Henrietta Lacks Pt Three- Mouse Men and the HeLa Bomb

This week we get into how doctors at John Hopkins purposefully gave misleading information to the public about the HeLa strain. They gave a false name to obscure Henrietta Lack's true name, successfully hiding her identity for about 20 years. 

We also talk about Chester Southam and some incredibly unethical uses of the Hela cells. He injected over 600 patients with live cancer cells to see if cancer was communicable. Other than a small study with prisoners, he never told the patients about what he was doing, just telling them it was an innocuous immunity test. Though Southam was only ever given a temporarily suspended license and a slap on the wrist the debate about his actions helped solidify the country's stance on informed consent. 

Meanwhile researchers began learning how to create hybrid cells going so far as to make the first HeLa/Mouse hybrids. They used this practice to help accurately map the Human Genome discovering what each individual chromosome did. Scientists were very excited about hybrids but the public immediately feared the worst. Worried about an army of mouse men and other half man monsters sweeping the nation. 

Fears about mousemen proved unfounded but Hela was about to rock the scientific world when they discovered that the cells were so robust and resourceful that they were able to move from culture to culture with ease through unwashed hands or equipment or even through the air on a speck of dust. This revelation would later be called the HeLa Bomb and rectifying the massive contamination problem would cost millions and millions of research dollars as well as thousands of hours of wasted time. 

And we will finally talk about how Henrietta's name finally reached public knowledge and then how that news made it back to the Lacks Family.

Hope you enjoy!

Sources:

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

Transcript

0:04

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 all you just sing this song. Rich people stacking the dick. Rich people with big fat checks. Rich people to have in the bar. Rich people. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Yeet the Rich. I am Emily Walsh and I am here with my co-host and husband, Danny Moss. Hello, hello, hello. Wow. How many coffees did you have today? Uh only two. Okay. Which, you know, I think is pretty good for me. You just came in real hot there. I did. I did. Well, because I was doing something stupid with cords that I should have done before we started the podcast. And I absolutely now see on the video. Yeah, that's kind of the whole thing, is they can see video. Yeah. Yeah. The the 12 people that are out there watching the video. We love you. Bless them. You know. We appreciate you. This is definitely worth it. I hope y'all y'all are enjoying. No one uh I mean, maybe people ask for it. I don't even know anymore. You're grounded. My ground, yes. I hope Kathy is really enjoying it. And uh other than that, you guys let us know if you're watching it. We do get some feedback from time to time. We love feedback. Yeah. Um yeah, I've had uh two coffees. You didn't ask, but I'm gonna tell you anyway. Uh I know. Um, one of them I was tired enough to buy, leave in the stroller outside for maybe two hours. Oh, and then remember, and then drink the whole thing. Yeah, hot coffee the hard way. Hot coffee the hard way, my least favorite cupe of coffee. Um even least favorite than regular hot coffee? Yes. At least hot coffee the the regular way is intended to be hot. Hot coffee the hard way is so sad, but uh and probably full of bad milk. Well, it's oat milk, so I'm not getting, you know, scurvy. That doesn't make sense. You guys, I'm tired. What I'm trying to say is our child is growing molars. Yeah. And molars can kick rocks. I don't care for them. No. She has not slept, she hates sleeping. We love sleeping, but we're separated from the things we love sometimes. We are. Last night she got less sleep than an adult should. Like last night she went to sleep at 11:30. She woke up at 5 30. Like that's insane. Not enough. Yeah, she's got some big old bags under her eyes. She looks like she has been at a weekend long rave. Um the least fun type of rave where you just uh grow teeth. I don't know if that kind of party exists. That's a wild that's a crazy rave. You don't want to go to it. I don't know what you were up to in your 20s, but I guess teeth rives. Yeah, I guess you don't know what I was up to in my 20s. I did uh go see my friend's band called The Toothaches in a warehouse that I quite warned was going to. It wasn't 2:30. I hate you so much. Uh I was pretty sure it was gonna fall down and grateful it didn't, but I I was always fun because I was like 25 and I was like, I don't think we should be here. Um but yeah, I'm I I'm gonna see how my tiredness manifests tonight. I I'm not sure I can't quite place where I'm at. So I'm well if halfway through we have to throw back a Red Bull. Oh, I just will quit. I think you think that's a bad idea. Sorry guys, we m we tried. We tried. We tried. Yeah. Uh I do want to do a quick shout out to um, and I apologize if I have pronounced your name wrong, but uh Luis, thank you so much for your feedback. Uh we read it, we loved it. I'm gonna write back soon once I have time, but I had to finish my book report, so I didn't get to it today. But uh I really appreciated your very, very thoughtful um pod, and we're glad you're enjoying it. Yeah, what a long you know, if somebody wants to try to give us longest feedback, you're gonna have a hard high bar to cross. So don't try. You know, try because this was great. I was I was really excited about it. I uh she had a couple of uh topic suggestions that I thought were really great. I do think we will get into Elon Musk at some point. Uh I'm still the thing about him is I feel like there are so many crimes still yet to come. And so it's hard. So we could do like an early days, you know. We could we could do like a what happened with SpaceX and why what what is PayPal? People are always suggesting Elon Musk, Bezos, all the heavy hitters, as you as it as it were. But I feel like A, we're right. There's stuff we don't know about yet. Yeah. And B, I they're so much part of our present day, and I have so much anger for it's a little too close to home. It's I also think the sources there are no like uh maybe there are. I haven't really looked, so but but I feel like I don't trust the sources yet. They did have one suggestion for an Elon Musk book, but yeah, there hasn't been like this giant takedown of uh most of these people that has done well or that I've heard about because it's being suppressed. I bet though, Elon, because he's like the the the fanboy nature of his fame is so crazy. And like the lamest. Yeah, he just shows up to the back end of a company and then takes it over and just like, look what I made. I don't get any part of the fandom. Like he's not charming, he's not smart, he's not funny, he's not good looking. What is it? He does not see uh salutes all the time. Yeah, he's transphobic as like why why? I don't know. Anyway, um thank you for email. I definitely want to look into Iran. I'm uh uh very interested in the downfall of their democratically elected president. Aaron Powell That is uh above my pay grade. What's also interesting it connects back to the original BP oil company, because they basically got all of their money by stealing it from the Iranian people. So I think that could be fun. And by fun, I mean oof. Yeah, let's let's get into it. Let's yeah, we got uh long days' journey until night. I mean you know that poem? It's a long day's journey. You know, something like that. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. You know what I'm talking about. Maybe. I don't know. I do. I you said that in such a way that I was responsible for knowing the poem. I'm so tired. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You're you guys, this is a form of marriage counseling that you're reviewing. Yeah. We're just tired. Yeah. We're tired. If you ever think you want to have a kid, think about how you are. Do you like tired? You are you interested in it as a concept? Is it one of your favorite things? That's gonna be tough for you. That's gonna be tough. Do you like to do things on time and on schedule? Maybe give that up for a couple years. Yeah. If you're, you know, you like routine uh and do not like it when that routine just suddenly changes and you're not told the rules anymore. Yeah. I don't know. That's a tough one. Tough little cookie. But uh so back to Henrietta. Yeah. Um, okay, what do you remember from last episode? I remember everything. Okay, lay it on me. Uh there was a guy who made an immortal chicken heart that was not immortal. No, and he was uh also probably a Nazi and Nazi and into eugenics as somebody always is. Yeah. Um they the guy who originally stole Henrietta Laxelles figured out a way, figured out several different ways to ship them about. For a little while, they were like in pilot's pockets, and then he came up with the culture medium to ship them around. The um Yeah, eventually they just used the mail, which worked. Yes. Henrietta unfortunately passed away, and they also stopped treating her, and they also stopped letting her see her family. Yeah. Um they didn't tell her that she was dying. They didn't tell her that she was dying. Um, so that's all terrible. Yeah. And then um something about polio. Yes. After after her death, they started a giant uh Gila factory at Tuskegee to uh help verify that the polio vaccine was viable. Uh so that was good because polio bad. Yes. Uh and then after that, standardized cell culture, much more demand for Gila because of all of the other science they were doing, and then all of a sudden a new factory uh completely corners the market and starts purely commercial. Right. And so now this production is just for money and for altruism, and that's where we get into stuff. Yeah. Uh once more the source for this series is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lax by Rebecca Sklut, written in 2010. Great. Okay, so uh George, Guy. He's the the the guy that um the guy the guy, Guy the guy, and Margaret his wife. Um but more and more demand for Gila was sweeping the nation. So Guy, however, seemed much more uh much less enthused about his discovery than the rest of the world. He was really yeah, he was he was just kind of