Lacks. It's probably a laugh I hear that, but I think it's Heila and Helos probably the way to go. We'll go, well, we'll just do our own thing, okay. Um, but yeah, this has been like a really big fan request over the years. Yeah, but it ties in. We did a show on right do you own your We have a right to privacy after you die? Yeah, and I think that's when we got the most feedback about this. Yeah, for sure, it ties in heavily. It definitely ties in heavily. There's a big movement about basically respecting the dead, you know, whether you're a an ancient mummy or a woman from Baltimore and the who died in the fifties, Like how much of an expectation of privacy and how much of a right to what makes you you? Do you have after you die? And the plight of Henrietta lacks Um has definitely raised this national discussion about it, and you know, great, I guess it is the only way to put it, Like, it's really good that people are talking about this. And it's not just privacy. There's also um a lot of allegations of racism, profiteering. It's a really morally complicated story, but a pretty interesting one too, because at the end of the day, this lady has done more to further science been possibly any one person on the planet. Yeah, Jonah Sauk, you say he is he la cells? Yeah? Is that gonna bug you every time I say that? No, it's fun. Okay. I I've adjusted my brain so I hear it the way that I want to now, So go ahead, great. Uh, what we're talking about are the cells of a woman, an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks who in uh in Baltimore, Maryland. She was pregnant with her fifth child and she felt what she described as a not to her family inside her midsection, and after childbirth, it was discovered that she had a lump on her cervix and had cervical cancer about a year after she gave birth. Yeah, and um, the only place that would treat African Americans at the time in that area was JOHNS Hopkins in Baltimore, which is sad in its own right. So, uh, while she was sick and being treated, one of her doctor's doctor, how are you going to pronounce this? Is it gay or gay? Gay? Gay? He was in her doctor he was he ran the tissue culture lab. Yeah, but he um, they sent part of her service away to a lab to get tested, and it turns out that it was pretty remarkable in the way that her cells divided. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta understand this guy, Dr Gay. It's g g e y. I would say gay gay? Is that what you were saying? It could be g I just gonna call him Dr Gay. Isn't everyone named Clark's so easy? Yeah? I'm boring though. Um So, Dr Gay is basically this guy who he his wife and an assistant run this tissue culture laboratory at Johns Hopkins. And for literally decades, this man has been trying to find a line of human cells that will continue to reproduce and not just die when placed in culture. One day he got a sample of some cells taken from the tumor in Henrietta Lacks's cervix, and he put them in culture and they started to divide. And they divided again after that, and they divided again after that. In every twenty four hours, the population of soul cells and culture divided doubled. And this guy said, Holy cow, this is it, Like, this is the first time I've seen a line of immortal human cells. This could advance science forever. By this time, I think henri Alax was dead because was it a biopsy or was it from her autopsy? Do you know it was from the biopsy? But um, she passed away on October fourth, nine, and I think all of this happened postmortem, and we should like, I don't in any way want to diminish what happened in between the time of her biopsy and the time doctor gaze like eureka, like this woman had um. She she got treatment, UM, but I mean the treatment at the time was fairly primitive. Apparently radiation treatment meant that you, um, you sewed little radioactive tubes into the cervix and left them there. That was radiation treatment. There was X ray treatment. She was in a tremendous amount of pain. Um, and she she died horribly from this extremely aggressive case of cervical cancer. At the time UM, and she died in her family was poverty stricken. Uh. They a lot of them didn't grow up to be very well educated. And by the time this rolled around, the the public awareness of Henriett Alacks's plight or post death, UM, her family couldn't even afford healthcare for the most part, which is a great irony of this whole thing. So let's let's talk about what what happened after she died in her m her cells continued on. Well, he named them, first of all, and it's it's a common thing to name the cells after the person from which they came, and so a lot for many years people I thought they said it was a lady named Helen Lane or Helen Larson, right, because they're trying to create anonymity, like you're trying to protect the donors identity, and they were actually trying to throw pull off by saying they were lying it was Helen Lane or Helen Larson. Yeah, I don't know about that. And on an anonymity, why would they name them after the person? Then? I don't know. I think that they're trying to protect their their name. Why would they name them after I think rather than calling it at the time that Henrietta lacks cells, HELO was good enough. Interesting. I would think if you're trying to protect them, you wouldn't call it anything remotely close to the right exactly. Well that's what they do now, Okay. Um, So anyway, people didn't really check a lot because it's just no one really cares that much in the medical community, like who did these come from? It was really common at the time and still to take tissue samples and use them without consent. And that's one of the big issues that came about later is she never knew that her cells were going to be used in this way. Right. Not