the immortal life of henrietta lacks sparknotes

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS SPARKNOTES HOW TO

Scientist Leonard Hayflick discovered that normal cells divide only a limited number of times before dying, so the chicken cells couldn't have survived.

Some of the scenarios were grim, including monstrous clones.

The chicken heart cells lived on and on, and as they grew people began to worry about what cell culture might mean for humanity.

Even scarier? People LOVED his ideas and bought his books.

He believed in eugenics and supported Adolf Hitler's polices.

Unfortunately, Carrel wasn't the upstanding dude that everybody wanted him to be.

If he could continuously renew cells, then cell death wasn't inevitable.

People began to say that Carrell had figured out a way to cheat death or turn back the clock.

In 1912, Carrel successfully attempted to grow (and keep alive) a bit of a chicken heart in culture.

Most of the time, the cell cultures would live for a short time, but most died after dividing a few times.

It was a big deal to be able to continuously grow living cells outside the body.

That was when French surgeon Alexis Carrel claimed to have grown an immortal chicken heart.

Skloot explains that the media and general public had been through the whole 'immortal cell' thing before, and it had turned out to be a scam.

It was all pretty groundbreaking, but the media didn't really care about it.

With Henrietta's cells, researchers could conduct experiments to see how human cells would react to a variety of treatments-something they couldn't do with human beings.

Gey travelled all over the world to see how the cells were being cultured in other labs.

Once a lab had them, they could grow more and pass them to other researchers.

Pretty soon, Henrietta's cells were in labs all over the world.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS SPARKNOTES HOW TO

And of course, he had to figure out how to ship them through the mail and have them arrive in good shape. To do this, Gey had to get those live cells out to researchers around the world.

Then he showed a vial of cancer cells-possibly Henrietta's-and explained that he was growing these cells in his lab to learn how to stop cancer.

He explained it on the cellular level using his films, showing how a cancer cell rapidly divides.

George Gey appeared on a television show on Apto explain to the audience new advances in the fight against cancer.

Explore additional resources at Death and Life of Cell Culture (1951) Find sample tests, essay help, and translations of Shakespeare.

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The immortal life of henrietta lacks sparknotes