like uh kind of annoyed. He was like, guys, why don't you care about all these other cell cultures I've made that are much less useful? Like, we want Gila. And um I everyone like urged him to write a bunch of scientific papers and publish things so that he could get credit for his discovery. Uh but he was always like, I'm too busy doing other cell nonsense, you know, making making it's I from everything you had told me about him before, I would have think he would have wanted the fame to get his flowers, as the kids say. Yeah, but he was he was just wanted to keep on cooking. He wanted he was like, This uh that was like, you know, step one. I'm I'm going for step twenty five. Can do more. So uh eventually he wrote like one, and then after that, Margaret just started writing his papers for him and then submitting them. So just another tired woman being like, Why don't you finish the task you started? I just why don't you finish what you started? You just gotta finish it. All you gotta do is just write this report. That's like the whole point of science. You people won't benefit if you don't publish it. I must do other stuff. Yeah. He was uh he was seemed kind of annoyed with Heila's success and annoyed that everyone was always asking him about the cells. And he tried promoting some of his other cells that he made, but none of them ever really took off because none of them worked as well as as HeLa did. So my guy, if you wanna be in the fame parade of big money science. You gotta you gotta you just gotta write the papers. Come on, guys. I don't even know what I'm saying. It's okay. He uh was also kind of mad about the fact that it was out of his control. So he was like annoyed like people kept bugging him about it. But yeah, I think that's probably part of it. And he kept like writing people letters. He would write people letters to yell at them and say, like, hey, uh, I've already done that science. And they were like, hey, where's the proof? We can't do anything with your thoughts. You have to publish the papers. And then uh one of his like friends and colleagues was like, Hey, I hear you, man. But uh you maybe should have published those papers before you released the the Gila cells so widely that they're now commercially available. Yeah. Once they once they were out in the world, uh he they caught started calling them general scientific property, which sucks. Um but basically by saying that he was like, you you lost the ability to have control over this thing when you when you let it out into the world, and now it's general scientific property, which again completely ignores and separates the fact that it's you know a real uh you know, there's an actual woman behind it. Do you have any idea what else is considered general scientific property? I don't, but I best I bet like penicillin at this point. I guess this is like when you like uh I believe it's a hundred years when the IP like Nancy Drew is now public domain. So now you can write and Mickey Mouse is about to be public domain. Oh which is interesting because there's like a cool video game called Mouse, which is like a gangster video game with Mickey like Steamboat Willy Mickey Mouse. Oh. I think it's fun. I think the only other original one is is coming up for public domain, but I don't really know. Gotcha. Well, either way. I am assuming it's like that. Something like that, maybe. Yeah. Um so once Gila became as famous as it did, like once it helped cure polio, and once it went to space, and once all of these things happened, uh, people started becoming curious about where the cells initially came from. And when you say people, you do you mean science? No, I I mean I at this point I mean the public. Like the there'd been enough news about Gila that like uh the the general, like you know, John Q. Smith and whoever were like, what's going on with these cells? Where'd they come from? This person, who is this person? He's from uh the mountains of Appalachia. Oh, okay. But he's interested in cellular biology. Yes, because he'd like his two teeth to be regone with a little bit of help from Hila. Well, I've lost some teeth, okay? And there's a little bit of tongue gone too. Oh no. What caused this accident? Uh the mines. I don't know, I'm so tired. So the scientists at John Hopkins, including George Guy and Richard uh Talind, wanted to keep Henrietta's identity secret. Woof. Uh there were a lot of people who already knew Henrietta's name, however, uh, that uh at some point it was bound to leak. So on November 2nd, 1953, the Minneapolis Star was the first to name the woman behind Gila Cells. Luckily for those who wanted to keep the identity secret, Star get the name a little wrong. Gila was from a Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lakes. Okay. So uh close, but not quite. Uh but close enough that if social media ex like if her family was paying attention, they'd be like, excuse me. And close enough that like if uh intervention had not happened, it probably would have eventually been figured out. Right. But wasn't it figured out since we know about it? Years, years later. Years and years later. Like after George Guy died. Go ahead. They figured it out. So you know, like 25 years later. So uh after the name was first leaked, the journalist began approaching Guy and Talind, wanting to write a human interest perspective about the Gila cells. Guy and Talind were pretty resistant to everyone who reached out, responding that they thought that a a plenty interesting story could be written about the Gila cells without divulging the name, and it wasn't worth the risk to the hospital and the family to confirm the identity. The exact risk at that time is unclear because it was sort of becoming standard practice to maintain patient confidentiality, but at the time there was no law against it, and it was not really like standard practice. They were just kind of like they're like, eh, yeah, we should probably do that. Because again, this is another classic story of not breaking the law, just doing something that shouldn't have happened. Yes. Yeah, and it does seem like you know, they were they basically discussed this as if it was like an altruistic, like we gotta protect the family, but like the family didn't benefit at all from not being known in any of this. So uh and and could have very well benefited the other way if they had been known. So you mean with money? Pro Yeah, with money. And maybe peace of mind that if she's helping people. Yep. So eventually Guy did agree to be interviewed by Call Years magazine, but he had two conditions. One, he'd be allowed to read and review the the article, and two, he would not include any personal story or full name of Gila's donor in the article. So the writer begrudgingly agreed to his conditions and wrote a popular article talking about the young woman who changed the face of medicine. They wrote about Gila cells, how they were changing society, and would continue to make the impossible possible. They wrote about the woman behind the cells abstractly, and in the article they called her Helen L. A young woman in her 30s admitted to John Hopkins with acute cervical cancer. So uh they also said that Helen L's cells were grown from cells taken after Helen L. Which is all true. So both of these things were clearly misinformation, probably provided by George Guy or or Richard Taland. Weird question. Yeah. Could you take cells from somebody after they're dead and make them alive again? Um not back then, but now more likely. So there's like a lot of advancements that have happened where basically like it would have to be pretty quick after they died, it seems like. Because once it once the cells are dead, they're dead. But uh pretty quickly after you could probably take them, and then you there's like certain viruses that you can infect the cells with that will la like create make them reproduce in the way that uh which is kind of crazy. Um but one thing is uh normal cells, like not cancer cells, normal cells kind of can only reprodu reproduce a certain number of times before they die. There's a like a thing that we'll talk about in probably the next episode. Which is like limiting returns. It's a compound that like the that basically is part of the reason why like you know that everybody bel was uh hopeful that we would just live to be 150 and 200 and 400, whatever. But there's this one compound that basically uh once your cells are tired, they're tired and then they're done. I mean, I hear your brother. Yeah. Um but cancerous cells, and at least some cancerous cells can just pre-purpose. They are in indefatigable. Yes. Don't know where that word came from, but you're welcome. So not only did they not correct the record when the Minneapolis Sun got Henrietta's name wrong, but they doubled down and gave the reporters a new false name. Later when Guy and the PR department at Johns Hopkins were given the opportunity to review the article, they rewrote many parts correcting scientific errors, but leaving in the two blatant inaccuracies. And clearly they would have noticed them, but clearly dis also decided to leave them in. So uh in the article, they they fully named her Helen Lane. Um and that name is a complete fabrication. Right. Because it's the first two letters of both names, so they it's pretty easy to change. Uh and then they were like, yes, that person is exactly who it was. But that's like this is I think if they had left it as Henrietta Lake's, it would have eventually became Henrietta Lacks. But because these doctors who were behind the whole thing were like, no, it's bigger change. Helen Lane. Yeah. It it was a complete smokescreen that worked for decades. So later, when asked about the name Helen Lane, they denied any knowledge of it, saying that it was just some name confused by a journalist. They must have created it. Yeah. Yeah, like I don't know anything about it. We didn't have anything to do with it. Colleagues of guys later, however, would say that the name was specifically created to throw future journalists off the scent. Yeah. Um, because that's the thing, is he's done this thing that was uh not illegal, not but kind of shady, kind of not, you know, in its the best interest. And he must know that a little bit. He must know that something's hiding. Like I don't know uh like the it's that's so weird to really figure out why he decided to do this because back then it it it wasn't really even like it was an ethical norm