Henrietta Lacks Pt Two- Blue Apron For Body Parts

This week we talk about the darker side of cell culturing history including a man named Alexis Carrell and his not so "Immortal Chicken Heart". Also unfortunately more about eugenics...

We also get into the final months of Henrietta's life. Her cancer was incredibly aggressive and in the end there was nothing that doctors could do to stop it. However they also could have treated her with much more kindness and dignity in her final days. 

After that we look into all of the fast medical advancements and breakthroughs that happened because of  Henrietta's cells. We talk about the first HeLa production and Distribution factory set up at the Tuskegee Institute in order to help perfect the Polio Vaccine. We also get into the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study happening at the same time and going on for 40 years!???

After that  we discuss the creation of the first private for profit HeLa factory at Micro Biologic Associates moving the use of Henrietta's cells from pure research and  altruistic development of lifesaving vaccines to a money driven for profit tool. And can you believe it, even after  making massive piles  of money no one thought to compensate the source of their fortunes. 

This episode is a bit of a  long one but  we hope you enjoy! Thanks for listening!

Sources:

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot (2010)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

But don't be ashamed if you get confused when you talk to your fans or you watch the news. They try to tell you where it all went wrong. Now you don't need to argue, you just sing this song. Rich people stacking the dick. Rich people with big back checks. Rich people to have an ball. Rich people.

SPEAKER_04 0:36

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Eat the Rich. I am Emily Walsh and I am here with my co-host and husband, Danny Moss.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Hello, it's me. I'm on TV again. It's very distracting, but I'm excited about it. Yeah, no. Uh if you guys haven't had a chance, we Emily has uh officially posted our first video podcast, which is very exciting. So if you go to Yeet the Rich at YouTube, Yeet the Rich Pod. If you go to Yeet the Rich Pod on YouTube, uh you can you know watch the whole thing if you want. You see our silly expressions, and uh a lot of times when I come up with a pun, I figure it out about 20 seconds before I say it. So you can probably catch that look in my eye.

SPEAKER_04 1:21

Yeah, you can watch the wheels turning. It's that's why.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

And then you can watch Emily immediately uh be upset. Be upset, yeah. Yeah, no, it's good times in a fun way.

SPEAKER_04 1:29

And if you have no interest in video podcasts, just go over to YouTube and subscribe to us anyway. Yeah. Just for fun. Who cares?

SPEAKER_02 1:35

You know uh just yeah, we've got to pump those numbers.

SPEAKER_04 1:39

We've got some new listeners and welcome and thank you. We're very thrilled to have you. Um, but yeah, if the new listeners would like to rate, review, subscribe. We we had like a very solid little team for a while and we kind of had the same numbers, and I I they almost doubled.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

Almost doubled. Almost doubled recently.

SPEAKER_04 1:59

So welcome. We're so happy to have you. But if you guys could uh throw on a little comment, throw out a little post about it, it would really yeah, all those weird data metrics thing data metrics things go a long way. Feed that algorithm for us. Do do that for us if you dare, if you have a moment, we would really appreciate it. Um, but yeah, we're we're excited to to keep chatting. I'm I'm excited to be very mad soon, I'm sure. Yeah. This we're back to Henrietta Lax, and I was so upset last week.

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Yeah, you're gonna be fairly upset through the beginning of this show.

SPEAKER_04 2:35

I also uh just for the one to two people that like to hear coffee talk and baby facts, yeah, coffee talk. I'm on my first coffee. It is the morning. He's pumped up.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

Yeah, I don't sleep anymore though, so it's fine.

SPEAKER_04 2:48

Yeah, no, he's transcended sleep, is what he told me this morning. Um, but I uh I'm not on the first coffee and I'm sober, so I don't know if that will make me more or less angry. I feel like I was so exhausted.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

I'm just worried that, like, whatever optimism you have for the day, we're gonna have to slowly watch it leave your eyes.

SPEAKER_04 3:05

Yeah, I'm we're going to a barbecue after this, and I might not be very fun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

I might not be very fun. Or you might be just indignant with facts that you're gonna just tell everybody that is that fun.

SPEAKER_04 3:15

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

We'll find out. We'll we'll let the listeners know later.

SPEAKER_04 3:18

We'll let the listeners know how it goes. And uh baby watch, she is napping. So this episode will be the length.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

It is a time one baby nap. One baby nap. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:28

So we will end it when she ends it. She's in charge, she runs our lives. We love her so much.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

Yeah, she was supposed to be social media manager, but she might be the audio engineer, but remote. She's working remote.

SPEAKER_04 3:38

She's working remote. Yeah, she's our producer, actually.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_04 3:42

She's the producer. Buckley is still here with us. You can't see him on the camera, but maybe we'll hold him up at the very end. He uh he's down there. He's he's the audio engineer.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Yeah, maybe I'll uh I'll set up a fourth camera for for Buckley who buckly chat every now and then. Uh and then yeah, we're I've got one more bit of business, which I'm very, very excited about. Uh a original artwork by my beautiful wife, Emily Walsh. The museum lives, people. The museum lives. We have I'm not sure how this is gonna play. Let's do this. So there's a lot of glare, but there's a tiny museum here with a lot of really awesome little figurines and portraits and little tiny placards, and there are a lot of little people in that in that little museum checking them out, and I love it. There's a horrifying uh Fiji mermaid that is, you know, the father of nightmares. There is uh some bloody bananas over here, and uh then we have a tiny little beanie baby and uh Coca-Cola, obviously, and uh Silver Teeth, a Capri's son that maybe was drank by a murderer, uh, and then uh a haunting little doll by Tammy Tammy Faye. Puppet. Right, puppet, puppet. Uh but I'm I'm really excited. This was uh a surprise for our anniversary, and uh I hope y'all uh you know check out this is one more incentive to go check out the YouTube because you can see it. Right, yeah, this is on video. You cannot it's a little hard to I mean, I think we did an incredible job describing it.

SPEAKER_04 5:11

I mean, yeah, incredible top top ten. Top ten. Uh but yeah, if you are one of the new listeners, Danny has spoken often about how this podcast deserves a museum, and I always made fun of him for that, but then I also made him the museum.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

Yeah. So because she loves me.

SPEAKER_04 5:26

Yeah, just true.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

Yeah, and I love her, and that's great. Um, okay, so I guess do we want to get right back in? What do you remember?

SPEAKER_04 5:34

I remember being angry. Um she's only 31 when she dies, and you told me that she was older, and it made me upset, and I'll never not think about it. Um she is a very young and vivacious uh woman of color who has cervical cancer. Yep. She gets a crazy uh like quick growing cyst. They take some of her cells, she signs consent to uh do anything that they need to do to cure her cancer, and they take that consent to mean do whatever you want with my cells in perpetuity.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Scientific research, totally fine.

SPEAKER_04 6:11

Forever. And a woman named Mary Papinculou had 20,000 peptors, and I think about her. I pray to her every morning now. Um and uh yeah. Yeah, and they put some radium in her vagina and it didn't fix things mostly.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Probably made them worse. Probably. Uh we don't do that anymore.

SPEAKER_04 6:31

Uh I wonder why.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

Yeah, not great. Not great. So um let's see, any other little things we want to go. I mean, the the HELA cells, medical marvel, and we'll get into a lot of like what they were immediately used for and the advances that they very quickly led to in medicine and science. Um, so incredibly important uh discovery. However, would have been great to ask consent and then borrowing that, at least give the family some money. Yes. And not uh wait until 2023, 73 years after uh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 7:06

And again, I will try not to keep bringing this up, but I'm going to bring it up one more time so that everyone has it in their heads while they listen to this. There are plenty of people who would give parts of their body to science.

SPEAKER_07 7:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

There are plenty of people who are willing to do that, especially for money. And why did we steal this woman's cells?

SPEAKER_02 7:24

Yep. We just stole them. We just took them.

SPEAKER_04 7:27

And also, when I said last week that your mom wanted to go to the body farm, people interpreted that to be visit the body farm. She wants to be a body in the body farm, just to be clear.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Yeah, yeah. She's excited about uh being part of because she wants a lot of CSI and a lot of like to be honest, my entire childhood is is peppered with uh true crime like shows. Well, which is wild.

SPEAKER_04 7:49

The reason I bring it up is that Sarah texted and was like, I also want to go to the body farm. And I was like, not like she does.

SPEAKER_02 7:55

Different, not the same. Different. Also, more Sarah news. Uh, she's actually used uh some of uh Henrietta's cells in her like classes when she was learning to be a nurse and a biologist and all of the things. So she's used them in experiments, which is kind of crazy.

SPEAKER_04 8:10

That is crazy.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

Yeah, yeah. But again, shout out to Sarah.

SPEAKER_04 8:13

Apparently, they're everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 8:14

Yeah, she also talked to me a lot about sarcomas and carcinomas and various uh brain tumors and things as well. That I don't um I didn't fully absorb all of it, but hey, who does it? You know, we have to agree some finger painting. She's gotta give us a little sag. But uh I it would found it very, very interesting. Of course. Uh because I love facts and knowledge and stuff.

SPEAKER_04 8:36

I know you do.

SPEAKER_02 8:37

But cancer, right? Am I right? Okay, so uh last episode we left off with uh Henrietta after she'd gotten her first radium treatment. The treatment, again, sounds absolutely awful and uh not not pleasant.

SPEAKER_04 8:53

No.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Uh we probably don't need to rehash it. We don't know. We're gonna move on from there.

SPEAKER_04 8:57

People don't listen to episode two without listening to one. Yeah. They know it.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

Yeah, yeah. Or if you didn't listen to episode one, go back. Go back. Um, so after uh the treatment, so she was there for a couple of days, and then after the treatment, she went back home, tried to get back to life as usual. Radium treatments like this would commonly cause like aggressive nausea, vomiting, weakness, and anemia. There's no record of Henrietta showing any of this, these symptoms, so either she was just like a person who pushes through because she also wasn't telling her family the seriousness of her illness. Exactly, exactly. So I think she was just tough as nails and hiding the fact that she was not comfortable.

SPEAKER_04 9:35

Also, all of those symptoms are pregnancy symptoms, and women in your lives push through them every single day.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

True. True that, true that. Um so she didn't tell any of her friends or family or anything about what the doctor said. Uh she was just like, yep, they're they're fixing me up. We're gonna have to go back for a couple of checkups, but we're totally fine. No big deal. Um so she went back to John Hopkins two weeks later for a second radium treatment. The doctors seemed very pleased with what they saw. Her cervix was a bit red and inflamed uh from the treatment, but the tumor was shrinking. So you know, we're so was everything else, but um they set her up with another casual few days of radium uh and then also began routine root then also began routine x-ray therapy every week for a month.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

Um so this is externally they're shooting x-rays at like the affected area.

SPEAKER_04 10:27

X-rays.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

Yeah, yeah. Uh like more intense x-rays than x-rays to see bones? Yeah, but they are like I think they're terrible radiation, uh, and they do uh, you know, that's why you have to wear a lead vest.

SPEAKER_04 10:42

Oh, it's in order to do the it's doing more to do the exposure to uh it's more it's they're not trying to see something that's no no no they're trying to do they're trying to do even more like tumor tracks.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

Gotcha. So uh it's supposed to be the thing that like uh makes sure that it's fully dealt with. Gotcha. You're right. Like the the the radium, the internal radium was supposed to do the like the big work, and then the x-ray was supposed to kind of like make sure that nothing came back. Got it. Okay. Um they uh it's getting that level of x-rays on your body for you know long periods of time uh over a series of you know months, uh is it damages the uh the the like x-ray text will put two like temporary tattoos on opposite sides of their chest to give them a place to aim, and they alternate between the two, which is kind of nuts. Wow. So unfortunately, about two weeks after the second treatment, Henrietta got her period and the flow was very heavy and then didn't stop. Oh uh, she was still bleeding weeks later. Um so she was still bleeding when they started these this x-ray therapy. So uh a week or two after that, the bleeding did stop, but so she didn't really think anything of it, and she just kind of kept moving on because that's kind of Henrietta's way.