only did she not know, her family had no idea too. Yeah, but we should point out it wasn't like against the law or anything, and there was nothing shady going on because it was commonplace. Right. We should also point out that Dr gay I never sought to profit from these things. Now, he would send them off to people for free. Um, you have to buy them now of course. Uh. And they're all different kinds of strains that range in prices from two fifty bucks to like thousands of dollars for example. Yeah, and we'll we'll talk about that in a little while, and like you can get online and buy them. Yeah, right, I went today and I added some to the cart, and then I was like, I'm just kidding, did you that car is like Bryant? Yeah. I just was curious, so how easy it would be, And I don't know if there was a something later on in that process that I would have to fill out or something, but I added it to the cart. Uh. No, I don't think you have to fill anything out to get human culture. Really. Yeah, you don't have to prove that you're like a researcher or some kind. I don't think so. No, as long as it's not like, um, a bio hazard, I think interesting. And I know some places that charge it different prices for nonprofits as well for the Yeah, but just that much of a discount, Like I saw somewhere, it would be like maybe you or I would pay two fifty bucks, but if we had, if we were a five O one C three, we'd pay like a hundred ninety. That's not bad sixty. Yeah, I just thought it'd be more. Okay, all right, so let's talk a little bit about why. Well, first of all, we don't really know for sure why herselves were so unique. Okay, so they think they might have figured it out. I saw that in nature, Yes I didn't. I don't know. I don't know. If I thought that was solid, you didn't buy it. Well, I don't think they even went on record saying it's super solid. It's just a theory. So I from from what I understand the what's her name, Rebecca Sclute? Yeah, she's who wrote the book The Immortal Henry at a Las, Yes, which is being options by Oprah Yeah for HBO. Yeah, that would be a good one for a movie. Um. So she apparently buys it. And because she was saying that for many many years after the book came out, well for a couple of years after a book came out, because it came out in two thousand and ten, and this explanation came out this year. Um that they had to tell people on book tour, like, we have no idea why herself kept growing and growing and now we have a better understanding. But the explanation, Chuck and I are referring to everybody. Um, so you get cervical cancer from the human pepioma virus. There's two else, so it's b O right, Okay, HPV and UM apparently, which is very common by the way, Yes, um, but that's what cervical cancer comes from Florida, I understand right. Okay, So the HPV and Henrietta Lacks had insinuated its own genetic material into her DNA right above a gene called mike m YC and this gene, it's a regulatory gene, so when it starts to when it's expression starts to get hay wire, it can lead to cancer. So they think that the placement of this HPV is what causes these cells to grow and divide so quickly and so robustly, because these HeLa cells are an immortal line of cells. When you put them in the right conditions, you take one cell, it will keep dividing indefinitely, And we should probably talk about why that's a big thing, why other people's cells don't normally do that. So before we move on, I think it's a good time for a message break. Hey, now we're back. Should we get into apoptosis? Apoptosis or cellular suicide is or program cell death because you pick many names. So from what I understand, program cell death is like this whole general idea that a cell self destruction, but there's different ways, and up poptosis is one of them. UM. Basically, when a cell is no longer needed, it commits cellular suicide. Uh, it's not abnormal or scary, UM. Healthy adults, we have billions of cells dying in our bone matter and intestines every hour. Yeah, and then your white blood cells come along, absorb all the detritus and move you move this this stuff out through your sweat. Yeah. It basically balances cell division out um tissue would grow or shrink if it wasn't for apoptosis. So it's a good thing, right. Um. Apparently we have web fingers as we develop in the womb, right, and thanks to apoptosis, these cells degrade and your fingers go back to to non webby versions of themselves. Well, they don't go back to or go to. Yeah. Basically all the cells, all the cells die in between your fingers, and you don't look like a man from Atlantis. Right. And this is also, like you said, I think a check on cancerous growth because cancer is well tumor is a cluster of cells that are growing out of control. One of the conditions of life is controlled growth. Cancer is uncontrolled growth. One way to keep that in check is to have cells have a lifespan, and they typically do in the healthy person. The cells divide um between forty and sixty times and then they die. That's what's called the hay Flick limit. Yeah, we've talked about that. Yeah, and do you remember what it was. We've talked about that a few times. Yeah, well, it's just so fascinating. It is. Uh So cancer cells, like we said, don't have the pc D and hers, thanks to Mike, are just the hardiest they had ever discovered, and uh I went on to be used in at least sixty cases uh in medical journals and articles. Well, this is probably written three months ago. You know. Um eleven thousand patents relate to the use of the he LA cells. And they're easy to store, they're easy to ship. They're basically the best cells out there to work with for most kinds of disease, although in viruses UM, although some doctors say they can be a little too robust and mess things up. So they