just to like take the take whatever you know biological matter you wanted to from the like it was a little shady that they did it sort of without consent, but that was kind of standard practice. So like uh I just feel like you don't hide things you're not a little bit ashamed of. Yeah, I I I don't really get it. There there must be, even if he was doing it kind of subconsciously, I feel like he felt bad about it. Because later, like basically on his deathbed, he was like, Enough time has passed. You can release the name if you want. Oh, okay. It's really weird. So he's thinking about it. Yeah, he's living rent-free in his mind, as it as they say. Yeah, and rent-free and basically paid rent. She everywhere. She everywhere. So whether or not it was a plan or an accident or like what the motives were behind it, uh, it worked. So for the next ten years, the woman behind the Gila cells would be known most often as Helen Land, sometimes as Helen Larson, but never as Henrietta Lacks. So explaining part of why at least it took so long for the family to find out. Um Okay. So meanwhile, as Gila continued to aggressively spread across the entire scientific community, uh, one well-known cancer researcher and virologist named Chester Southam had a very disturbing thought. What if Gila could affect the scientists working on them, and could they get cancer from working with Henrietta's cells? Okay, just because they're cancerous cells? Yeah, just because they're cancerous cells. And like back then, you know, the understanding of cancer was still uh it was more than rudimentary, but they still like they had so many varying theories on what caused cancer and where it came from. One prevailing theory was that it was caused by some sort of contaminant or some sort of virus. So if that's true, then if you're in the lab with them every day. Yeah. Yeah. Um so scientists had already shown that some rats grew tumors after being injected with Gila cells, so why not humans? Aaron Powell But also stop injecting things with things. That's not it that's not gonna lead to happiness. No, no. Well, the this is not gonna lead to happiness either, because uh Chester Southam is a is a bit of a bit of a badman. Um the cells had become so common and so big ubiquitous in the lab uh that scientists began treating them kind of really casually. So they were not using very proper like protective equipment or techniques. No vent hoods, you know. Some scientists were just like eating their lunch at the same table that they're working with Gila. Whatever, it's fine. Well, also there's no reason to preserve it. There's they got powder. Yeah, they got a whole bunch, they got a whole bunch of it. So it's uh whatever, we'll make some more. It's fine. Uh so you know, one gross, but two, not great lab practice. No. Um some vaccines were being tested with Gila, leaving trace amounts of the cancerous cells in the solution before injecting them into patients. So That was not great. And if you could actually catch cancer from Gila, it would be a huge issue. Right. And at this point it's in a lot of different places. They would basically cause a pandemic. Yeah. So all of this I agree with. I think it's good that you figure out whether or not this thing that you're just kind of willy-nilly injecting into people is going to cause cancer. But this is where Southam takes a turn into the wildly unethical and dangerous area. Okay. So February of 1954, Southam loaded a syringe with saline mixed with about five million HEL cells. Feels like a lot. And then injected that solution into the arm of a patient recently recently admitted to the hospital with leukemia. He was his thought process that this person was probably terminal? Yeah, I believe so. Not that that I'm just curious. I believe so because they're they're uh the next like I don't know exactly how many I think I wrote it down, but there's like a a half a dozen or a dozen patients that are basically terminal with various types of cancer who he injects with healer cells. Gotcha. Um so he puts a tiny little little tattoo next to the injection site so that when he comes back to inspect the area days and weeks and months later, he he knows exactly where it is. So he told um Yeah, he repeated this process with about a dozen, a dozen other patients with with one form of cancer or another. So he told them all he was running a test on their immune system, telling them nothing of the live cancer cells that he had just injected them with. Yeah, this is the same thing. No, let's see if you're immune to cancer. But also if they're terminal, what is he gonna learn unless the spot turns purple? Like I said, Yeah, yeah. Um at that time. I feel like now you could do it. He did learn some things, but again, it it's all not good science the way he did it. So it's it's not about it either. No, probably he did write papers. This guy feels like he was very proud of the work he didn't know. Because later when uh brought up on a huge board of ethical review, he was like, I still think it was it was good and valid that I did this. Because it gets worse, but let's uh let's let's talk about this first. It's so interesting that all the people in this story are from the Appalachian Mountains. But I've run out of accents. Uh you just started with the one. That's all I got, maybe. So within hours, patients' forearms grew red and swollen. Five to ten days later, hard bumps began growing near the injection. So maybe don't put five million cancer cells. So Southam Southam removed some of these these lumps to test them to see if they were cancerous. He left others to see if the body as an immune system would reject them on the So basically, he was like, you guys are not human beings to me. I'm gonna do whatever I want. And uh the crazy thing to me is it's always like in the name of science and helping somebody else, presumably. But it's like, but you, you're done. You're you're just fodder now. You're fodder for the canvas. You're a resource for me to use. It feels and like I know that to be a good scientist, you probably need to have a little bit of ego and you need to play God a little bit, but like this feels too. A little bit of like separation from what you're doing. But I you know, uh the the Hippocratic Oath at least, it feels feels like we're not we're doing harm. We're doing harm here. We're doing harm. Um So within two weeks, some of the lumps grew to be as large as two centimeters in diameter, which was the size of like Henrietta's cancer when she first got a radium treatment. Um so eventually he removed almost all of the nodules. Those he didn't remove mostly disappeared on their own. However, four patients, they came back even after being removed. Oh wow Southam removed them again and again, but they continue to come back. In one patient, Henrietta's cancer cells metastasized to her lymph nodes. Wow. So he is just fully causing more cancer. However, completely unbothered. Of course he is. You don't do that with trepidation and then be like, oh no. Like it's like he was like, they're dead anyway. Interesting results. Yeah. So uh he wanted to know what would happen now. He was like, oh, maybe the cancer is the problem. So let's inject it into people that don't have cancer. Okay, no. Yeah. So in May of 1956, he placed an ad in the Ohio State Penitentiary newsletter seeking 25 volunteers for cancer research. Before he knew it, Southampt had over 150 volunteers. He would accept 65 of them. Why did they get something? I don't know, but it seems it seems like they probably got some uh favors within the prison. Sure. Yard. A lot of it, a lot of them when interviewed later, would would kind of all have the same refrain of being like, I've done wrong and I want to make make as much of the help somebody. Um so scientific testing on inmates would come under some really deep scrutiny about 15 years later when the courts decided that incarcerated communities were a vulnerable population, unable to truly give uh informed consent. Aaron Powell I mean, I think that's true. You know, they they are trapped in a place that they can't get out of. Also, he's not telling them all the facts anyway, so even if he did huge place of power. Yes. Um and like the the the inequities and all of that make it very the power dynamics are insane. Yeah. Um but at the time inmates were being used for medical research all over the country from testing chemical warfare agents to testing whether x-rays on testicles could reduce m reduce men's fertility. Just like just uh just you're stand there, we're gonna shoot some x-rays at your junk and then we'll see what happens. Wow. I mean, there I don't know if you remember this from the Johnson ⁇ Johnson story, but their baby shampoo was tested on inmates and they poured it directly into their eyes. Oh, great. For like 10 minutes. They waterboarded their eyes with shampoo to make sure that it didn't hurt their eyes. Yeah. Spoiler alert, some of them had to be a little bit more. Some of them it did hurt their eyes. Yeah, sure. Um so Southam, so he did actually tell them that uh it was cancer. Like they knew that it was cancer in their arms. Uh unlike, you know, with the other 600 people that we're about to talk about. Oh no, 600. Yeah. So uh Southam began injecting the inmates in June. Tumors began growing on the inmates, just like the previous study. The men in the study were very, very worried when they saw small lumps begin to form, knowing that they were cancerous. But again, they all were hope like just like, I want to do some good in the world. I've done, I've done, I've done bad. So um Southam actually gave these men multiple cancer injections. Uh and unlike the terminally ill test subjects from the last studies, the inmates almost all fought off the cancer. And in fact, they were actually able to fight off the cells faster and faster with each new injection. So raising the question of whether or not you could build immunity for cancer or possibly one day create a cancer vaccine. So that's interesting. Did not play out that way. Yeah. You can build a vaccine for GELA if you're you know, if you want to the cells that you're intentionally injecting, yeah, but it's it's a whole different ballgame for all of the other types of cancer. So um in the next few years, Saltham would inject over 600 people with live cancer cells, some from Henrietta and some from other cultured cancers. Uh he began injecting the cells into any gynological surgery