SPEAKER_04 11:59

Yeah, she's working, and she's a very young, vivacious woman out in the world.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

Yep. So at that point, from all outward accounts, Henrietta was feeling good. She, you know, her doctors were hopeful, she was hopeful, and she was thinking about the future. So she asked her doctors when she would be all heal you know healed up and healthy enough to start trying to have other kids.

SPEAKER_04 12:18

I don't I don't want to tell people how many kids to have, but Henrietta, just cool it for a minute. Well, just for like a minute.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

Even though it was this is just a trigger warning for you know doctors doing unethical shit. Uh even though it was standard practice at the time to warn patients before performing procedures that could result in fertility loss, it seems like she didn't know and they didn't. Uh there are there are like in her records it says they did, but at that point she was asking whether or not she could have more, you know, when she could start having a lot of people.

SPEAKER_04 12:47

When they already stopped the ability for her to do that.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

And uh right after that, there's a note that said that like if she had known that this would have done it, she wouldn't have done it, which is also, you know, kind of horrifying. So clearly Henrietta was uh incredibly sad about this, all of this. The John Hopkins doctors, you know, the gynecology department were um some of the people in just the wider medical community that were pushing for informed consent about this type of thing. They were like, listen, uh, you know, no matter how much you think you're you're like saving them from anguish, them finding out after the fact that's way, way worse and actually does have negative medical you know implications. So it's better to like tell you.

SPEAKER_04 13:26

Yeah, if you don't have like hope or joy in your life, you're not gonna do well medically.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Yeah, and uh, you know, it's you at least need need the time to make it your choice.

SPEAKER_04 13:35

To process it, yeah. Uh as opposed to like just you know all of a sudden finding out that feeling like something was taken from you always alters it because even and I know that Henrietta had kids already and wanted more kids, but even if you were never going to have kids, the idea of somebody taking that choice from you is very different than you being like, I'm good, I don't feel like it.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Yeah, yeah. So that was that was very tough for her, but either way, as Henrietta does, she sold her sauce.

SPEAKER_04 14:02

She pushes it forward because she is a fucking yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

She she was going to these these x-ray treatments very frequently, and she had uh family members who lived in Baltimore close by, like within walking distance of the hospital. So she actually kind of enjoyed the nights after her x-ray x-ray treatment. Uh Day couldn't pick her up until after work, so she would just have like a block of time where she would just go and hang out with her one of her cousins uh and just kind of you know relax relax and chat and all that stuff. Um but within a few weeks she began feeling more and more tired, uh, eventually spending the entire afternoon sleeping, and then a few times nearly passing out on the walk from the hospital. So wow, you know, this uh might have been like just difficulty healing and dealing with the losing her strength, like she's getting worn down. So also on top of that, her abdomen at this point had turned like a deep black color because of all of the x-ray treatments. So uh she told her friends that she felt like that blackness was like spreading all inside of her.

SPEAKER_04 15:00

So was it?

SPEAKER_02 15:01

Yeah. Yeah, I mean that the like the cancer, yes. Yeah. Um, but the thing that's really crazy about all of this, like th through through the entire treatment, is eventually she starts feeling worse and like has kind of a vague discomfort that she's like, I think something's wrong. And then she tells her doctors, and her doctors like do a kind of cursory exam, and they're like, No, you look fine. I don't see the tumor's not coming back. You're healthy as a clam, come back in a month, and then she like comes back, and then she's like, I feel worse than I did before. And they're like, Well, I can't see anything. Like, all of a sudden the doctors are like, She seems chronically ill, and and the she has a turn on a non-operable tumor that is is probably gonna take her life. And I I don't know how we could have foreseen this. We can no way it's and it's just that that switch is so abrupt and is so frustrating because it's like she was very specifically being like, Hey, there's something going on.

SPEAKER_04 15:57

I can tell there's something off. And they were like, No, you can't.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

Especially given that like the initial treatment, everybody was like, eh, it's fine. And she was like, I feel something inside me.

SPEAKER_04 16:05

Which again goes back to black women being the least listened to as far as pain management.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

Yep. Yep. Um three weeks uh so three weeks after Henrietta started radiation treatment, George Guy, the one of the culture scientists with his wife um Margaret, uh went on television on a special show dedicated to his work on how cell culture science could help cure cancer.

SPEAKER_07 16:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:38

Um so he was starting to get some notoriety and some some fame. So he showed the viewers the film of different cells under a microscope. He zoomed in on a cancerous cell just as it divided into, you know, multiple cancer cells while it's growing, yeah. Uh and then he held up a pint-sized bottle of cancerous cells that their lab was able to grow in culture. Uh these cells were almost certainly Henrietta's healer cells, but he didn't mention her, he didn't mention what they were, he just held up some cells and was like, we grew this. This is all our science that we needed. I made this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:07

Because I'm a man that makes stuff.

SPEAKER_02 17:09

So Guy told viewers about how he had sent. Wait. Yeah. So Guy told viewers about how he had sent as many cells as he could out to various scientists and researchers all over the world doing experiments on how to eliminate or neutralize cancer cells. So he was like, We've we've started the the, you know, we've got it to everyone. We've sent out the call. Yeah, we're we really we're soon we're gonna really see some progress. So um, you know, he was becoming famous, and his uh work was gonna become incredibly important in the years to come, but uh the public would not learn about Gila for decades and then even longer before they actually knew where to get it. What the implications of everything, yeah. Yep. Um okay, so today shipping cellular samples around is relatively straightforward, but back in the 1950s, Guy had to work from scratch. Uh so they would send out test tubes by plane with just like a few extra drops of culture medium to sustain them during travel. Often they would just hand these test tubes to pilots who would just pop them or like stewards tubes and they would just like put them in their pocket because they were like, oh, the body heat, it'll it'll be like the incubator.

SPEAKER_04 18:16

What I mean, yeah, sure, but that's wild. Just especially if you mix like the Pan Am stories that we heard of these like crazy, drunk egomaniacs just being like, I'll take the cells like the sky gods. Yeah, just absolutely nightmarish. That's insane.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Not great. So uh other times they would ride in the cargo hold, uh, but it would be too hot, so they would have to be shipped in a small block of ice. Um when shipments of Hela were ready to fly, he would tell his he would like call ahead to his colleagues that they were going to and be like, uh the cells were ready to metastasize to their city, and told him to be ready, which is just annoyingly nerdy, but yeah, it makes sense. Um so some samples survived, some did not, but guy would just try again. He sent shipments all over the world to New York, Texas, India, Amsterdam, London, you know.

SPEAKER_04 19:11

This feels like when Amazon sends you something and they it gets lost or damaged, and they're like, we don't even want it back. We're just gonna send you more and we'll just send you more. So many. Yeah. Like, who cares?

SPEAKER_02 19:23

Uh yeah. Yeah, that's exactly I think what happened. Um Yeah. So once the other researchers received their samples, they would incubate more until they had a large supply of their own. So like all of a sudden, there were now little pockets of Gila cells all over the world, and Henrietta cells just being grown by all kinds of different scientists. So like it's now getting bigger and bigger. It's starting to kind of um it's definitely growing out of Guy's control. And later he like gets grumpy because he's like, I don't all these scientists are doing stuff that I wouldn't that I didn't want to do. Or they're like, they're doing tests that I've already done. Uh, how dare they? And it's like you gave it away. You can't be upset now. Yep. Um, so Guy would also fly around stopping to help researchers set up new cell culture labs, always kind of carrying a few extra vials in his pocket to just like hand out. That's really weird.

SPEAKER_04 20:19

That's absolutely that's like you have like campaign like buttons. He's got a bunch of extra stickers and give them out.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

He's like, no, these are actual humans. You voted.

SPEAKER_04 20:28

No, that's a person's uh cells.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

Yeah. Um and whenever people would visit him, he'd also just like send them home with a few vials. Like at his house? No, like uh they would come visit the lab to see what he was doing. And I mean, maybe it's about it. I wouldn't be surprised if he just kept some at home and we're like, here you go.

SPEAKER_03 20:45

He has them on ice with Miller Life in a bucket. He's just like, whatever you want.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

And uh his neighbors are like, I don't know, what do I do with these? I am not a scientist.

SPEAKER_04 20:54

Not a scientist. I could use the vial for something, maybe fill it with radium, put it somewhere.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

They did actually uh use like expose Hila cells to radium to try to figure out how to deal with like after the atomic bomb and all of those things, and like because they wanted to know what happened to human cells and then whether there was a way to uh Whoa, but they're already cancerous. Yeah, well, the the th that's the thing. So this is what I'm gonna get into is is uh these cells were so useful and are so useful because it allowed scientists to do a lot of tests on human tissue that they wouldn't be able to do on like living, you know, actual thinking humans. Uh and even though they're cancerous cells, they still react very similarly to drugs and diseases and radiation that like it's at least a a first step of like being like, okay, this is what happened this is the thing that happened. And the fact that it it propagates so quickly, you can see uh those things a lot faster than you would have if it was like a normal cell propagating.

SPEAKER_04 21:52

Gotcha. And again, propagate because that word is just right right inside my comfort zone. I know what it means. But just for people who might not they're just uh duplicating. Yeah, they're just duplicating, they're just growing. They do it quicker than most cells. That's right. HEL cells, which is part of the reason they're so valuable.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Yeah, and we'll talk about uh cellular cloning later.

SPEAKER_04 22:13

Will we?

SPEAKER_02 22:13

We will maybe. I mean, if we get to it, we'll see. I've got a lot of a lot of pages here. We're on page four of 24.

SPEAKER_04 22:19

Oh boy. The nap will end before then.

SPEAKER_02 22:24

I think you were right. So basically the Hela cells became as close as possible to like a human, you know, human samples and human test subjects. Sure. Uh and they were relatively cheap and easy to like replace, and they were like robust and rugged. So the other than the you know, his early shipping attempts, they became really easy to like send around the world.

SPEAKER_04 22:45

And also if you can make them again so easily, it doesn't again the comparison to Amazon, it's not affecting your bottom line to just send more. They're not precious to him. He's like, here's I don't care, I'll make more.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

Which also, like, you know, if maybe he was had to compensate people for also then they would be a little bit more precious.

SPEAKER_04 23:03

But when you steal something, you don't care.

SPEAKER_02 23:05

Yep. Uh so it quickly quickly became the workhorse in laboratory testing. Like everybody was using it for kind of everything. Uh, and it would be favored above rodent or monkey testing because it was cheaper. Uh sure. Because, you know, to keep monkeys alive or to keep, you know, and a lot of times those tests would kill the monkeys. Whereas with Gila, it would kill the cells, but you would always have the like the the base to just propagate some more.

SPEAKER_04 23:32

Do we test things? And maybe you don't know the answer, but have people tested things on Gila cells in order to say that they don't do animal testing?

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Uh yes. Yes. Sure. Sure. Because uh cosmetic testing, a lot of cosmetic testing is done on Gila cells. Wow. And it's to see whether or not like the makeup or or whatever, you know, serums and lotions and potions will like degrade human cells.

SPEAKER_04 23:58

Why would you take my phrase and attach it to something sad? Lotions and potions time is when I relax and I slather myself from things. And it's nice.

SPEAKER_02 24:07

Don't worry, we know that they're they're safe because of the thing.

SPEAKER_04 24:09

Oh, thank you, Henrietta.

SPEAKER_03 24:11

I'm very conflicted about all of this.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

Yeah, me too. Me too. And also, like I just like my skin to be nice. The the like I think it is good that we're not doing as much animal testing, especially for like cosmetics and things like that, that uh, you know, we can get into the male gaze and all that other stuff. But uh the the fact that it was just so kind of flippantly used for anything and everything. Literally. And then after the fact we came back to be like, ooh, sorry, we should have asked permission.

SPEAKER_04 24:38

And it's also just that it it's like knowing now that they do that, it's like, oh, the label that says we're not doing animal testing does not mean we're doing ethical testing.

SPEAKER_07 24:48

Right.

SPEAKER_04 24:49

And like, yes, I mean she's not hurt by this, she is gone, like physically hurt by this, uh whatever. But it just is like, oh, nothing is ethical. Just because it claims the first step of being ethical doesn't mean it's actually though, like I think, you know, maybe we get into it by the end of the book.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

I'm not sure because I still haven't read uh past where we are. So I read some past. I know about we get into some Nuremberg trial nonsense. Yay, yay, yay. Not great. There's a guy that just uh doesn't tell people and injects Hela cells into them to see if they get cancer.