these cells are. They're extremely robust, They divide very quickly, They're very hardy. They also apparently are airborne. Is one one way that they go and contaminate other cultures. They can easily be transferred on clothes or gloves or whatever, so they to some researchers, they basically are like invasive. They're an invasive cell line. Uh and by the early seventies they contaminated so many other cell lines UM that doctors had to figure out how way to identify HeLa cells from other cells. So they said, well, we'll just call the family and and I think nine day las Henriette's husband got a phone call that just completely con used him. And this is the first seat ever heard. This is the first the family found out that these cells, that that this was going on the family. This family had no idea. Yeah, but like we said, they weren't highly educated. So when someone calls from Johns Hopkins and says, your wife is still alive as cells in a lab, they were really confused. And the daughter even thought for a while that they had literally cloned her mom and that versions of the mom were living in London. Like, you know, she had no idea what they were talking about, right, if so? But not only that, the call apparently was later proven to be very misleading because they were saying, we need to find out if your kids have cancer. So well, what they wanted was to see if they had the same properties as their mom. They wanted they wanted the kids DNA so they could identify HeLa DNA and other cultures because it had become so invasive, right, so they were basically saying, you guys might have cancer. But really what they were after was their genetic material for for DNA typing. That's right. That's extremely misleading and mean because once the kids went in and got their um blood workups done, Johns Hopkins never called back, so they were just left to wonder what was going on. But I mean, think about it. So let's say somebody called you and said, hey, um, we think you might have cancer, come in and do some blood work. You go in and get your blood work done, and then they never call you back again. Wouldn't you be worried? I get on the phone. Sure. So, like we said, Chuck, this is a pretty morally complex situation. Um. When the family did finally find out, they also realized that this this their mother's cell line. Um was a multi billion dollar cottage industry and they hadn't seen a penny from it. Um. And so medical science kind of said, well, ho hold on, let me let's let us explain all the great things that your mother's cells have done. Right, And I mean there's they've been involved in some pretty spectacular scientific achievements. Yes, like we said, the study of viruses, everything from measles to mumps, um created vaccines. In fact, curing creating a vaccine for HPV. Yeah, so that she had. They ended up getting a vaccine for that from ourselves, which is pretty great. Like you said, Jonas Salk. With polio, which has been eradicated here in the West, we should explain how that happens to Like um, when you have a live human cell, you have an opportunity to do whatever you can to it and simulate what would happen in a normal human body. And with polio, they took the polio virus and injected the heli cell with the polio virus, and then they injected the heli cell with some of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, and the polio virus was eradicated in that heli cell. That's right, Yeah, you just figured out that your vaccine works. They've used it to study tuberculosis. Yeah HIV, we already said HBB Parkinson's. They've used a lot in Parkinson's research, and even in the transportation and standardization of just using cells like this period, because you know, they were so great and they wanted to use these, they had to figure out a better way to ship them back and forth. And just a lot of the standardization of these procedures are in place now because of everyone wanted to work with these cells, which is pretty great too, So okay, chuck. Um the family finds out about this, they spend basically decades saying like, hey, can somebody fill us in on what's going on here? How are you guys making money off of this? Like what's the deal? And we're just being ignored, And finally Rebecca Sclute gets some involved. Yeah, she's a science writer. I don't think we even mentioned that. Yeah, and the author of the Immortal Henrietta Lacks right, Yeah, I think it's The Immortal Life, The Immortal Life of Henriette A. Lacks Um. And over time Sclute kind of befriends the family and ends up writing this book and telling the story of Henriett of Henrietta Alacks and basically just captures the national attention. Basically says, this family, you can make a pretty good case, was totally exploited as a whole, or by the medical establishment as a whole, and let's talk about this, and that's exactly what happened as a result. Yeah, um, the family did look into getting money from it, but that is pretty much completely off the table because that opens up a can of worms that everybody's cells ever used in any experiment would have to be tracked back to their original family members and compensated. In the courts of resoundingly said no, no, no, we can't do that. Set halt medical research because we know it and we can't do that. There was a case in nineteen eighty where this this patient with leukemia um found out that his doctor had taken cells from a biopsy and created a cell line worth three billion dollars, and this case went all the ways Supreme Court. In the Supreme Court said sorry, man, yeah, once it's taken from your body, it doesn't belong to you any longer. To a lot of people still don't necessarily agree with, but that's the that's the status quo as it stands to think. Everybody's very protective of scientific um