patient that went to slow and kettering. What so he said he was doing it as a test for cancer, believing that since healthy bodies reject GELA cells at much faster rates than somebody who already has cancer, he could use the technique as an early warning sign and possibly catch cancer. Uh but okay, six hundred women who went for any gynecological. I don't it wasn't just uh so he injected a lot of different people. Some of that six hundred were from people that went in for more routine gyneological sur surgeries. Mm-hmm. As a person who's been put under for a gynecological procedure, yeah. Uh I really hope that they didn't do anything else. Yeah. Uh they didn't at least do this because he got caught and Yeah, no, I get that. But don't know what else happened. Yeah. That'll wake me up in a month. So after the prison study, Southam never disclosed that he was injecting his patients with cancer cells, believing they were harmless because unless you had some different type of cancer, the cells were always rejected pretty quickly. Um and he thought the patients had too much fear and phobia around his work. Uh, and he didn't want to cause any unnecessary fear. You don't want cancer in your body, is lame. He even suggested that telling them could be dangerous for their health. So it's better just to lie. These people are really concerned with mental health except for actual health. Except for actual mental health. Yeah. They're really concerned. Really not concerned for our mental health hearing about this because it is making me sad. I don't think they knew the phrase mental health. No, they did not. They did not. They did like to use it uh as a thing to their benefit. Yeah. So Southam acted as if he was withholding the information for the patient's benefit, but in rally reality, it was clearly just for his. Uh because if he told them, they would probably refuse to do the study. Because of course they would. So he probably would have just continued doing this for years if it wasn't for three whistleblowers from the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn. Okay. So Southin contracted with the hospital to allow him to use their hospital patients for research on a much bigger scale. The head of the hospital agreed and told his staff to make the injections, uh, without, you know, telling the patients what they were actually for. Three of the staff doctors refused, saying that they would not conduct research on patients without their consent. Good job. Yep. Good job, Franklin. They believed uh the study breached the Nuremberg the Nuremberg Code of Ethics and refused to do it. So in 1947, following World War II, a huge war tribunal was formed in Nuremberg, Germany, where they sentenced seven German doctors to death by hanging. They had all conducted heinous experiments on Jewish prisoners, all without their consent, sewing some siblings together to create a kind of man-made Siamese twin. Uh doing dissections on live humans to examine organ function. It's just a couple of the nice things that they did, along with quite a few others that we won't really get into. Yeah, that is something that it is very graphic and very horrible. I've I've read into it and it was not for the faint of heart. But uh And they were all on meth. Like the whole time. Just a lot of drugs. And the people who did less stuff than that project operation paperclip, some of them came here. Yeah. Which is not great. Not great. Um I did not think about when you said that this story had some like Nuremberg reference or something, I didn't really realize that it's like ten years later. Yeah. It's not that like really not that far away from this. And like the a lot of people in America, one, they didn't some didn't know about it. Right. Some were like, oh, that's not about us because that's about like monsters and Nazis. It doesn't like we're not. They're doing that to prisoners. We're doing it to other prisoners. So it's totally different. I mean, America still has a chip on its shoulder about doing that. Yeah, for sure. Even though uh even though they had a lot of the same values before the war happened, so not great. So the the Nuremberg Tribunal set forth a ten-point code of ethics now known as the Nuremberg Code, the first of which stated that the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. That feels great. Yeah. The Nuremberg Code was a revolution in medicine, raising the bar for all medical research and experimentation. However, the code was not a law. It's basically just a list of recommendations, and many doctors knew nothing about it. Trevor Burrus, Jr. We have learned so many times you can't assume people are gonna follow a code and respect an unwritten rule. A norm, any of that stuff, you know. People are gonna do what they want. They did not. They need the threat of jail or shame or both. Southam claimed to know nothing about the Nuremberg Code. Of course he did. And uh the three Jewish doctors at the Brooklyn Hospital. Shoot? There was a second one? Like, how do you not know about Nuremberg? Wait, greater than the Great Wolf? Yeah, basically. Yeah. It was worse than it was not great at all. Um The three Jewish doctors at the Brooklyn Hospital were incredibly familiar with the code, however. So after they refused, their supervisor basically just had a resident do the same thing. It's like, oh, you guys want to do it? I'll just get literally anybody else. Those three doctors resigned uh sending a letter of resignation to the head of the hospital as well as like a bunch of newspapers. So I mean that's they got out really quick, and then after that, you know, the the whole thing got he got brought forward to to get on another sort of tribunal situation and be like that. That's like collective bargaining at its finest. Like, yeah, it uh and needed to happen because again, he had like already done 600 of these injections and would have just continued to do more for a very long time. Yeah, getting involved with a bigger hospital in a bigger city to continue to do it. Yeah. But at the time there was no formal review board uh or like overseeing human testing at all. Like there was nothing uh you could just kind of do whatever you wanted as long as you didn't you like to do it. Because we assumed that doctors always have people's best interests in mind. Yeah. Um yeah. So many states had by that point attempted to get laws passed, but were all quickly struck down because silence sciences and researchers said that enforcing those laws would completely halt medical progress. Trevor Burrus, Jr. You can't slow down progress to be kind to people and not inject them with cancer. And like the thing is, so there were so many other countries that at that point did actually have consent laws, and you could they were still doing medical experiments at the same level. And it's like there's so many people that like if you tell them would be like you know what, yeah, I'll do that. Honestly. Like, not all people, but still enough to get your research done. Enough. So the idea of informed consent did not reach legal documents until 1957, after a man receiving what he believed to be a routine procedure woke up from anesthesia permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Yeah, that's not great. Yeah. That's not what you want. The doctor had not told him that the procedure had any risk whatsoever. But they didn't want to worry him. Exactly. Uh and uh what if he gets paralyzed because he's worried, paralyzed with fear instead of paralyzed with a scalpel. So the judge ruled in the favor of the patients, saying that it was a doctor's duty to fully educate patients on their options and allow them to make truly informed decisions before agreeing to the procedure. So this was law that at that point became kind of established to protect patients from their direct doctors. However, it would be even more decades before the law began to apply for informed consent to research subjects. So people that like volunteer for like generic research subjects, they were like, well, you're good to go. Yeah, exactly. So after the doctors sent out their letter to you know the journalists, a heated debate erupted around the ethics of Southam study. One reporter demanded that it was so safe. Why didn't the doctor inject himself with cells? And Southam responded by saying, let's face it, there are relatively few skilled cancer researchers, and it seemed stupid to take even that little risk. Wow. That's right. But you guys And he's not redeemable because he's not from Appalachia. No, he's not. So um patients who had recently worked with Southam realized that they had received the injection, began contacting reporters as well. Um Journalists began demanding that Southam uh and the head of the hospital have their licenses revoked. Eventually, the Board of Regents found them both guilty of fraud and deceit and unprofessional conduct in the practice of medicine. They then suspended their license temporarily for one year. Oh no, not temporarily for one year. What will they do? Houses cost ten dollars. They couldn't possibly just go fishing for a year. So after that ruling, which kind of feels like a slap on the wrist, uh scientists cried that medical research was doomed, saying that 1966 would mark the day that all medical progress ceased. Uh after that, the news And it has. So after the news came out about Southam studies, journalists began looking into other ongoing studies, finding that Southam's one was just one of hundreds of similarly dubious uh content. Not unique, yeah. Hundreds of other people like injecting g people with various diseases and like we haven't even gotten to like in 1966 they haven't the whistleblowers haven't happened for the um the syphilis study, but it was until the syphilis study that they like they didn't have the board of uh like the board of oversight to deal with that until after the the syphilis syphilis study in like 1971. So even another like five or six years until we get any type of that kind of reform. Yeah. Um despite the worries over uh you know this being a complete end to medical science, the next decade was just kind of a uh a huge boon for medical research, even with the use of informed consent. Um so this is a kind of wild, wild little section. So Gila research continue chugging along throughout all of this, uh all of the the good press and the bad press. By 1960, Gila had been to space aboard the second ever uh nearer satellite, Sputnik 2, and