SPEAKER_04 25:21

So Which one do you remember who that is?

SPEAKER_02 25:23

I I don't remember his name, but we will get back to him for sure. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 25:28

I bet I know who it is.

SPEAKER_02 25:29

Yeah, it wasn't this is after after Nuremberg. This is just like this is in an American scientist who like which is like those don't apply to me, I'm not a Nazi. And was like, well, you're doing some Nazi shit.

SPEAKER_04 25:40

You're doing some Nazi stuff, my guy.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

So uh yeah, but I we'll we'll we'll get back into him a little later. Um so uh Hila cells were a uh just oh wait, no, I wanted to talk about uh I don't know whether or not like we are gonna get into the the ethical uh question of whether or not using these cells is morally good or not. Like, you know, it's so I'm not really sure whether the book gets into like the moral question of as to whether or not it's ethical to like use these human cells to do all this testing. You know, the the fact that they're replicatable like uh and that they are so useful, it's like such a weird gray area to say whether or not like using this human material is should have the same implications, but I guess we'll see. Um but the Hila cells were a real medical marvel that was really poised to change a lot about the medical world and the scientific world just generally. Um but the guys would almost basically never really publicize their discovery. Like eventually they would just to get some credit, but like it was such a weird um They kind of knew it was a gray area. Yeah, well, and also like public opinion had generally soured on the concept of like immortal cells and cell culture. Uh and we'll get into some of the reasons why, but there were some like fraudsters that said they had done a bunch of like made some immortal chicken hearts that like just were not real, and then there's like a bunch of science fiction things that like would really kind of just generally sour the idea of of cell culture. So uh the guys generally kept the discovery relatively quiet.

SPEAKER_04 27:18

Gotcha.

unknown 27:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:22

Okay, we are back. So we've had a brief hiatus, but we're we're back in the saddle ready to go. Woke up. Yeah, uh we had to phone a friend. The producer was like, hey, uh, you had 30 minutes. I hope you got everything you needed. And we're like, oh, we super didn't read it. So we phoned a friend. So uh shout out to Max and Alana, they're the best.

SPEAKER_04 27:38

Yeah, our child is on a walk now.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

On a walk, discovering the world. And we're gonna talk about immortal chicken hearts.

SPEAKER_04 27:46

Perfect. That's what I was hoping for.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

I thought so, yeah. Yeah. So, okay, back to the science of cell culture. Uh, it had been around for a while by this point, right? Uh it was first theorized. Wait, when it was first theorized, it hit popular culture like some sort of miracle. Uh, like everybody was kind of treating it as if it was the fountain of youth. That meant that we're like one day science scientists would be able to like defeat death as a gun.

SPEAKER_04 28:09

It's always about the fountain of youth.

SPEAKER_02 28:11

That really is, yeah. Uh, you know, they were hoping people could, you know, grow new organs, cure all diseases, reverse aging. Uh, there's literally when when they started using Gila cells for cosmetics, somebody wrote into like the Gila factory and was like, hey, since you figured out how to make cells live forever, we were hoping that you could make like our neck cells live longer. And like well, like uh like they they wanted to like tighten back. They were like basically like, hey, can you use Gila cells to make uh to make our bodies last longer?

SPEAKER_04 28:43

What a weird Italian man told me um 15 years ago, which will stay with me forever, um, is he said something along the lines of like, I could tell you were young even with your gray hair because it shows in the neck.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Oh.

SPEAKER_04 28:57

So you've been moisturizing necks for lotions and potions, baby.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

So many lotions of potions. So uh the problem is those miracles and advancements never really materialized in the way people were kind of hoping. Of course not. And the public started growing more and more skeptical.

SPEAKER_04 29:12

Um, do not care about science.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

So there are a few notable fraudsters uh that also helped sour public opinions. Um in 1912, a man named Alexis Carroll, a French surgeon, announced that he had grown the first ever immortal chicken heart.

SPEAKER_04 29:31

It's always chicken, it's always chicken parts when it's a fraudster. Like when whenever a healer, notably Jim Jones, but several others, whenever healers say they've taken tumors from people, it's always chicken guts.

SPEAKER_02 29:44

Easy to get, uh, you know. Gross looking. Gross looking. You don't investigate too much. Easy to get, hard to forget. That doesn't really rhyme in the way I wanted it to. But it's okay. It's okay. Can't all be winners. So once again, one of the big dreams, really one of the biggest dreams of all of the cell culturing thing was the idea of like growing lungs and hearts and things to uh have transplants happen. And Corel claimed to have made a huge step forward in that research. So this guy was already a world-famous surgeon by this point. He had developed the first techniques for suturing blood vessels together, uh, which is huge. Like you know, a huge thing. And now he sets set his sights uh on lab grown organs. So so as a first step, he uh to to like learning how to grow organs generally, he put a sliver of chicken heart in gross solution, and to everybody's surprise, that piece of chicken heart survived. Uh the cells were actively beating as they would if they were still part of a healthy chicken cell. I didn't realize, uh, and you know, I don't know much about science, but like the idea that cells of the heart actually like pulse to help do the but also can chicken cells be trusted because they stay alive without heads for like a minute or two.

SPEAKER_04 30:57

That's a good point. Is that the animal we want to use?

SPEAKER_02 31:00

Cannot be trusted. So months after he started this, like initially started this immortal chicken heart experiment, Corell received a Nobel Prize for his blood suturing techniques. Wow. Um a world famous, you know, surgeon, uh, and also his contributions to like organ transplant generally. Uh however, the public very quickly confused what he had been awarded the prize for, adding the immortal chicken heart to the news about the Nobel Peace or the Nobel.

SPEAKER_04 31:28

Oh, being like this Nobel Peace Prize winner kept a chicken heart replicating.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

They just like uh, you know, uh what's the word? Yada yada yada, it didn't be like a conflated it into meaning that he had won the prize for the immortal chicken heart.

SPEAKER_06 31:43

Um because our baby is asleep, our dog has to party. Hey, buddy.

SPEAKER_02 31:48

No squeaks, man. So uh it it I feel like this was this is one of those projects where, or like one of those things where you make a prototype of a project, uh, and you're like, hey, client, what do you think of this? And they fall in love with the prototype, and then you're like, now I gotta stick with this first pack.

SPEAKER_04 32:07

Like I had a good idea at a party when I was on a little bit of cocaine, and now I have to go through with the business.

SPEAKER_02 32:12

So this like tiny immortal chicken heart experiment that was supposed to be a like launching pad to more in-depth research, it became too famous too fast, and then you know, he started uh having to his whole deal was this chicken heart. Um so articles started coming out that saying like immortal chicken heart points way to avert old age, death, perhaps not inevitable.

SPEAKER_04 32:36

Death perhaps not inevitable. That's the weirdest phrasing ever.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Yeah, it's pretty bad. So uh yeah, scientists speculated that this discovery would be one of the most important advances in the century in cell culture uh and would make almost anything possible. However, there are a few problems. Of course. Um, first off, in case you were thinking to yourself, boy, I am so excited that we haven't had to talk about eugenics in a long time. No. Don't worry, uh, that streak is over because this guy was a huge eugenicist. Of course he was. Um he hoped to help man live forever, but really only in order to preserve the quote superior white race that he believed was being contaminated by less intelligent inferior stuff. Definite big boo here. Uh he promoted everlasting life for those he deemed worthy, aka white people, aka himself.

SPEAKER_04 33:32

Uh this is the Nobel Peace Prize guy?

SPEAKER_02 33:34

This is the Nobel Peace Prize guy, which is why, like, if I ever get into the Nobel Peace Prize as a concept, this is a huge part of it. There's so many like Nazis in eugenesis that have won the Nobel Prize. So uh not great. Um not great. So uh he would also advocate death or force sterilization for all of the people that he thought was inferior. He, in fact, would later actually praise Hitler for his murder of the Jewish people.

SPEAKER_04 34:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 34:01

So this guy is an absolute monster.

SPEAKER_04 34:03

Yeah, that's not even casual eugenics. That's straight up straight up cuckoo.

SPEAKER_05 34:08

I mean, it's all cuckoo, but like this is straight up Nazism insanity. Yeah, evil, evil uh. This isn't him like pondering.

SPEAKER_04 34:17

I bet if we did it's like, no, I'm fine with an entire people. I'm tired, I'm fine with genocide. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 34:23

Yeah. Uh what really sucks is that like he moved to America pretty early in his career. And America at that time, uh, a lot of people believed the same things that Hitler did. So even though we've kind of rewritten history and said that like we won the war and therefore we were never fascinated. We were never bad. Yeah. We were never bad.

SPEAKER_04 34:45

But also Operation Paperclip brought over a ton of Nazi scientists that we were like, but they're side, they're smart, so we'll just let them in.

SPEAKER_02 34:55

It's fine.

SPEAKER_04 34:56

If you want to be really good, if they did war crimes. I don't know if we'll ever cover that because it's not like a monetary thing, monetary thing. But maybe we will because it's bad. Yeah. I don't know. It's very annoying and upset, annoying. That's the most insane thing I could ever say. It's really annoying.

SPEAKER_05 35:09

It really is not really peeves me. It really is just rolls me the wrong way.

SPEAKER_04 35:13

No, it's just really insane how many Nazis uh got to come here because of one or two scientific advancements that some of them weren't even like one guy like put pigs into like spaceships and was like, I'm trying to figure out what happens when you get in the spaceship. And we were like, you know what? That's valuable enough. You can come to America, you Nazi.

SPEAKER_02 35:31

What's your next idea?

SPEAKER_04 35:32

What's your next big idea? We need you here. We need you here, buddy.

SPEAKER_02 35:36

So uh unfortunately, he became kind of like uh uh like a kind of a cult hero in America. Uh I hate everything you're saying. Yeah, yeah. He was personal friends with Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Thomas Edison. Oh, yeah. Harvey Firestone.

SPEAKER_05 35:51

Wait, Edison was a Nazi?

SPEAKER_02 35:53

Not a Nazi, but I a uh he was he believed in eugenics.

SPEAKER_04 35:59

Also, again, again, I continued to confuse Einstein and Edison. They're not the same person, obviously, but Einstein was like fleeing persecution. So I was like, wait a second. No, no, no. I think you got your text wrong, but I'm confused.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

Not he not a Nazi, and I think some of these guys, such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, much more uh openly and farther on the evil spectrum, but he did believe in he was he was into the idea of like uh kind of uh a curated gene pool. Got it, as it were. Um not great, yeah, not great at all. Not great. Uh so fun little side note so Corell wrongly believed that light could kill cell cultures. So like all of his laboratories were painted completely black, like walls for ceiling. Exactly. Mushrooms. Uh you know, ceilings, tables, stools, everything painted black. The uh only light coming in was like from a dusty skylight in the ceiling. This is like Project Gail Mary. Yeah. Everybody, exact that one scene where he figures out that they go towards the the Yeah, when they make a box. Except uh, however, they're they were all also wearing black gowns and hoods and gloves to reduce light and glare on the cultures. Uh so the author described this lab as looking as if it was the photo negative of a Ku Klux Klan rally. Oh which, given the extreme racism, feels like a pretty good explanation.

SPEAKER_04 37:29

Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

And uh the pictures are nuts. They look absolutely interesting.

SPEAKER_04 37:32

Oh, I want to see the pictures.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

Yeah, I'll show I'll I'll uh we'll put them up.

SPEAKER_04 37:35

Yeah. Show them to be later.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

At some point when I learn how to do it, I'll I'll put them on the video, but I don't know how to do that right now.

SPEAKER_04 37:41

I might.

SPEAKER_02 37:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 37:42

So if you guys are watching and you see them, say good job, Emily. Good job, Emily. But I don't actually know, so we'll find out.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

Yeah. Um but I might. But I might be.