progress, especially in in eradicating diseases as they should be. However, earlier this year there was finally some good news for the Lax family. UH The National Institute of Health UM in I had to two of her descendants to be part of the HeLa Genome Data Access Working Group, which basically now they're a part of the UM the board which considers applications to use her cells. Yeah, because in addition, while this whole thing is going on, this whole national conversation about what should be done with the cell line, and um, you know what rights a a person has to their own cells. This European Scientific Agency cracked and published the HeLa genome, which they published Henrietta Lacks's genome just out there, open to the public. And it's been proven that you can you can find someone's identity out just from their genome, and you can also find out a lot about their descendants. So it was a big deal. This European agency took it down. But now it's been placed behind this UM. It's it's under like a password, lock and key in this database, so there's access to it. You can get access to but you to apply to that working group. That's right. So now the Data Access Group UM, they apply for permission, they agree not to contact the family members of Henrietta Lacks, agreed to use them only for biomedical research only, and UM, some of the family members will handle those requests along with uh, you know, the other people on the board. It's not like they're the only ones that are left to decide this of course, and um, like I said, they did ask about paying, and they said, maybe we can think of some other ways for you to make money off this, like patenting a genetic test for cancer based on your mom's cells. But they have not yet come up with any way to make money off of it. So a lot of other people have, Like you were saying, you can go online and buy a vial of cells for like two bucks or something like that. There's other ones that, um, you can buy that have HeLa cells that are like ten thousand dollars. And I read this explanation of all that that if you take one of those ten tho dollar vials, it has all these other patented processes and proteins and genes and things, and that that account for that increased amount of money, that increased cost. And then even the vile it's like, well, it costs money to produce these things and store them and ship them and all that. So the the idea that there's somebody out there that's just making tons of cash off this is not. That it's much more spread out and it's much less obvious, and um, there's really not that much of a bad guy in this story as much as you want there to be. And even the author of the book is like, there's there's a lot of like shifting sands in this and it's not cutting dry and black and white. And you know, at the end of the day, we want biomedical research to keep progressing. Yeah. I don't think anyone necessarily looking for a bad guy as much as they're looking for a good ending for that family. Well, it sounds like they got them. No, I mean they got an apology. Yeah, there's now endowed um scholarships and chairs at universities around the country in her name. And I think if you use HeLa cells now in a study, you say, these cells in this use in this study were donated by Henrietta Lacks. Yeah, I think that was part of the agreement. Yeah, I was talking money though, you know, I got you like, they're still poor and they still don't have medical coverage. Actually I don't know if that's true today, but yeah, yeah, Oh, there's also a Henrietta Lacks Foundation too. There is, Uh, you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well, if you want to learn more about Henrietta Lacks, you should probably go read The Immortal Life of Henrietta lacks by Rebecca's glute. Sure to check out the website Foundation all that Stuff, and you can also go on to how stuff works dot com and type henri alas in the search par Since I said search parts time for listener, maybe right, I'm gonna call this bio diesel dad. Um, Guys, after listen a ten easy ways to save money, I want to tell you about my dad's super cool garage biodiesel LOP. He got into homebrew biodesel about five years ago and since developed a very sophisticated setup which can produce a ninety gallon batch of biofuel in three to five days. UH. The simple rundown is that you filter use vegetable oil, boil off the excess water, and lie in methanol and filter filter filter. UH. He regularly gathers to used vegetable oil from various restaurants and bars around town who are happy to give it to him. UH. He uses the biodiesel to self sufficiently fuel my mom's SUV, his sedan, his truck, and his twenty six ft fishing boat. UH. No engine modification is required and can be mixed at any ratio with normal petroleum diesel. As far as money savings go, the raw chemicals only end up costing about a dollar per gallon, so I'll let you do the math. While I'm not recommending that everyone go out and build their own biodiesel plant in their garage, especially since I'm not sure how legal it is a permit, I was wondering that too. I thought you guys would find this interesting at least. I started listening to the show in September during the long drive moving to Stanford where I just started work as a grad student. And I've been a die hard fan ever since. And that is from Ben. Thanks Ben, and Ben's dad dude, I don't know his name, but good on you, sir. Yeah, it's pretty cool. French fire machine. Yeah uh oh, let's see if your family members are doing something pretty interesting, we want to hear about it from you. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash so if you should know, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you can join us at our website, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com