then soon after by the American Discoverer 18. Was that just to be like, what do cells do in space? Kinda, yeah. They they wanted to know one, uh like what happened if you put cells in vacuum. Nothing good. Uh, and two, like they already knew because they'd sent animals to space that like uh your body, like there are effects, your your corneas, uh like your eyeballs change, your bone density goes down, your blood cells come sometimes are affected. And they also knew that there was a lot of radiation in space. So they basically wanted to like put some cells in space outside of the you know, you know, the protected inner inner part and see what happened. Um and yeah, they decided to use Gila to find out. The thing that was crazy is that all other normal cells reacted exactly the same, grew normally, did their normal thing, whatever, everything fine. But Gila grew even more powerful, doubling even faster and faster. And they I think they sent the same sample up a couple of times, and the rate of growth continued to like rise. Yeah. Um, probably because all of the aggressive radiation in space. Right. So okay. Uh around this time, a Navy doctor was developing a technique of culturing skin cells, hoping to help heal bad like burn wounds uh and create a quicker way of treating injured soldiers in the field. So he applied cultured skin cells directly to a few patients' wounds and then came back to test the results. Are they healing cells? No, they're skin cells, so they can't be. They're skin cells. So they can't be. They can't be. We'll talk about that later. Uh so the cells did grow and begin healing the burns. However, when the doctor biopsied them a few weeks later, all of them came back to cancer. Yeah. Uh so he panicked and removed all of the new skin cells from the patients, and then he never tried translating skin cells ever again. He was like, nope, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It wasn't me because this guy is actually reasonably ethical, at least. Yeah. Um, I mean, not great to just put cells on top of other cells. Other than the fact that he was like, just did the Homer Simpson bushes. Like, couldn't be me. So another uh a peculiar thing that scientists notice about cells in culture, like all cells in culture, is um they again, we talked a little about how normal cells have like a limited shelf life. Like they can re-replicate quite a few times, but eventually they all die. The uh other thing that happens is either the normal cells die or they spontaneously transform into cancerous cells, is what they were noticing. So either they would die or they would transform. But one crazy thing that they noticed is that all of the transform cells uh after they transform into cancerous cells behaved exactly the same. Uh they would divide at the exact identical rates, they would also produce the same enzymes and proteins. Um, even though they had produced different enzymes and compounds before becoming malignant, all exactly the same. This was a big mystery for a very long time as to why this happened. Which is another like more at the time it was evidence that like maybe one virus was causing all cancer to kind of like convert things into uh this one type of of you know problem, I guess. Yeah. So a renowned cell culturalist named Luis Coriel thought he might have an answer to the mystery of this identical behavior. He suggested that the reason that they all reacted the same is because they were affected by the same contaminant. Uh as like an aside, he noted that Gila also behaved the exact same way as all of these transformed cells. And he wondered kind of as an afterthought if Gila could be the contaminant. Maybe I'll put other people's cells in your cells. So before digging too deeply into that question, however, Aquarial called a meeting with other leaders in the tissue culture field. He was worried that uh they were on the precipice of disaster. If they didn't do something about this like mysterious contaminant soon, the entire branch of science could be at risk. So Well, they already stopped scientific progress, so it doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, it shouldn't matter. They should be able to fix this and then maybe get it jump started again by getting rid of informed consent. Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Seems logical. Smart. Easy peasy. So if Goriel was c correct, every cell line being used could be at risk of transforming into the same malignant matter. After all the work that uh the guys and other early cell culturists had done to simplify and standardize the practice of tissue culturing, uh now almost anyone could do rudimentary culture like in your backyard with the right materials. Uh so hundreds of new industrial tissue cultures had been created and now were being used to do cutting-edge research, cutting edge research on transfer and gene therapy, transplant therapy, and just a lot more stuff. So with this new ease came a certain level of cavalierness by many of the scientists. Records on which culture they were using was incredibly spotty. They were like, I don't know, one of those over there. Uh very little was done to prevent contamination or cross-culturing, caught cross-culture mixing. Many cultures were mislabeled, if they were labeled at all. Um many scientists thought that if they were still growing, everything was okay. So if there was, however, a single contaminant causing all of this transformation and all of this like problems, then uh it would really disrupt and or completely invalidate much of the progress made over the past couple of decades. Because if it like it could make some of the cell cultures that were being used, uh the cancerous cell cultures that were being used today, totally the science that they were doing done on it invalid. Because they were like, they thought it was, you know, they were doing tests on like liver tissue, but it had transformed into this other thing that does one very specific thing. So, you know, it would just make the science bad science and useless. Right. Um, so a group of culturalists at this meeting hoped uh hoping to keep their field from devolving into chaos, advised the, you know, American science community to use protective measures to limit the possible contaminants. So they suggested using suction hoods that would pull air away from any possible, like pull any possible airborne contaminants or anything away from the cultures. Yeah, but yeah, just like a zero air, you know, suck all the stuff away uh while the experiments were being done. They also recommended that the NIH create a reference collection of cells the scientists could compare their cultures to to see if any significant drift had occurred. So see if like their cultures had changed in any way over the years as they're growing them. So a bank of cataloged cultures that would be stored with the highest security and using state-of-the-art sterile techniques. The NIH agreed and formed the Cell Culture Collection Committee, the CCCC. Catchy. So I'm in. Lewis Coriel uh and two other culturalists from this like worried group of scientists uh were asked to head up the effort. The NIH had already had a library of bacteria and fungi, yeasts, and viruses since 1925, but this would be the first collection of culture tissues. I just read this uh book that is a novel, so I don't know if I'm allowed to reference that. But uh there's this family, I think they're in New Zealand or Australia, um, and they preserve like one of the world's seed uh because I must be New Zealand because it's like a place where it's uh like if climate change happens, it probably won't happen that badly. But it's a really beautiful book that's only a little bit about the seeds, but the sun, there's like a family, and the boy like he cares about the seeds so much that he like puts himself in danger because he just like likes the idea. He's okay. Yeah, okay. Spoiler alert. I think it's called Wild Dark Shore. Big wolf-eating seed or a seed-eating wolf that's coming along, and he's like, No, stop. No, but something else happens, and I actually have almost told you to read this book like four times, but there is a sad dad widow, and I just don't know if he's he's like really sad. Okay. When I'm when I'm feeling uh just in a uh a sad funk, and I want to just like really get into it. Yeah, let me let me hit that book up. Yeah. Um but yeah, that's very, very similar to what they were creating, but this with with uh they were trying to create this like impenetrable vault of pure cell cultures, um, creating very strict rules and procedures for vetting and then testing different culture lines uh and then transporting them to the vault. So they all needed to be uh tested for any possible contamination. They needed to come directly from the original source. Um and they also like had like locked, sterile, like air-proof, you know, briefcases that they would specifically carry them in. Uh probably handcuffed to somebody's somebody's wrist. They didn't want to choose the barbersol can from Jurassic Park. Oh, that would have been smart. Yeah, no. Just saying. Didn't have that technology at the time, but I bet they would have loved it. Um so the first cell line collected was the L cell, which is the original cell line from the Immortal Mouse that was you know made before George Guy and Gila. The second cell, cell cell number two, was the he was Gila. So Guy had to scramble because in his excitement to give away all of his Gila cells, he gave away all of the original samples. No. So uh luckily uh they he found one uh at least one original sample with the scientists who had set up the first factory at Tuskegee for the polio vaccine. Okay. Um in 1960, French scientists discovered that when cells in culture were exposed to a specific virus, they would clump together and sometimes fuse. And when they fuse, they would actually blend their genetic material together. Oh. Um technical name for this was somatic cell fusion, but some cheeky scientists like to call it cell sex. Uh hilarious. I know. So cell sex allowed scientists to study how genetic traits were passed along much faster than the old fashioned way, because the for some reason, once they like made this thing happen, it would kind of produce new cells every day. You would get new cells coming out of it. Um and they would have like parts of the original two cells that it had been mixed from until I don't know, eventually it stopped, but