SPEAKER_04 37:51

I think we'll speak too soon, but I think I can do it.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Okay, hell yeah. Oh my excited. Um so uh unfortunately the American public didn't really shy away from his extreme views. Instead, they kind of remained fascinated with his magical immortal chicken heart. They were like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got some he's got some crazy views. But my neck might look better, so I'm fine with eugenics. Like, yeah. Gotta have a tight neck, even if it means doing eugenics.

SPEAKER_04 38:22

The neck tells all.

SPEAKER_02 38:24

Um so, yeah. So every January 17th, for decades, Corell and his staffs uh of the lab would get together and sing happy birthday to the chicken heart. Uh and journalists would show up and always like be there to document the occasion.

SPEAKER_04 38:38

What a gross party. Yeah, very gross party.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

And also they're all wearing these like weird black like hood things. It's very strange. Very strange. Wow. Um science is crazy. Very crazy. Uh so yeah. All of those like promises. So Corell, when he got like far far later in his career, because like nothing was happening, right? Like they weren't learning anything from this heart. It was just there and still technically alive, and everybody was still excited about it, but like none of the advancements ever happened, even though he kept claiming that they would be that like this heart would grow to be the size of like Kentucky at some point or whatever. He's that a lot of very bold claims.

SPEAKER_04 39:21

What so he wanted a giant okay? So this is um really deep blue sea coated. Okay, sure. Because they made the sharks' brains bigger in order to get enough culture to study. Oh, yeah. Uh Alzheimer's Alzheimer's. And they broke the Geneva Convention and another made-up convention in the movie that uh you shouldn't do because then the sharks eat you.

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Because then the sharks eat you, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:47

And so giant chicken heart feels like a bad idea. Giant eugenic chicken heart is my Warzheimer.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

Uh so there is literally uh pretty soon after all of like while this is happening, there are some like pop culture things that happen. And there's one movie, like a horror actually, it's not a movie, it's a radio show, a horror radio show that like a mad scientist grew an immortal chicken heart that wouldn't stop growing, and soon got so big over the town that it broke out of the lab and began roaming the streets, absorbing unlucky passerbys. Honestly, in less than two weeks, it had devoured the entire country.

SPEAKER_04 40:21

Horrifying, believable, yeah, horrifying, would watch, want to listen.

SPEAKER_02 40:26

For sure. So, luckily, luckily, the real life immortal chicken heart was uh not really even likely to outgrow its test tube.

SPEAKER_06 40:34

Um, because that's insane.

SPEAKER_02 40:36

That's insane. So a few years after Carell's death, uh awaiting trial for collaborating with the Nazis.

SPEAKER_03 40:41

Bah bah boh.

SPEAKER_02 40:43

This is the worst. So a scientist kind of grew suspicious of the famous Immortal Chicken Heart. Uh, no one had ever been able to replicate Corell's achievement.

SPEAKER_04 40:51

And after means it's not real.

SPEAKER_02 40:52

It's not real, yeah. So after some investigation, uh the suspicious scientists concluded that the real chicken heart probably had died pretty quickly after introduced into the culture medium. Uh, however, the doctor uh had been adding wait. Yeah. However, Corell had been able to simulate immortality by injecting more chicken cells into the solution, replacing the old ones. Uh, it's unclear as to whether this like replenishing was planned or accidental, since part of the growth medium recipe was just like chicken organs. Yeah. So, like, you know, it it just was it was like coalescing, new new uh new parts were coming in every day.

SPEAKER_04 41:33

These like eugenic P.T. Barnum. Like, this is not real. And like I am not a scientist. I am science is my least comfortable topic, but even I know that you have to be able to replicate an experiment for it to be valid. Like you have to be able to create all the circumstances over and over again and be like, yep, it's real. It's real.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

And it's not, otherwise, it's a theory forever and oftentimes a bad one.

SPEAKER_04 41:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:59

Um, so over the years, oh wait, uh, after Carell's death, no one was there to keep the idea of the chicken, immortal chicken heart alive. You know, and so uh one of the new scientists just unceremoniously threw it in the trash. I mean, literally, I'm picturing Carell being like, See, look, look, just sprays some blood.

SPEAKER_04 42:20

He's like, oh my god, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 42:24

Yeah. Uh I I it's one of those things that, like, you know, he he one, a Nazi, so he had other things to be occupying himself with by being evil, but he peaked really early, so he did the suture thing, and then he was like, This is my next big thing, but it never turned into anything. And then he just had to keep riding the coattails of having a birthday party for an uh an inanimate object.

SPEAKER_04 42:46

Chicken heart. Yeah, it's not ananimate, it's pumping.

SPEAKER_02 42:49

That's right.

SPEAKER_04 42:49

My uh, this is gonna sound depressing. I really don't mean it that way.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 42:55

I often comfort comfort myself by telling myself, you didn't peek early.

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Hey, there you go. You know what? Yeah, you didn't peek early. I think we're getting into our stride.

SPEAKER_04 43:06

I mean, if I did, then I'm sad, but I don't think I did.

SPEAKER_02 43:08

Yeah, no, I think I think we're I think we're I'm definitely uh you know, doing better than I was in like high school and college. So just like as a person. Yeah, as a person. I think I'm you know, I I think uh whatever I'm at least upward on the graph from where I was then, meaning that could not be my peak.

SPEAKER_04 43:24

Yeah, even in college, I'd be like, You didn't peak in high school, girl. You did not, because it was if that was your best time, your time is still to come. Walk into the river. Yeah. That's depressing.

SPEAKER_02 43:34

Uh yeah, but no, no rivers in our future because we're going to the moon, baby. Metaphorically. Um, okay, so over the years, the concept of just cell culture generally was tainted, kind of connected with the idea of creepy science fiction, racism, Nazis, and fraud.

SPEAKER_04 43:52

Chicken hearts that take over your town.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

Yeah. So by the time we got to Henrietta and the Gila cells, the public had grown pretty weary of the idea of a more.

SPEAKER_04 44:02

It didn't seem like a believable thing.

SPEAKER_02 44:04

Yeah. It's like it is immortal cells that cried wolf.

SPEAKER_04 44:10

Equivalent of for some reason everything in the future being flying cars and we don't have flying cars. Like I feel like for 20 years they've been like, the cars are gonna fly. They're not flying. They're not flying. They're just self-driven and they crash.

SPEAKER_02 44:22

Yeah. Yeah. But Emily, dirigibles. Oh my god. Um, so maybe this is part of the reason why the guys didn't really like openly pub publicize their discovery. I'm not really sure.

SPEAKER_04 44:35

That and five other reasons.

SPEAKER_02 44:37

We definitely will get more into like some of the like nitty-gritty of them hiding who who Henrietta was.

SPEAKER_04 44:43

They just have nothing to be proud of.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

Yeah. So why would they tell people? Because they just stole some stuff and then also just gave it away to the point when it was out of their control completely. So yeah. So uh let's get back to Henrietta. Um, and it's it's gonna it's getting worse. It's getting worse. So just brace yourself. By early June of 1951, Henrietta was telling her doctors that she sought the cancer was spreading. She said she could feel it moving throughout her. Uh after a routine exam, the doctor wrote, The patient feels fairly well. However, she continues to complain of some vague lower abdominal discomfort. No evidence of occurrence return in a month. She's probably wrong.

SPEAKER_04 45:22

She's probably wrong. She's alright.

SPEAKER_02 45:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 45:27

Uh although the idea of feeling cancer moving through your body is the most upsetting. It's haunting. Yeah, for sure. No, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 45:33

No, pass.

SPEAKER_04 45:35

Hard pass.

SPEAKER_02 45:36

That's a pass, please. So uh it seems like Henrietta didn't push the issue. She would leave and go home, coming back for her next checkup, still telling the doctors that she felt something off. Um Yeah. Doctors of the day commonly practiced a thing that they called benevolent deception. Uh which uh would mean they would withhold upsetting information from their patients, sometimes never telling them their true diagnosis, thinking that it was better to not confuse or worry them. The doctor knows best, and most patients didn't didn't question that.

SPEAKER_04 46:07

This is a real Lenny of mice and men situation.

SPEAKER_02 46:10

Like Yeah, the rabbits. Yeah, we're going to the farm. Um, so it just like uh, you know, I'm thinking of today and how long it took me to realize that a lot of doctors they're just guessing, you know, they they think they know, always get in a second opinion because sometimes they might tell you something that's that's just not true and you may be worrying about nothing, or you need to worry more than you are. So always worth a worth a second opinion because they're just out there doing their best.

SPEAKER_04 46:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

Most of them, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 46:40

Well, the thing is, is like people who get C's can become doctors. Like you can have a C average the entire time in medical school and still be a doctor. And I'm not saying that you're like nine.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

George Bishop became president, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 46:57

We were talking about I I uh I was driving home with a comedian last night who is uh 31 and I am 40, and I she was talking about how she probably knew people who voted for Trump the first time. And I was like, I know people that voted for Bush. My first election that I voted in was Bush's second election. And I voted for John Kerry because I was raised by Democrats in Massachusetts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But a lot of people, the election was like your second month of college for people in my class, so you might still be a Republican.

SPEAKER_02 47:28

Yeah, the slog the slogan uh and the slogan of like, I could drink a beer with that guy or whatever.

SPEAKER_04 47:32

Yeah, whatever it is. But it just you do what your parents did, yeah. They were too young. And once I was in my 20s, people would start to reveal that maybe they had voted for Bush and we'd kind of all laugh about it because it was passed and Obama was president and it wasn't great, but what are you gonna do? But now it's like a whole other level kind of darker thing of darkness. Um oh, because you brought up Bush. I was like, where am I even going with this? But uh but what I was gonna say is you don't have to be the top of your class to become a doctor. And they uh they might not be like bad, but they're not the type of person who's like reading studies on the weekend.

SPEAKER_02 48:11

If you have like a real edge case thing that's kind of specialty, they're probably not gonna catch it. They're not gonna catch it. Yeah. Um, so the doctors, you know, would be especially deceptive and quote unquote, you know, benevolent to black patients. Poor people. They would lie to black people. They would lie to black people all the time. Yeah. Um so we talked about it before, but generally, at least in the day, black people didn't really question the white doctor's judgment because you know, institutional racism.

SPEAKER_04 48:40

And also they couldn't, you said a lot of doctors were turning them away. They were happy to be in the room. They're they were worried to be treated at all. So they couldn't Google it. They couldn't probably even look it up really. Like you go to the library and be like, tumor? Like, what are you gonna look up?

SPEAKER_02 48:55

And it's hard to say how Henrietta's treatment would have been different if she had been white. Uh later doctors would say that every treatment that she received was standard for the day, but uh you know, all that aside, it is very well documented and known that black patients on average were treated in hospitals and treat the were treated and hospitalized much later in the progression of their diseases. So, like they just weren't believed, and then eventually they'd be like, Oh, look at that, you do have cancer. We'll put you in the hospital.

SPEAKER_04 49:22

Well, and I and then also the thing with painkillers, it's just very well, you know, it's very well documented, and I don't know the exact statistics, so I don't want to speak out of turn, but I do know that it is still black women are still the least listened to for pain. Like people don't believe that they're experiencing pain, and there's like an internal racism that doctors have that just thinks that either they're exaggerating or they don't. It used to be probably at this time and earlier that they genuinely, some of them thought that black people couldn't experience as much pain as white people, which is insane. Um, but now it's more of a institutionalized thing that people are doing without necessarily being conscious of it, but they are the least listened to for their pain.

SPEAKER_02 50:09

Yeah, still which is uh awful. Look at you, doctors. Everybody work on that. Everybody hey, work on that. Work on that. Uh and uh also it is is well documented that they have a much uh higher average on like mortality rates.

SPEAKER_04 50:26

And they still have the highest maternal mortality, which is terrible.

SPEAKER_02 50:31

We should we should do something. Work work on that too, people out there in the world. So, according to her medical records, only a few weeks after she had been told she was totally fine, she had to come back to John Hopkins and told doctors that the discomfort that she had been complaining about earlier had turned into a constant ache. The doctors once again wrote in a report that there was no evidence of recurrence and told her to return in one month. But two and a half weeks later, she uh was in constant pain in her abdomen and she could barely urinate. The pain made it hard to walk. So she went back to John Hopkins and again they inserted a catheter to help her clear her belt bladder and then sent her home again. Three days later she was back once more complaining of pain.

SPEAKER_04 51:12

Um Did they maybe you don't know, did they insert the catheter, empty her bladder, remove the catheter, send her home?

SPEAKER_02 51:21

I think so, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:22

Because you can't really be sent away with a catheter.

SPEAKER_02 51:24

No, I think they inserted it, cleared her bladder, and then were like that probably cleared that up and then sent her home. Jesus. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:32

Um a man again.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

So three days later she came back once again complaining of pain. This time they felt her out abdomen, they palpated her abdomen, uh, and noticed a stony hard mass. They finally did an x-ray and saw that uh it was saw that there was a tumor attached to her pelvic wall almost completely blocking her urethra.

SPEAKER_04 51:53

Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 51:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:54

I'm glad they finally the other thing is like I guess they're not communicating, but they're so excited about her cells and the ability of the cells to propagate at such a quick rate, but nobody's thinking, hey, maybe the cells in her body are still propagating at a quick rate.

SPEAKER_02 52:11

Yeah, no, they're not really communicating, and the guy just keeps popping in randomly and being like, Hey, can I get a little bit more of a little more scrapey scrape? Uh, which is awful. Yeah. So um after looking at the X-ray, and again, this is just like weeks. Weeks after they told her that she was completely fine, totally, totally good to go. Uh, they uh decided that the tumor that was on her pelvic wall was completely inoperable.

SPEAKER_04 52:37

So that's she's gonna die.

SPEAKER_02 52:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:40

I mean, I know we know that she dies, but they they've decided she's terminal.

SPEAKER_02 52:44

Well, not just yet. They've decided that they can't uh surgically remove it, so then they they try to like up her Yeah, they try to shrink it with more radiation, with with more radium, with more x-rays and all this stuff, thinking that that's gonna help, and it does not. So this is when the medical reports switch to being like, oh yeah, no, she's she's clearly very ill and has been chronically in pain. And we didn't we didn't tell her that she was totally fine for the last like month. Yeah, we never saw that. So uh, but even still after that, they sent her home uh to bed. And um later, Henrietta's cousin would say that Henrietta didn't waste away, you know, like you you think of people with terminal cancer kind of wasting away in you know, in her body or her spirit, but she could like just see the pain in her eyes, and you know, could kind of see that she didn't think she was gonna be around much longer. Um she kept her illness illness from almost everybody at home for a very long time, but she was unable to hide it any longer. Now the pain was unending, and you could hear her screams kind of anywhere on the plane.

SPEAKER_04 53:46

Oh my god. So she has five kids?

SPEAKER_02 53:50

Yeah. They took her back to Johns Hopkins uh again. This time they found more stone heart tumors all over the inside of her abdomen, one on her uterus, one on her kidneys, one on each of her kidneys, and one on her urethra. Um so this was just like a month after that she had a clean bill of health. Um at this point, doctors knew that there was nothing they could do. They decided the only option was to continue radiation, but not to save her life, just to try to relieve the pain. Uh her doctors never told her that they had given up and that she was dying.

SPEAKER_04 54:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 54:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 54:29

They just okay. They're just giving her radiation and telling her see you next tomorrow.

SPEAKER_02 54:35

Yeah, yeah, just keep on coming back. So um she showed up every day for more radiation treatments, thinking she was getting better. Uh, the only effect of the radiation seemed to be more pain and more burns on her abdomen. Finally, on her 30th birthday, Henrietta demanded that she be allowed to stay at the hospital to better manage her pain. Something. Um the drive-in every day was taking the toll on her, and the doctors finally agreed that she should be admitted to the hospital, which is again, it's insane. So when she got in the hospital, they drew blood in case she needed, you know, a blood transfusion later. Uh at the request of George Guy, our buddy, he he's popping back in. They took another sample from her tumor to see if it would grow as well as the first one had. Again, without any explicit can uh you know permission for the sample. Uh the sample did not grow in the same way because her body was so full of toxins due to her inability to properly urinate that the cells died pretty much immediately in culture. Not that that really matters, but I'm crumbling. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:37

Also, I just saw on your thing that it's this extra sad warning, and I'm I'm trying to mentally prepare.

SPEAKER_02 55:41

Yeah, just uh really, really brace on this one. This one's this one's very sad uh and like different sad than we've been dealing with. So during the first few days of the stay in the hospital, the kids would come, day and the kids would come and visit her, but after every visit, she would cry and moan pitifully until the doctors decided that the stress of seeing them was bad for her health, which is absolutely nuts because they'd already kind of given up on saving her. So just let this woman see her kids. Like, what the hell's wrong with you?

SPEAKER_04 56:11

So they've put her unknowingly into hospice care.

SPEAKER_02 56:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 56:14

And then they're like, you know what we're gonna do while you're dying? Deny you any joy or comfort.

SPEAKER_02 56:19

That's right. That's right. Yep. Uh after that, they would park outside of John Hopkins uh at the same time each day and stand outside the window with the kids, and she would pull herself out of bed and press her hands and face to the window to watch her kids play.

SPEAKER_04 56:32

Grow up.

SPEAKER_02 56:33

But after a few more days, she was unable to get out of bed anymore. So doctors tried to ease her pain with drugs, but none of them were effective. Demerol, then morphine, then dromerin. Um, one of her doctors tried injecting pure alcohol into her spine, which I've never heard of, and I think is crazy. That is crazy. No positive effect. I suspect a negative effect. Um, new p tumors appeared almost daily. She had a constant fever of over 105. Uh, they finally stopped her radiation treatment, deciding it wasn't helping at all. She'd lost so much weight, falling from 140 pounds to 100 pounds. Um, and she began getting like one blood transfusion after another until one doctor decided she was using too much of the hospital's blood supply. Nope. And then stopped her uh transfusions. But a group of men heard like a group of of locals that knew Henrietta and had been like helped that just liked her and helped by her, uh, showed up to random randomly donate as much blood as they needed. That's nice. And then uh it allowed her to start, you know, her transfusions again. Unfortunately, more blood would help, but not save her. Doctors uh stopped all treatments except for pain management. And then finally, uh at 12 15 a.m. on October 4th, 1951, Henrietta subc succumbed to her cancer and passed away.

SPEAKER_04 57:56

Um I guess she's not in pain anymore. Yeah. That's uh that's the worst story ever.

SPEAKER_02 58:02

Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of all of the other theft of everything else, that like she would go on to basically save hundreds of thousands and millions, like hundreds of thousands of kids, and then that might have gotten polio, and then, you know, uh so many other people throughout history.

SPEAKER_04 58:20

Do you know, and maybe if that's at the end of the book, maybe it's nowhere. Do you know if her family gets any comfort from that?

SPEAKER_02 58:26

I I don't know, but I bet it it will be in the book because the the author gets very close with the family through throughout the yeah. I'm interested to hear what her kids feel about it. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely they're incredibly bitter and incredibly angry for a long time because you know, before the settlement, before all that other stuff, there's a lot of like bad documentaries that come out that like are are like that kind of that just are not good tellings of the uh of the story. Yeah. Um I don't know enough about what the exact problems with them, but I know that they're problems. Sure. And that basically they felt like on top of the sell thing, the documentary people were making money off of their mother.

SPEAKER_04 59:03

And also all this other shit about just not treating her and lying to her, all of that alone is an injustice.

SPEAKER_02 59:10

Like I was debating as to whether or not I wanted to talk about that in, you know, just because it's not really connected to the like the financial end of the story, but I think it does really illustrate the like the kind of uh real dire straits of the like medical industry.

SPEAKER_04 59:25

And it would be it would be completely a different story, I think, if they did take her cells from this tumor, but then they treated her with respect, they did absolutely everything they could to save her, and they were incredibly straightforward with her.

SPEAKER_07 59:39

Right.

SPEAKER_04 59:40

But then once she had passed, once her family had kind of you know recovered as much as they could, yeah, then this guy's like, We got those cells.

SPEAKER_02 59:50

Like it'd still be shitty, but it would be a different story if they hadn't lied to her and they the family didn't find out for 20 years, and they only found out because they the the doctors wanted to get more cells from the family.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:02

Wow, oh, because they thought the family was.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:04

Yeah, because they wanted to check and see if if they had like something similar in them.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:10

Hey, by the way, we took advantage of your mom. Would you guys be interested in that?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:15

We're like, oh, we should just give it a try, you know? So Henrietta's cancer was so wildly aggressive and fast growing that there was absolutely no way that the doctors were going to be able to stop it. And they would find out in the coming years uh that that her cells were just surprisingly rugged and resourceful and able to kind of come back from you know almost anything, making it an incredibly deadly cancer, but also then a very useful tool in the world of cell culturing and and scientific research. So it kind of just makes sense that this is the that uh it it it went this way. Like there there was probably nothing that they could do. I would say that like I wish that it had not been so painful and there'd been more respect and more kindness, yes, um and more honesty. Yeah, a hundred percent. So Henrietta's official cause of death was terminal urania, uh, which basically because there was a tumor that was blocking her urethra, they couldn't eventually they couldn't even insert a catheter anymore, and so she was unable to get rid of the toxins in her body uh that are normally disposed of by urinating. So um her entire body by this point was riddled with tumors as well, uh basically replacing her kidneys and bladder and ovaries and uterus. So yeah. Um George Guy and the culture lab, you know, our our buddies over there, learned about Henrietta's death pretty quickly and began pushing for an autopsy. They wanted to compare the samples that they had been propagating to those left in her body after death and test to see if they would grow as well as uh the original Gila cells did. But in order to get those samples, they would need to get written permission from Henrietta's husband, which is kind of nuts that uh, you know, they did not need any written permission really to get cells from a living person, but once they were dead, there's very clear laws about uh, you know, the desecrating a um so Day remembers the doctors calling him just after Henrietta's death, asking to Henrietta's death asking to do an autopsy. Day immediately said no, but later that day he would make a trip to John Hopkins to sign some papers and see Henrietta's body. The doctors came to convince him in person. They told him that they wanted to run tests that might eventually help his children someday. Uh so Day finally reluctantly agreed.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:28

Yeah, that's gonna get me to do it. Yeah, that's gonna get you to do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:31

And signed the permission form for a partial autopsy. He wanted Henrietta's remains to be still presentable for the funeral, so he, you know, refused to allow a full and basive autopsy. But basically, so this is another moment where like I don't think that any of the the because again, there's so much toxins in her blood and all this other stuff. I don't think that for medical science the rest of it was probably that helpful. Um, but they they still lied to Day because it was not it was not at all about the the kids or any of that stuff. It was really about you know trying to understand more about what they already had.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:06

Again, it's giving deep Lucy.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:09

It is. So uh a few days later, Day drove Henrietta's body back to Clover for her funeral. She was in a small pine box because that's all Day could afford. Um Henrietta's body was displayed at the home house for a few days, allowing the family and friends to come pay her their respects. She was then laid to rest. That's that's just no, that's just what they called the the house where her grandfather lived. Oh. Oh, was the home house. Um then she was eventually laid to rest in a grave dug next to her mother's.

unknown 1:03:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:39

Okay, we are back once more. Part five of the episode two. The sun is still out, so technically, technically, we are not yeet after dark, but boy are we getting there. It is 7 p.m. The vibes are dark.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:53

The vibes are dark. I uh beverage check. Danny has a maybe six-ounce coffee.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:59

It's wee, but mighty.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:00

Mighty, hopefully. Um I have had now two frozen Aperol spritz and an espresso old fashion.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:09

Yeah, okay, so that's kind of coffee.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:11

So I'm that something like ready to go. I think we're ready to rock, yeah. Yeah, we've been to a barbecue, our child did not nap.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:19

Yeah, wildly.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:20

The biggest poop of her entire life isn't and now is asleep. You laughed enough to scare her. That's how much you laughed.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:27

That's a whoopsie.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:28

Uh so I'm hoping that means like sleep through the night, Queen.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:31

Like, yeah, that would be delightful. But you know, wish us all luck.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:36

Wish us the most luck ever.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:37