either way, um in 1965, two British scientists took cell sex one step further further by fusing Gila cells with mouse cells, creating the first human mouse hybrid. What's our ratio there? It was 50-50, but it was it was just a cell. So we haven't they're not creating creatures, they're just creating a single cell. This is less fun. Yeah, I know. Uh but the the news media got really, really jumped. They're really worried about mouse. The same people that were like, you can't, if we're men can marry men, they're gonna marry a dog. It's like nobody's married a dog. Same, same. Um still kind of still kind of spooky. Um, but it was half mouse, half Henrietta DNA. So all of this hybrid cell stuff really helps scientists discover what individual genes actually did. Uh and the mouse hybrid was uh was crucial in this process. Was it adorable, do you think? I think it probably looked squishy. Squishy things may be adorable. I don't know. Have you seen a jellycat? That's true. That's true. I'm gonna let's say it was adorable. Let's I think that'd be nice. There's no harm in that. So the thing about the mouse human hybrid is that over time the mouse cells became dominant, and the human cells would eventually just disappear one by one, and then it would kind of revert back to a natural mouse cell. Um this happened slow enough, however, that scientists could actually see the change in like behavior, see like the genes change and like the cell would produce different enzymes, allowing them to know uh like which chromosome ha uh affected which which enzymes. So like one chromosome would disappear and then all of a sudden whenever this one enzyme would would also stop. And they were like, ah, the 23rd one down makes, you know, uh makes this enzyme stop. I'm able to chart this now. And this like provided the very first r rudimentary like human genome map that we use today, which I think is kind of cool. Um they went on to use this study of hybrids to create various gene therapies, uh, study the cause of like organ rejection in transplants, making it a lot easier to do life-saving surgeries because they were like, if I can if we can force a mouse cell and a human cell to hang out together, we ought to be able to figure out how to talk your body into enjoying having a new kidney. Um that's probably how it works out, right? Be like, yeah, come on. Are you enjoying that? Are you enjoying that? How does that feel? How's that feel? Is that is that good for you? Good, proud. So scientists were absolutely stoked about like gene hybrid studies, but the public became very wary very fast. I mean, it sounds insane. Yeah, no. They called all of the like hybrid scientists mad scientists who were like, oh, they're crazy. They're creating man, animal monsters. I mean, literally, uh when you said man, mouse hybrid, I was picturing Petri Dish. Sure. Lots of goo. Yeah. Human ear, mouse tail popping out. Got it, yeah. All covered in like light furry. All kind of just gooey and furry. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really good at science. Um, so they just they called it an assault on life. Um, scientists tried to assure the public that they were only creating individual cells, not fully fret fledged horror creatures. Uh, but the public never really believed in it. Still, I mean, they were right on the heels of that immortal chicken. Yeah, true. Stop creating man-sized chickens. Exactly. Gotta stop creating man-sized chickens. I've never done it. There was one of Henrietta's cousins, like, she I don't know why, but she like popped down into the basement of John Hopkins and then like told Henrietta that she had seen man-sized chickens uh and was very scared of them. I'm not really sure why. I'm not quite sure what she found, but maybe they were man-sized chickens down there. First of all, could be. Could be. Second of all, what a weird uh segue for the book to take. Yeah. For you to take. Well, I'll uh the the next episode we're we're gonna probably get into a lot more of the like the family and how many uh were you thinking? Like 45. Give or take. Yeah, okay. Give or take. Yeah. This is a very fascinating story. No, it's fascinating. I mean, I don't have to do work, it's great. Okay. Um the public never really believed these scientists. They were like, there's definitely monsters somewhere deep in the last year. Yeah, no, I mean they're with the city. Yeah. Um so okay. Remember how I I uh you asked whether or not the the skin cells were Gila cells? Yes. We're about to get into that that topic. So uh in September of 1966, a man named Stanley Gartner was he's a geneticist who spoke at a conference uh, you know, of like cell culturalists and and genetics, and it was all like kind of a celebration. They do it every year, and they're like, where is our field going next? Gotcha. Uh and this guy was like, I think I found a technical problem, just a little just a little issue just to say it might be a little bit of a problem. So Gartner had been working on cataloging genetic markers and had noticed something kind of strange happening in many of the most commonly used tissue cultures of the day. Eighteen of these most commonly used tissues had a very, very rare genetic marker, G6PDA. Um this genetic marker was almost exclusively found in black American DNA. And uh even among that population it was kind of rare. Wow, okay. So this was strange because many of uh the cell cultures um came from black Americans, but many others came from Caucasians. Uh it seemed as if somehow the tissue cultures were being genetically contaminated somehow. So a few weeks earlier, Gartner had contacted George Guy to ask uh about the race of the woman behind the Gila line. When Guy told Gartner that the sample had come from a quote, colored woman, uh, he believed that he'd discovered the source of the contamination. That makes sense. So he told the crowd uh that the simplest conclusion was that they had all been contaminated by exposure to Gila. Scientists knew that they needed to keep their cultures free from bacteria and viral infection, and they knew that it was possible for cells to contaminate each other if mixed in culture. However, none of their precautions were nearly enough to protect against Gila. Henrietta's cells apparently were so hardy and they could replicate so easily with just the smallest amount of cellul cellular material that they could actually float along in air on dust particles to move from one culture to the next on unwashed hands, reused pipettes, riding cells. Also, they chose them because they were robust and hardy and reproduced quickly. For sure. The uh the so some of the family members later will say that like this this healabom was was just Henrietta getting back at them for not uh not telling the public about her sooner and not telling her family about it. They were like, Yeah, you know, you you can use her for medical science, but she's gonna get you. She's gonna get you. Which I like. I like as a concept. You know, these guys, especially the people just injecting uh cancerous cells into people. Not great. They deserve to get knocked down a peg or two. So um they were actually like riding from lab to lab on researchers' coats and on shoes. Right. And they would just like were able to. This is a real magic school bus situation. Very magic school bus. So uh if even just one single heel cell made it into a new culture, they would completely take over consuming all of the culture media and taking up all of the space, killing off or absorbing the existing tissue culture. Gardner's findings did not go over well. Oh, people weren't excited about the contamination? People were not excited about the contamination. So weird. So for years, scientists had been creating more and more immortal cell lines, using them to do science in specific cells, trying to learn as much as possible uh as they could about each type of tissue and each type of cancer. So if so many of these cultures had been contaminated, then and at least somewhat replaced with Henrietta's cervical cancer, then all of the research the scientists had been doing for decades was possibly useless. So um millions of dollars in wasted research and also so much wasted time. So uh Gartner's theories also raised questions about specific experiments that used, you know, types of body parts to try to learn new things about like hearts or kidneys or heart cancer or kidney cancer. Uh saying that they reacted differently than like Gila did, because uh it's very likely that they were still using Gila. So either like somehow they got magically different results or they lied about the results. They probably lied. They might have lied. It feels like lies, maybe. So of the 18 different cell lines that he found the rare genetic marker in, uh he also talked about where he tested them from. And six of them came from that like NIH vault of super secret protected baseline culture strains, meaning that Gila had uh infiltrated the Fort Knox of cellular tissue cultures. I like that. Not uh, you know, she's she's in there messing some stuff up. Sticky as hell. So even that effort may have been compromised, uh, causing the scientific costing the scientific world million millions of more dollars. Oh boy. She's stirring it up. So after the cell culture community began developing the library, they started using much more rigorous techniques to prevent contamination. The rate at which they created successful cell lines diminished by a lot. So not only that, they had also not reported a single example of the spontaneous transformation of normal human cells becoming spontaneously cancerous. So this was a huge blow. Not only could it mean that they had wasted a lot of money and a lot of time on bad research, the concept of spontaneous transformation had been one of the most promising avenues to the study to help like figure out how to cure cancer. Yeah, you said the thing before, and you looked at me with this like very expectant face, and I was like, I need more information. Yeah, well, here's here's the more information. So uh it it seemed like uh after Gardner's findings that spontaneous transformation was not just a natural thing that happened to almost all cells. It was just them actively watching Gila take over uh take over these different cultures. So much time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um clean your hands. Gotta clean your hands. Gotta clean your pipettes, new stuff. Use the vent hood. I