So um, but yeah, once more, let's get back into the story. Okay, uh, so you're ready to talk about uh polio?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:44

I'm always ready to talk about polio.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:46

I thought so, yeah. Yeah. So not long after Henrietta's death, planning began for a fully funded Gila factory. Was it called that? No, well, kind of, but um the it was mostly just a Gila distribution center, I think is what they technically called it. But later there was like an industrialized factory that exclusively created Gila for a long time.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:08

I um believe you, because you read the book, and I understand that that probably did happen. But factory really makes me picture. Um, I'm gonna be honest with you, and this is gonna age me like crazy. Uh, I picture I Love Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory, just like try. Like I always picture factory picture factories where people are in coveralls and it's black and white and everything is dirty. And uh this is like a lab.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:37

This is a lab, yeah. This is a much cleaner sort of factory, I think.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:41

Um factory is just a word that to me is industrial.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:44

Yeah, true, true. And this is really it is like uh at a university in their like medical wing that they set up this thing, but specifically to make it someone's in Down. They end up making some school making this six trillion like uh uh you know molecules of of healer every week.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:02

So like I think a lot of I had a lengthy conversation with somebody last night about the difference between a million, a hundred million and a billion. And basically like uh a million seconds is uh a million seconds is like a few minutes. Okay. A hundred million seconds is a few days and a billion seconds is thirty-five years. Okay. Yeah. So we don't like in our heads when somebody's a millionaire, the next thing is billions. So we're like, oh it's like e it's the same. It's not that big of a leap. It's a huge leap. Very different. I want to say also those numbers were told to me by somebody with their phone. I did not I was driving Yeah yeah this is not this is not verified research on our end. The people that listen to this to write term papers which I'm sure is so many. Research that Google it yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:55

Yeah. It would be if we find out that we've been cited in uh I would love it.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:00

But also what a bold because we are a trimary source. Like we're not a primary source. We're not a secondary whatever is after tertiary. Yeah we are we are not a source. We are two idiots.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:13

Yeah unless it's specifically uh you know a paper about podcasting and then that would be interesting.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:17

Maybe we could contribute something to that. Yeah who knows in the sense that we have a podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:23

Okay so uh yeah this this factory this lab uh was expressly built for the purpose of stopping the polio epidemic so by the end of 1951 the United States was desperate to find a cure for polio almost 3000 reported cases uh in 1951 followed by almost 6000 the next year so it's a lot and polio is uh a a pretty bad disease that generally will lead to you know uh lifelong paralyzation as well as a number of other uh other issues leg problems yeah it's uh it's bad um so in february of 1952 Jonas Salk uh at the University of Pittsburg Pittsburgh Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh announced that he had produced a viable vaccine for polio however he couldn't begin offering it to children until he had first tested it on a large enough scale to prove that it was safe.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:20

Can only kids get polio?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:22

I know they're the most affected I'm not actually sure but let me see can no but are you if you're under five you're not vaccinated but there isn't a vaccine at that time so maybe they just had the worst symptoms yeah maybe and I think it was also just the the like especially back then and and now too I'm sure but the the idea of like a child kind of losing their suffering is for the rest of their life highly motivated to solve that.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:53

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:54

Yeah so the National Foundation for infantile paralysis or the NFIP uh a charity founded by FDR uh which makes sense because PA folio um began putting together and funding the largest field trial in history to test the new vaccine. So Salk wanted to inoculate at least two million children and then test them to see if they had become truly immune using a thing called neutralization test. So what they would do is inoculate the children, you know, let it let it fully take effect and then take some of their blood um and create a like a a barrier around some sort of cell so there's a cell in the middle that is susceptible to polio you surround it with inoculated blood and then you expose that to polio to see if the cell and if the cell gets polio which is a thing that they can see like they see the damage in the cell uh with a microscope then the vaccine then the vaccine didn't work didn't work. But if it you know if it did then it's you know it's totally viable and that means that that child is actually inoculated against and they don't have to like give children polio which would be awful. Yeah let's not do that. So neutralization test very very good thing. So um the issue is that up until that point these neutralization tests were done with the cells extracted from monkeys uh and the monkeys would die in the process. So test at this large a scale at like two million you know cells would take quite a few monkeys. Enough that enough monkeys that people weren't comfortable with that you weren't comfortable with it and uh not uh not because like today it would be because of uh you know animal rights back then it was just because it was expensive how do we track down that many monkeys how do we track down that many monkeys and it's like expensive to kill a bunch of monkeys I guess back then it's always money in the banana stand yeah yeah that's a dark banana stand yeah I don't know what I'm I like I said I had free drinks and it's after 7 p.m we're gonna we're gonna be in a very interesting wave for the rest of this so you know as a listener let us know what this ride was like because I won't re-listen. Yeah yeah I'll listen to it but only to edit um so the NFIP began looking for cultured cells that would be able to you know they would use in lieu of using these monkey cells. So George and Marguerite uh no so George and Margaret Guy saw this as a golden opportunity to one promote their work and two push the science of cell culturing forward. So the guys had two problems uh that they would need to solve in order to be considered for the polio trial. One, they would need to figure out a cheap and easy method for producing Henrietta cells at large scale and then two they would need to verify that Gila reacted to the polio virus. And this is before the factory this is before the factory this is this is all like in the in the setup the things that the factory needs the factory was a teaser trailer and you've gone back to yeah so um we're we're going back. So this is this is the the this is getting ready to set up the the factory but um so you know they need to verify that Gila is susceptible to polio because some cultured cells wouldn't be you know and if it wasn't then it's not useful at all for the test. So they were very lucky with the mass you know production component of this because Henrietta cells grew at such astounding rates that they and they just weren't that fussy. It wasn't hard yeah um so many other cultured cells required a very narrow environment to grow often on like a flat single layer on a glass surface or in a test tube and it would just grow on the outside of the the glass um meaning that it would run out of space pretty quickly and you'd have to like you know take it out of there and split it into other test tubes and that that process is very time consuming and takes a while. However Henrietta cells Henrietta cells weren't picky. They didn't need a glass surface to grow on they were able to grow floating in culture medium this medium would be stirred with a magnetic stir at the bottom of you know the vial or can't let it stick you got to stir the stuff you gotta move it around. Because it's you know when when they move from because if you'll remember from the last episode they had uh these little like drum rollers so they'd put the test tubes in it and slowly kind of spin it around to kind of you know keep the liquid moving uh when you move to a vat harder to do that so they just basically have like a a magnetic little pill that lives at the bottom of the thing and underneath it there's another magnet that spins so it spins inside without having to have like mechanisms inside a thing through yeah yeah and then gaskets that break and all that other stuff. So sure it's handy the magnetic spinner thingamab. So they would basically grow until they ran out of culture medium. Uh this was a new technique that Guy developed that we now call growing in suspension. This made it much much easier to grow large quantities of medium the larger the vat of culture medium the more Gila cells could be created and just kind of let them grow. So one problem solved next they tested to see what happened if you expose Gila to polio. Within days they discovered that Gila was actually more susceptible to polio than any other cultured cells that they'd ever worked with. Wow. So that was great for for their purposes. After that they also needed the one last thing that they needed to figure out was how to transport it at scale because his uh like ad hoc method of just like slipping a couple of vials into a pilot's box wasn't gonna fly for like thousands and thousands of vials being sent around the around the world.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:29

Sorry not sorry.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:30

So so the guys thought they would see how the US Postal Service would do. So he packed like a half a dozen vials into a small box lined with cork. Each vial had enough growth medium in it to sustain sustain the cells for a few days. And then he put detailed instructions in the little box and just so just had the assistant pop it in the mail. Basically it's a blue apron. Yeah cells working um the package arrived in Minneapolis about four days later and uh the all of the cells were fully intact and viable for propagation. They just you know started they were able to you know grow them really quickly. This was the first time that live cells had ever successfully been shipped in the mail. Wow that's kind of you know kind of groundbreaking I guess so that summer they continued experimenting with more and more shipping environments, you know, trying to see if heat was going to be a problem or cold or you know distance or time uh and they found that they could easily ship them all over the country and then some you know over the world and in their tests only one sample died throughout it. So it's like you know this is this is a very positive test yeah very successful. So when the NFIP heard that Gila was you know highly susceptible to polio able to grow in Basqua on the NF, what'd you say the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis?

SPEAKER_04 1:15:46

Oh boy a bummer place.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:48

Yes yes I mean good that they're that's the the foundation uh yeah founded by FDR the that's kind of in charge of this whole thing. And the motto is a bummer place. Exactly uh you know colon a bummer place. Um but you know helped with polio it's good it's just uh you know yeah sure sad to think about sad to think about yeah um so once they heard about you know all of the success that Hila had they immediately began uh setting up the largest cell culturing operation that had ever been attempted to date it would be built at the Tuskegee Institute uh one of the most prestigious black universities in the country and still uh a highly prestigious you know traditionally black college or university is that where the Tuskegee It's where all of the Tuskegee things happen. So the Tuskegee Sipla study was there the Tuskegee Airmen came from there uh Tuskegee Is that a town uh a town in Alabama uh and it was named after the town so it was uh it's Tuskegee is a university in Tuskegee Alabama named after the town originally the Tuskegee Normal School established to educate future black teachers uh and eventually became the Tuskegee Institute and then the Tuskegee University the founder and first principal was President Booker T. Washington and one other famous alumni was uh scientist George Washington Carver and then also the tea the Tuskegee airmen were educated there. So they they like learned to fly airplanes at a nearby you know at at like a military base nearby but their their classes were all at Tuskegee. So a man named Charles Bynum was the director of Negro activities for the NFIP and he was also the first ever black like foundation executive in the country so uh what is a foundation executive as in like he worked for he worked for the the like the foundation that the infantile paralysis foundation and he was one of the like department leaders yeah I know I was confused a little weird um but so he was you know one of the first people that was was given that type of leadership over you know vast sums of money uh and um he pushed for the lab to be created at Tuskegee because it would provide funding jobs and opportunities for young black young black scientists who had previously been pretty much barred from the field. So okay so I'm gonna do a little aside to talk about the syphilis study which eventually I think I'm probably gonna go back and really get into a little bit more but uh we'll we'll go ahead and do a quick summary here which is also a bummer. So the syphilis study began in 1932 and lasted for 40 years. The 40 years part because I've heard of this study I knew it was bad but the 40 years part is which means that like it didn't get stopped until like 1973 or 1972 which is the time where a lot of people you know were alive. Yeah yeah so it was conducted by the not me for the record but other people homey service so so it was conducted by a federal agency and led by the US sur Surgeon General so it was like a fully state funded study which I think is awful. So they enrolled 600 poor black men in the study. 399 of them had latent syphilis and 201 did not. Latent is like obviously active obvious syphilis okay symptoms symptoms and uh like not like symptomatic not it you know uh they wanted to see the natural untreated progression of syphilis um which is insane because we already knew the natural untreated progression of syphilis from all the people that died of of syphilis for hundreds of years for hundreds of years maybe just give them the penicillin so it was absolutely nuts. So the men were also told that they were receiving free medical care for what they thought of as bad blood the entire time the entire like four years. Yeah the Taylor Swift song uh no I guess it's just what they called uh syphilis back then so or a lot of probably sex we shouldn't ask Taylor because you know Travis Kelsey's bad girlfriend fiance I know you think you're think you're being funny but people are gonna think they're gonna be so mad I don't think that I think that's awful i Taylor Swift is way way way bigger of a a person than Travis Kelsey so that's that's other than literally other than hmm he's a very big man oh yes he's large he's physically large yes um because you know you've got bad blood syphilis so they were denied care for decades even after penicillin became the standard cure so penicillin was first used to to cure syphilis in 1943 uh and became routine and standard in 1947 so like this started in 1932 and then uh they basically continued even after we all knew that it could easily be cured by penicillin for like 30 more years or 20 more. And those men didn't know because they were told they were receiving careful they were told they were receiving care and they were just like I guess this is just what care looks like. Yeah. I have a real bad case of Taylor Swift and it just won't sound exactly uh so uh eventually a whistleblower in 1972 leaked the details to the press and the outrage that followed led to a $10 million class action lawsuit not enough money not enough money uh and a complete overhaul of the ethical restrictions of federal research laws so that part's good it made informed consent like an actual written in you know stone law of things that they needed to do it also institutionalized like review boards in all medical biometrical research and stuff like that which everybody is like oh you know it's red tape and all of these boards are just getting in the way of like progress but like this is the reason why it exists. It's because there were people that were doing shit like this. So it's like uh I guess that's the price we have to pay for the fact that we can do really really evil evil shit sometimes. So sorry about it. You're gonna have to deal with a review board.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:02

Yeah so there's um this thing in Florida that uh this comic in my car was telling me about last night that this made me think of and it's called the free kill law what and it's in Florida and it's a controversi controversial provision in the state's wrongful death death act and certain people cannot sue for malpractice and those people are over 25 unmarried and have no minor children. What? So if you are that person and something happens to you you can't sue for medical malpractice. What doesn't make any sense that's like and that's law that's a law that currently exists in Florida. That how long how old is that law?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:48

1990 okay so you're basically saying like unmarried no children you're less of a person like you deserve less care. 100% and less uh you know justice you less justice it doesn't matter if you were you know a victim of negligence.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:03

Yep okay cool yeep cool cool cool cool cool and it's the only state in the US with that law great but also wait no this feels like an Alex thing it was maybe repealed in 2025.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:16

Okay okay that'd be great you know that like weird uh uh like group of legislators and like or not legislators but they're like it's a legal think tank that goes around to different states that tries to teach them all how to do ultra conservative grassroots grassroots quote unquote it has been repealed okay thank goodness because fuck but sorry grandma but I I mean I'm sorry too but I think that is worth it that's deserved crazy okay well that's good to know about and to to be to be dug into some more later yeah sorry I got no no it's okay another thing she was telling about while I was driving and I was like I can't Google right now yeah you guys got into some intense we had six hours of the car some people you don't really talk to and you just listen to a podcast and some people you literally dig into every form of trauma you've experienced and that was that was this one and then you added some new trauma in there and then I learned new trauma things. Yeah we we had fun so eventually I do think I'm gonna dig more into the study and how it started in the first place uh like why did this need to happen because we already knew what happened were people benefiting financially like is that why this is happening why was it only black men included in the study fantastic questions how in the world did it continue for 40 frigging years another great question this meant that like this means that it had to change leadership multiple times right yes like the people in charge of it had to change multiple times and every single time the guy had to be like yeah no this seems like good science and yes it was a man yeah no absolutely it was a fucking dick of a man sorry again grandma I'm just heated heated about this so um clearly this is some you know racism some eugenics some other evil uh fucking sorry dang it now he cannot be stopped I'm so mad so the other evil stuff but uh it also just led to just huge damage and trust for the institution of medical research in general as well as the truck trust of the black community towards science medicine and the federal government so like all bad okay so uh back to 1952 um in only a few months a staff of six black scientists and technicians built a Gila factory at the university they had walls lined with industrial autoclaves for steam sterilizing autoclave apparently is just a thing for sterilizing okay which I you know sort of learned about but not really uh they also had rows of mechanically stirred vats of culture medium incubators glass culturing bottles um and automatic cell dispensers to precisely distribute cultured cells into test tubes before shipping so they would just like squirt out a little bit of uh Gila cells into the into the vials and just kept on trucking. Blue apron yeah blue apron for for people for people cells um so Tuskegee scientists would mix up thousands of liters of Guy's culturing medium every single week uh it was made up of salt minerals and blood collected from the local students soldiers and farmers responding to ads uh for blood in exchange for money. So the blood was needed for the culture for the culturing medium yeah so I I guess that's the like some of the organic matter and protein that the cells needed to you know feed off of. So uh yeah but uh teams of scientists would examine each vial for quality control making sure that each sample was living and had enough medium to make their trips uh other scientists would be in charge of scheduling a very complicated shipping program sending regular shipments of Gila to 23 different polio testing labs around the country um the staff of the lab eventually grew to 35 scientists and technicians producing 2000 tubes of Gila every week or about six trillion cells per week. Trillion is so many trillion is so many. Trillion is so many every week for like a couple of years. So with this constant supply of cells Jonah Salk and the army of doctors and scientists were able to prove that the polio vaccine was truly effective um photos and articles show black scientists producing Hila cells taken from a black woman instrumental in a cure for polio uh in the United States. So this was like a big kind of PR step forward for scientists for black for black scientists at the time um but it is also like wow this is happening while everyone's like wow these people were so instrumental uh they're they're actively conducting that infamous infamous Tuskegee syphilis study like at a different part of the universe segregation is still like still happening exactly like they're using cells to solve to like cure things for all people but all people can't

SPEAKER_04 1:28:00

Drink from the same water fountain. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:01

Like it's this is it's just Yeah, and something that the book mentioned that, like, because uh, you know, uh African Americans at the time were a minority, this all of this work going in, you know, cells stolen from a black woman, uh black doctors and scientists producing the cells, all pretty much to mostly help white white Americans, white kids. Yeah. So um not great, especially, you know, considering that the syndicalist study was actively going on at the same exact time.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:32

So at first, Tuskegee factory distributed uh only wait. At first the Tuskegee distribution center only provided Hila to the polio testing labs, but soon it became clear that they would easily be able to make much more Gila than they needed. So they began sending out surpluses to any scientists interested in buying them for their own studies. The cells would uh cost about $10 plus air expenses.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:56

Plus the cost of shipping.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:57

Yeah, plus the cost of shipping.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:58

So they're now blue apron and an Etsy store, is what you say.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:02

So $10 back then is about $125 today. So not cheap.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:05

Okay, not cheap, but not that expensive for living cells.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:09

Yeah, exactly. Uh so this is where Henrietta's cells began to diverge from uh being used as pure experimental science and altruistic emergencies like curing polio to like a financial prospect. So at first, these fees I think were to help Tuskegee kind of offset the cost of like producing more and doing more. But uh they're not regulating who's buying them. No, they're not. But pretty soon, you know, because it becomes so widely uh useful in many different places, uh, private for-profit companies would would form to produce Gila as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:44

Because you just need Gila to make Gila, right? You don't need the origin.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:48

Yeah, once you get it, it's like sourdough. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely like it it does diverge a bit uh as as it gets bigger and you want to kind of like be building off of the base.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:58

It's better to build off from the start, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh and later I've seen the movie multiplicity. I understand.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:04

But later we will talk about you know specific cellular cloning where they try to isolate specific because the like in a cluster of HELA cells, because the very first cells were taken from a like slice of a tumor which is made up of a bunch of different cells. And so like uh each individual Gila cell from that line acts slightly differently, it you know, generally pretty close to the same, but slightly differently. So eventually scientists were able to isolate every like individual cells of Gila and then kind of create and like genetically, you know, modify, augment uh cell lines to be the same exact cell over and over and over again, uh, to be able to do specific science things. So you know, this is the this is the like cellular cloning of it all that you know we'll talk about soon. Um so Henrietta cells came at the perfect time for medical science. Research was just beginning on viruses and how they worked and how they could be stopped. So since Henrietta cells were susceptible to most viruses, they could and be grown so quickly and cheaply, they were perfect. So scientists could infect HELA cells with a virus, note the effect, and then start fresh with new Hela cells, trying various cures and vaccines, always having a fresh, uninfective stock to pull from. So, like herpes, measles, mumps, smallpox, equine, encephalitis. Uh it's a wide range of just uh all kinds of things they sort of. Yeah, and so sure, it's but it sounds bad, doesn't it? Bird flu? Well, I think horse flu. Horse flu? I don't know. Uh, because encephalitis, I don't know what that is, but again, sounds bad to me. Um doesn't sound great. So Henrietta cells really jumpstarted the fledgling field of virology, just you know, understanding viruses. Um a series of very quick scientific breakthroughs followed the the introduction of Henrietta cells. Uh, first scientists studied the process of freezing cells without harming them or changing them. So this allowed cells to be easily sent around the world, even simpler than you know, the like shipping them in the mail with some extra solution because uh which felt pretty simple as it was. Pretty simple as it was. But they could then use the already established methods that they have to send send like frozen food and and other things like that, that the the systems were already in place, so that once they could figure out how to freeze them, then blue apron. It's more it's more blue apron. Uh it also allowed scientists to store cells without having to worry about feeding them or keeping them sterile. That feels big without feeding them. Yeah, so you don't have to like constantly be and also like you know, if you don't need a trillion Gila cells, if you keep feeding them, they keep growing. So like, you know, freezing.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:44

So you're doing a normal amount of experiments.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:46

I don't um normal is not the word, but the the big advance in science, however, came from the fact that freezing the cells stopped their growth at the point of the freezing, allowing scientists to get a like a true snapshot of the cell's progression and compare them to cells taken later or earlier in whatever. Because you can timestamp and freeze and be like change and you know, uh the two weeks after the vaccine was given, a month after, a year after, or whatever. Sure. Um so it just this also brought them much, much closer to pinpointing the exact moment of transformation from normal cell to cancerous one. So it was helping push the cancer science forward in a big way as well. The second big advancement that followed Henrietta Hila factory was uh cell culture standardization. So because they were doing so much of it, uh, and and they the because of this study, they the the the like Hila cells, George Guy cells became the like predominant cell culturing you know techniques. He was able to really like work together with other scientists to kind of standardize the field generally. Up until that point, every lab had every lab had their own special recipe for cell culture, leading to a lot of fluctuation in results uh whenever scientists tried to repeat experiments. And like we talked about before, being able to repeat results over over you know various scientists uh to actually truly prove whatever theory that they had is incredibly important. Um so Guy and several other leaders uh established a committee dedicated to the simplification and standards of standardization of culture medium and practices across the entire field. Um they contracted two fledgling private companies, uh DIFCO and microbiologic associates, to begin selling uh the standard ingredients and eventually pre-made culture medium.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:33

Including blood.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:34

Including blood. I think they eventually came up with some sort of like synthetic protein solution, I think, but I'm not 100% sure. Um Guy and the committee taught these two companies how to make all of their first products. Soon these companies would balloon, and microbiologic associates in particular would become a massive force in the field of industrial cell culturing.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:56

Which again is just like taking it away from this altruistic standpoint to and moving towards a much more like financial.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:05

Like obviously, uh again, so many advancements have happened and it it really pushed science forward in a really big way. But it like there is money involved too. That like it's the ethical problems of having this much money involved and not compensating the the place where it came from is it's just making an already bad sin even bigger. Yeah. So standardization of cell culturing required three things. Uh, first, the Tuskegee factory began mass-producing the Gila cells, proving it was possible and like a worthwhile venture. Yeah. Uh and then a scientist at the NIH, the National Institute of Health, used Hila to establish a simplified and easily repeatable formula for culture medium that could be made by the gallon and shipped ready to use.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:50

Is that in the UK NIH? I believe it is.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:52

Oh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:54

Oh no. Okay, and they just have their own. I have looked up many things about babies and I read the uh UK version.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:04

The UK the UK version. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if uh there are multiple national institutes of health, but this one in particular, I think it was the US. Um the third was Guy and and other scientists used Hila to determine which glassware and test tube stoppers were the least toxic to cells over time. Sure. So like without that, you know, cells would deteriorate or die over time. And and like figuring out all of those those little impediments and those roadblocks to like mass production was huge in able to like in in order to like really explode this this whole industry. Um so now scientists all over the world could work from the same exact cells, growing in the same exact medium, using the same exact equipment, all of which they could buy and just have shipped, delivered right to their lab. Standardization. Standardization. Um so Henrietta, we now want to talk about the cloning of human cells. We kind of teased this a little bit, but I want to I want to sort of get into it a little bit more. Okay, so I want to quickly get into the cloning of human cells. We've already kind of talked a little bit about it, but uh isn't that all we've talked about? Was that no okay? So the thing is so Henrietta's cells were not technically clones, at least at first. So they were created through the natural process of cell division, albeit accelerated due to their Cantrus attributes. Like they were they grew fast, but they're not technically clones. Apologies. I just was like, that is literally what we were talking about. So uh that that meant that though they reacted very similarly to each other, each little divergent cell line works slightly differently. So um scientists in Colorado. Wait, Colorado. Colorado. Scientists in Colorado, uh Colorado? Colorado. Okay. So scientists in Colorado E and an A.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:00