don't know. Uh so it always been kind of suspicious and strange as to why the cells had reacted exactly the same after they transformed. But less uh less suspicious and less confusing when you're like, oh, they all became the same thing. It was Gila, which is a bummer. So um Yeah. Gardner was just a geneticist. Like he didn't really have a lot of experience in the cellular culture field before he started doing this specific study. So not only did he drop just like an unpleasant bomb on all of these scientists, uh, a lot of them really thought of him of kind of like an outsider to the field. Um, so many scientists very quickly tried to find holes in Gartler's Gartler's findings, asking how long he had kept them in his laboratory, suggesting that the contamination happened in Gartler's lab, not before. He responded by saying they were all tested and analyzed at their home labs before being sent to his personal lab. Uh they asked if the samples had been frozen, wondering if the contamination happened during the thawing process. However, Gartler did the test while the samples were still frozen, so that didn't matter either. Eventually, the chair of the conference stopped all the questioning and said that they clearly had more study to do to determine whether or not Gartler's theory was accurate or not. Uh, and we should just kind of move it along. Yeah, he's like, we're not gonna solve this today. Let's hit the bull. Let's hit the bull, exactly. So many scientists just laughed off the man series, but others took it very seriously. So um they quickly began testing every culture that they could get their hands on to verify the findings and see how widespread the problem was. Scientists began working on genetic tests that could specifically find Gila and not just the single genetic cell marker. So, like to really verify that like this is Gila that was moving from thing to thing. Um, Gartler's theories would turn out to be very true. Uh Gila was taking over cellular cultures and able to move from one culture to another as easily as hitching a ride on a speck of dust. Um Gartler's announcement to that conference would later come to be known as the Gila bomb. So Okay. In late spring of 1970, George Guy was fishing with some of his friends and colleagues on the bank of the Potomac. Suddenly he felt incredibly weak, almost collapsing. His friends pulled him back up to the bank and into the car, taking him back to John Hopkins. After years of studying cancer, it turns out it was now George Guy's turn. Uh, and he had one of the most deadly and fastest spreading cancers, uh pancreatic cancer. Oof. Yeah. So if doctors didn't operate on him immediately, he would die. And even if they did, it would probably only buy him a little time. So on August 8th, 1970, Margaret called every member of Guy's lab staff in for a mysterious emergency procedure. They didn't tell anyone what they were doing. They were just like, get down here and get to the basement. Uh when the doctors showed up, they were all told of George's cancer and told that they would be taking samples just like they had with Henrietta's tumor almost 20 years ago. So George had decided that if he was going to die uh of cancer, he would at least try to make a difference, hoping that his GG line of cells would become an immortal cell line just like Henrietta's. Do you think that he wanted to do that for altruism, or do you think that he wanted to do out out of weird remorse? Or do you think that he wanted to do it to be immortal? Uh I think A and C. Like I think it was both he wanted to like do one more thing for science and then out of out of some. I wouldn't mind if everybody kind of knew about it. I think he would be if he was like, oh, if my cells become even cooler than Henrietta's cells, then that'll be cool. Um So unfortunately, after doctors uh got in there, opened him up, and started examining them, they discovered that they were far too late. Growth had covered his stomach, his spleen, his liver, and his intestines. Uh they worried that cutting into the tumors would kill him. So against his wishes, they closed him back up without taking any samples. Weird. Because A, they respected his wishes, and B, they would have cut into anybody else if you're not sure. Yeah, exactly. They did not give Henrietta the same concern. Um When George Guy woke up from anesthesia, he was absolutely pissed though. He was like, Also, put me under and cut me open and didn't do what I asked you to do. He was he was pretty mad. So once he recovered from that surgery, I'll do it myself. I'll get on in there. Uh he contacted all of the best cancer research hospitals around the country and asked who was doing research on like cutting-edge pancreatic cancer. Uh he wanted to offer himself help as a test subject. Nothing was too experimental. He had already decided he was going to die. Now he wanted to help advanced medicine one more time, even if it killed him. Wow. Um so he got a flood of replies. In the three months between that surgery at Johns Hopkins and his death, he went to like seven different places. Wow. Um he went to the Mayo clinic uh to get a week of treatment with an experimental Japanese drug, made him violently. And then to New York for a couple of weeks of study at Saloon Kettering and then back to John Hopkins for a new experimental chemotherapy drug, not yet approved for humans. He did a lot of stuff. During that time, his body withered from both the disease and the aggressive treatment that the hospital was trying on him. Then, so on November 8th, 1970, George died. Before he died, he did make a point of telling his former assistant, Mary Kubachek, that after this this many years, it would be fine. His name's Henrietta. It would be fine if they released Henrietta's true name. But possibly out of uh respect for her former former boss or I don't know, not wanting to be in the limelight, Mary decided to keep out of it. I mean, part of me would definitely be like, why do I need to do this? Yeah, why is that me in charge of this? So, you know, George Guy, problematic figure in this story for sure. Um his last few months, though, I feel like he really uh whether or not it was out of ego or or real real ultr altruism, I do think he like did intend to help people. He really like that part of it is he he was really putting himself forward for because he was in pain, a lot of pain with the thing. No, that sounds miserable to be like, do whatever you want with me, considering what they're doing to people who they don't like that. Yeah. So um a few months after George's death, Howard Jones and a few other John Hopkins scientists decided to write a history of Gila uh as a tribute to George's memory. While doing the research, Jones noticed a problem with Henrietta's medical records. With years of new study, it was clear to Jones that Henrietta's original diagnosis was incorrect. So he checked the original biopsy sample to make sure, which apparently they saved for 25 years. Sure. Um instead of epidermoid carcinoma, Jones now knew that Henrietta's cancer was an adenocarcinoma of the cervix. Instead of skin cells, the tumor was uh had originated from a glandular cell. Um, helping explain why her cancer like spread so quickly to other parts of the body. Uh apparently there it's a much more aggressive cancer. Was that a diagnosis they could have made in the same year and somebody made a mistake, or did they not know about it yet? Uh they did know about it, but it was pretty rare. Um and they did uh they did say that like Yeah, that even that at the time they treated both types of cancer the same. So even if they had gotten it correct, they probably would have done the same rack plaque and some radium up there. Probably the best. Yeah. Yeah. So um in the article that they wrote kind of as a tribute, they listed the correct diagnosis. Uh and they also finally identified the original subject as Henrietta Laxe. Um This is the first time that Henrietta's true name appeared in print next to Gila. So next to a very striking picture of the woman, uh, there was a subtitle that said Henrietta Lax, aka Gila. Okay. So after the publication, Henrietta's true name started spreading like wildfire, lab to lab. It was in like a pretty like uh niche journal, though, so the rest of the public didn't really get that knowledge just yet, but like lab to lab they were learning about Henrietta. Later that year, Richard Nixon signed an the National Cancer Act and announced a war on cancer promising $1.5 billion in research funding over the next three years. Nixon announced that doctors would cure cancer in the next five years just in time for the American bicentennial. What a gift that would have been. But instead, it's been another 50 years and we're gonna have uh a cage fight on the White House lawn. We sure are. And that, my friend, isn't he say it? Oh boy. Many believed at the time this move, this war on cancer, was just meant to distract from the negative press coming out of Vietnam. Probably true. Usually is. Um So with this funding, the pressure to show results and find the elusive cancer virus grew exponentially. So Nixon announced a joint effort with Russian scientists to exchange information and biomedical uh research to find this quote unquote cancer virus. Most people at the time didn't still did not know or believe in Gartler's theory that the cancer virus was nothing more than Gila contamination. But late in 1972, the Russian doctors announced that they had identified a possible sample of the cancer virus. The cells were transferred to the U.S. to verify the results, and it turns out those cells were none other than Hila cells. Gela cells. Henrietta laxed cervical cancer. Um somehow her cells had made it all the way to Russia and then back again. Because they're sticky little buddies. They're world world travelers, sticky little buddies. So the world had finally accepted the Gila bomb as a concept. Once the news hit that American cancer cells had infected affected Russian ones, the public finally started taking interest into the Gila contamination problem. Cancer cells from long-dead women invade other cult cultures, serious confusion, misguided research, and millions of wasted dollars. That's my news. I was gonna say, are you reading the byline from a Spider-Man reporter in the 60s? Correct. So now the public was fully focused on Hila once again and the woman behind the immortal cells. The article continued to