Colorado. Uh Colorado is, I think, what you said.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:04

It's Doritos. Colorado, is what I said.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:07

Colorado.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:09

Colorado. Uh so scientists in Colorado. Scientists in the Northwest. So scientists in Colorado uh eventually succeeded in uh being able to grow one individual cell of Gila and then multi-like copying that exact cell in order to start creating divergent cell lines that uh were you know that way it would, you know, they they basically then split off Gila into not just the the like one group mass that it was, but also specialized and like cellularly augmented things. So so they started like kind of you know pushing some cell lines, you know, some that were better at say um you know disease uh uh like immunity and stuff like that. They they got it, they started pushing that cell line more and more to be good at that, and then kind of replicating exact clones of those over and over again. So like not only do we have the like mass you know use of regular healer cells, but now they're these like specialty augments of them that are also out in the world as well. So this science helped advance the the like isolating and growth of single cells in culture, so like stem cells and things like that. Um it also, of course, advanced the science that would eventually lead to cloning whole animals like Dolly the sheep.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:33

Um saw her at Enbro.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:35

Yeah. Spooky. I mean her her Again, less spooky because of AI. Don't care about clones anymore.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:41

Couldn't care less. Clone whatever you want. I truly don't care. So again, the robot is not looking at me.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:47

Now it is. Yeah, okay. That's that's a flight robot. That was petty.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:51

It felt sort of petty robot. That was petty. Yeah, and now it's focused on you, even more petty. Okay, it's both of us. Yeah, we see a robot. Like you. We love you. You're welcome in our home. Yeah, that's right. Anytime. So uh this a similar science was also required to develop in vitro fertilization. So, like the act of trying to figure out how to isolate individual cells really and you know pushed forward the science just generally, sure. Uh, leading to a lot of a lot of these knock-on effects, which is kind of cool. Um so a happy accident with Gila also catapulted the study of human genetics. So, up until that point, scientists believed that the human DNA strand was made up of forty-eight chromosomes, uh, but they were clumped too tightly together for scientists to get an accurate count with their microscopes. Oh.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:40

So you can just twease them apart?

SPEAKER_02 1:40:42

I guess not, no. In 1953, a Texas geneticist accidentally mixed the wrong liquid with Gila and some other uh wait, mixed the wrong liquid with Gila, and something strange happened. So the chromosomes inside the cell actually swelled and spread apart, meaning that scientists could for the first time ever see at each individual chromosome and count them. Turns out normal human cells have 46 chromosomes. Uh, and once scientists knew how many they were supposed to have, it was much easier to identify and diagnose abnormal genetic conditions.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:16

And now they do it like they took a tight a vial of my blood this big and they were like your baby's good to go.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:22

Yeah, good to go. Which is crazy. You know, I I think I had one genetic marker that was uh recessive and you didn't have any. Yeah. And she's good to go. So um yeah. So that's kind of nuts. Just that like that uh what it now it's seen, it's seemingly a very easy test that can be done. But back then they were just like, I don't know, a little squibble of one DNA seems important, yeah. Just like slicking your thumb and DNA. Um so all of these new discoveries and developments very quickly increased the demand for Gela cells, and eventually Tuskegee couldn't keep up. This is where microbiologic associates uh made their big move. Which is a company. That's the this is a company, and that is one of the companies that they taught how to make the standardized. To do it exactly the way they did it. So the they started a a started building a massive industrial scale for-profit distribution center. Um, and their first big product was Gila cells. So uh So this entire company is based around. Yeah, they were they were like they were a pretty fledgling company, just doing, you know, some I don't know what they were doing before the uh the uh the NIH found them, but uh they basically were just small enough that they could be controlled by like John Guy and his committee. So they were like, here, make this culture medium stuff. And then once they saw a window, once they got big enough and they were like, oh, we could probably make Gila, and then they did that. So uh eventually this this company got massive, huge. And eventually they did start uh producing and selling other, you know, genetic lines that were not based on Gila, but none of them like were as easy to produce or had as much demand as Hila. Across the board, so like it is one of the like you know cornerstones of that company. Uh, but they did do other things as well. Um they set up their first factory in Bethesda, Maryland, in the middle of an old Frito Lay factory.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:26

So happy to know that. Just smelled like Fritos when they were doing this.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:30

Um the setup was very similar to Tuskegee, but much, much bigger. Uh, and they quickly began getting contracts with many labs all over the country, sending large recurring orders to the NIH and other large health uh research organizations. Um but also they allowed like any scientists over the world, if they wanted to put in a small order to receive a batch, they could.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:50

Still get a pocket-sized amount.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:52

Yeah, it would be shipped overnight uh right to their doorstep. So they like had contracts with the airlines, and somebody would just like hop on the plane and go there and be like, here's your Gila, see you later, and then go back. So they they became like the Amazon Prime for Gila. And uh so pretty quickly they were able to corner the entire Gila market and eventually forcing Tuskegee to close down their Gila factory in 1955.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:15

Which kind of is a I mean, I don't it's so ethics are so strange right now, but it's like were they making money for research? Yes. Was that research forcing men to have syphilis? Yes. Like it uh Right, right. The ethics are so muddied right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:30

It also means that like a primarily black group of scientists was producing Gila and distributing it, uh, and then they're now replaced by this incredibly white company. For that, I'm assuming I don't really know, but I'm I'm just I think you're probably safe. Probably pretty safe to assume that part, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:48

That see the ethics, they're just so money because that's bad. But also we shouldn't be making Gila cells without paying this family.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:55

Right. Um and like they We're asking to do big. Well, and that's the thing, it's like when this company started, the you know, they they had their source material and they never went, hey, where'd this come from? Where'd this come from? We're now becoming for profit. Should I start from the sky? I should be giving somebody some money.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:11

They were like, Nope, this is this is people in business would ever ask that. Yeah, I know, I know.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:15

Wait, but all of them.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:18

Who can I pay? No one's saying that.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:20

No one's saying that. Nope.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:23

That's why poor people tip better than rich people. Like, yeah, we just don't think that way.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:31

So uh because of the standardization in the field, it did become much easier to start uh creating new and different immortal cell lines. Uh and microbiologic did set up uh different factories to produce more and more of these other cell lines as well. Um but again, none of them to the volume that they were selling selling HELA. Uh they would basically do these like little um whenever these small orders got made out, they would basically be like fifty dollars plus shipping. So like even more money, you know, in in 1955. That's that now we're talking like you know, a thousand dollars or five hundred dollars today. Um so like it is becoming more of a business. And Microbiology turned into a multi-billion dollar company, uh, all on the backs of like Hila research. Yeah. And again, not all of that multi-billion of dollars is from Gila, but multi-millions of it for sure. Plenty. Yeah, not none. Plenty of money. Um so as the Cold War escalated, scientists exposed Henrietta cells to radiation to test the effects and try to find ways of healing the damage of, you know, nuclear bombs. Um Gila cells were also put into special centrifuges to test how they dealt with extreme pressure, uh, allowing like to basically like get do more science to allow people to do deep sea diving and like go into space.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:54

Well, that's very cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:55

Uh eventually Hila was actually sent into space on Russian Sputnik 2 in 1960 and later, uh later in the 60s aboard an American Discoverer 18 uh to learn about how cells dealt with vacuum.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:08

And again, I say somebody would have been willing to do this. Yes. Yes, somebody would be thrilled to see if their cells are in the space.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:16

Yes, please. Uh, but they did not ask. Uh so the we talked about this some already, but in the mid-1950s, cosmetic companies began replacing almost all of their animal testing with Hila cells. Um, and Gila was used to test the effects of steroids, chemotherapy, drugs, uh, and environmental stresses like sun damage and extreme temperatures. Like we learned a lot more about all of these things about the human body with from these cells. They infected them with salmonella, tuberculosis, and was used to help cure hemorrhagic fever during some war that a bunch of soldiers were getting hemorrhagic fever. Uh that I probably should have written down.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:53

I mean, after 1952, we're doing Korea, we're doing Vietnam, Iraq.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:57

What are we doing? Yeah, I don't even I'm I'm I don't remember, but I I I do know that they basically sent George Guy and Gila cells to the front line to like figure out how to cure uh this fever. I'm going Vietnam, but and hemorrhagic fever sounds bloody.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:15

Yeah, they include virus families like Ebola, Marburg, and Molassa. Yeah, sure. They are caused bum bites from infected mosquitoes. Yeah. It sounds bad.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:29

Sounds pretty bad. Okay, so I think that is where we're gonna leave it for for today. This is a pretty pretty long episode. I appreciate you guys all sticking in there for it.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:43

Korean War.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:44

The Korean War.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:44

And the Crimean Congo. No, the Korean War. Got it.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:48

Okay, good to know. Um, but yeah, I hope uh you guys are uh still still interested. I think this is a pretty fascinating story. Uh next episode, we will um get into some like fun stuff where we everybody in the Lax family gets ice cream in college education. Totally, totally, totally, totally, totally. No, we're gonna talk uh a lot about the actual like process that they they did to hide the fact that it was Henrietta Lax. Let's go. Uh we're gonna talk about that scientist that decided to inject uh cancerous healer cells into human patients without telling them. Oh we're gonna talk about some some real crazy stuff coming up in the next episode. I like keep thinking that we're I'm I'm gonna like kind of come around the bend on the like the bad stuff that's around the big thing. No, it sounds like there's only around the bend and also you know uh 70 years worth of like opportunities for bad stuff. Yeah, just all bad. Uh I mean curing polio, good. Good. Good. Uh ask permission. Ask permission. That's it. You know, ask permission. And you make a bunch of money from something. Uh uh pay somebody. Pay somebody, you know? Say who can I pay? Say who can I pay? Uh but yeah, I uh again, hope you guys enjoy. Um rate, review, subscribe, go check out the theory. Thank you to the new listeners.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:14

Thank you so much for subscribe on YouTube even if you have no interest watching this video. I don't watch video podcasts. I get it. But if you love them, please watch it.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:23

If you know somebody that loves them, or if you know somebody that does, send them on.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:26

But also just subscribe because who cares?

SPEAKER_06 1:50:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:28

You know, you'll see the shorts because we like a short either if we're gonna.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:31

Everybody loves a short.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:32

Yeah, it's summer.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:33

It's summertime. Great time for shorts.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:35

That's a YouTube thing, but you guys get it. Danny's wearing shorts.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:38

If you want to actively, I'm not gonna stand up to show you. Wow. But I am wearing shorts.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:44

Yeah, you'll just have to imagine, I guess. All right, well, uh, yes. Uh thank you. There's gonna be probably two more eppies.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:54

Three more? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:58

We still got a lot of book left, and then uh there's there's 20 years that happen after the book was published.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:04

So good golly, Miss Molly. This is now a Henrietta podcast. I do feel better if it's that long that we're doing more episodes on this than Coca-Cola.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:16

Arguably a company that just is a company.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:18

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, did all big companies are bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Yeah. But arguably. Yeah, yeah. I you know, I thought the shoe was gonna drop at some point.

SPEAKER_05 1:51:27

You really thought we were gonna get share and it just never didn't.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:30

Yeah, we just learned about Coke.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:32

Yeah, I mean, now, yeah, sugar, it's bad. Sugar did it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:36

I mean, there was also the like violent union busting.

unknown 1:51:39

That was bad.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:40

That was not good.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:41

I'm gonna be honest, I forgot about that. Forgot. Yeah, sure. I'm tired, my guy. That's okay. This is part three. Part three. Uh, but yeah, let's wrap this up. You guys are amazing. We'll be back next week. Please, if you're new here, uh tell a friend and come back, and we'll talk to you later.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:58

Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:00

You hang up. Is it this button?

SPEAKER_02 1:52:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:05

Thanks for listening, and a big thanks to Carsi Bland for the theme music. You can follow the podcast everywhere at Eathe Rich Pod. You can email us your suggestions for future episodes at eatherichpod at gmail. You can follow me at thefunnywalsh, and you can follow Danny at DMoss315. See you next week.