get her name wrong, however, calling her Helen Lane and Helen Larson until some scientists decided they needed to set the record straight. Eventually, Howard Jones and some of his colleagues stepped forward to send letters, like a definitive letters to multiple news outlets, uh correcting them once and for all and confirming that Hila was from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. So the news spread even farther and faster, but it still took a few months to get back to the Lax family. Yeah, I mean imagine if you're not reading scientific journals. Yeah. Probably won't really. If you're just trying to like make it to see tomorrow. That's right. So early in 1973, a chance meeting between Bobette Lax and a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, the news of Gila finally got back to the family. He was like the brother-in-law of one of Bobette's friends. And she he was just like over for like uh for like a hangout, a little chitchy. And then they were just they were just chatting. They were like, Oh, hey, how are you? And she was like, Oh, I work at you know, I work at the hospital. He was like, Oh, I do cancer research. And he was like, Where'd you grow up? I grew up uh in northern Baltimore. I was like, Oh, me too. What's your last name? Oh, Lax. And he went, huh, that's interesting. I've been using these cells for years. And just last week I read this article that I thought they were from this lady named Helen Lane, but it turns out they're from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. And Bobette was like, huh, that's funny. Uh my mother-in-law was named Helen uh you know Henrietta Lax, but it couldn't possibly be her. She died back in the 50s. Yeah. Uh, and he went, wait a minute, your mother-in-law is Henrietta Lacks? Did she die of cervical cancer? And Bobette was like, How did you know? This is I I love this acting, you're doing I love this stage play for one. Um, and is Bobette a man? No, it's Bobette is a woman. Uh she's married to Lawrence, uh Lawrence Lax, the one of Henrietta's sons. Gotcha. So um Bobette was like, how could like how did you know that she died of cervical cancer? And uh then she had completely stopped smiling. It was no longer a joke. Uh and also uncomfortable that you have to introduce that to the family as the in-law. Yeah, yeah, very uncomfortable. But the so the the the researcher said that those cells in their the lab had to be her mother-in-law's because they were from a woman who died of cervical cancer named Henrietta Lass in 1951. Yeah. It was like, it's her. And then he told her that they had like hundreds of her cells in his lab. And she was like, How did you get those cells? And then he was like, What are you talking about? I ordered them online. Well he didn't order that's not how it worked. He called them. He called you know, however, you get cells back then. But he was like, I I ordered them from the service that delivered them. And he was like, What service? What are you doing with her cells? Because like Again, you made Bob better man, but that's okay. Yeah, I I'm not I'm not great at accents. I'm gonna order. You said he. Oh, yeah, I did. That's a whoopsie. Oh well. Um she shook him. Shook him. Shook him. Yeah. And uh so we'll get into it some more uh in the next episode again, much more about the family. But um the the like the black community and medical research are uh at odds? Uh yeah, they they do not trust each other. And like they had just it by this time they had just found out about the syphilis study, and Bobette was like, Right, oh God, it's happening to us. They they like have a piece of Henrietta alive somewhere. Yeah. And uh she she freaked out. I mean, there was also like because of John Hopkins' you know uh uh history of like treating, you know, poor people and like testing doing testing on poor people. Oh yeah. But there was a lot of like um theories. Th there was just like folklore about like night doctors coming and taking black people off the streets and doing medical testing on them as a and this like outing them, but to do science. And we'll get into get into it even more. But apparently this is like goes all the way back to uh like slave mastered, you know, slave sense. Because they they basically told told them like not to go outside because there were doctors out there that would take you and do research research on you, or there were ghosts out there that would would come and and take you for like, you know, whatever. Some sort of torture. And those like that ghost lore is actually part of where the like Ku Klux Klan hoods came because they were pretending to be these ghosts outside of the slaves' windows to scare them to keep them inside. So like this uh theory of like, you know, dark men coming to take them in the night is like very deep. Um and very, very real. And like uh some of it is not not true. You know, like the civilist study, the like all of this stuff that was happening without consent. There's so many reasons to be suspicious. I also hadn't thought about this, and maybe we'll get into it next week, or maybe you don't know, or maybe they're not religious. But I was curious if there's any like religious feelings, because I feel like a lot of times with like true crime, which is not the same as science, obviously, people want their family member to be laid to rest. Oh sure. And so the idea that she's like not at rest. Yeah, they're um they are religious, and uh some of her family even believes that like her being kind of reincarnated into these everlasting ELSLs is her like going to heaven. Is the is the like transformation into an immortal state. So and like she went on to do all of this huge medical research and stuff like that. So there's well, glad they're not tortured by it. Yeah. I mean, I think some are, you know, her daughter uh that Deborah will we'll talk about a lot in the next episode, uh, who is also like instrumental in the in the the work for this book as well as like figuring out you know things about her mother, but she was very tortured by it and very afraid of like all of these um she would kind of go back and forth in a in being really excited about learning about her mother and then being afraid that somebody was coming to take all of the last things that belonged to her mother. So like her Bible and her or like her medical records were so uh uh Deborah had the medical records, but then like every now and then the author of this book, who they become very close friends, but every now and then there was one moment when like uh uh Deborah had put the medical records on her like bed and brought uh Rebecca in to like clearly look at them, and Rebecca just saw them and went, Oh, are those the records? And immediately Deborah like panicked and thought she was gonna try to steal them, and that she was like, they constantly have to like she has to talk her down to be because she keeps being like, Who brought who sent you here? Who's paying you? Yeah, like why are you why are you trying to steal this from me? And like for good reason. I mean, it's all uh very uh Deborah had a very hard life and uh um she did like the the her mother did start getting a lot of uh big recognition before her death, but she she did die a little like earlier before any of the lawsuits or any of that happened or any of that stuff. So um which is part of why I wanted to do an episode kind of talking more about the family. Yeah, yeah. She was such an instrumental part in all of the writing of the book and stuff. So is that that's next week? That's next week, yeah. Um so Bobette she freaked out, she went back to the family and was like, Lawrence, some of your mother is still alive at John Hopkins. We need to tell the whole family. Um and uh Yeah. The I think that's where we're gonna leave it for this episode. Um we'll talk much more about the family and kind of get into the the research that happened after that and kind of the connection with the author to the book, you know, um, in the next episode. But Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah. We learned a lot. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Is this uh is that the finale of the story or is there more science to come? Um no, this so there's more more stuff to come. Uh mostly most of the science I I think is is done because I did I did finish the book, but we need to kind of get into the like the ethical debates of like using people's cells after the fact. There's a lot of like legal wrangling that happens that later um kind of culminates in in the ongoing lawsuits that are happening now. And I will say I need to find some more research on the actual lawsuits, because most of them at this point have settled out of court, and I don't know how much they got. I don't know much about it because it's all kind of uh under lock and key. More secretive, but I'm gonna try to find some sources and try to get some more information. Rough people up to the hard-hitting journalism. You know me. Google it at least. Gum shoe. Yeah. You stuck gum on stuff. Shoe leather. Shoe leather. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um great. Well, I am uh excited to hear some more of the personal story next week. Yep. I'm excited about some of our new listeners. Guess if you had to guess, yeah, what percentage of our listenership is European? Oh, uh five percent? Fifteen. Fifteen percent? Yeah. We're international, baby. We're international. I mean, we are international. Yeah. We've been international for a while, but this feels pretty uh news, right? It's not nothing. And yeah, if other people want to give us topics to talk about, if you have weirdly a source of news about Henrietta Lax's lawsuits, send it on away. Yeah, stranger things have happened. Um, and also we do we do have a a nice little chunk of new listeners. So I just want to say welcome again. And if all of you could leave a review for us, um, it could possibly literally change our lives. So something to think about. Uh we're very sleepy parents. What if we got 10 more hours in the week, you know? Somehow. I don't know how, but money helps things. Um but yeah, we uh we're so excited to make this podcast for you, and we appreciate your listenership. And if you're brand new, go back, go back. Check out the there's also two years before we have a kid if you're tired of hearing about it. You're tired of hearing us being tired. Yeah, we were there was a time before fee b before fatigue. Uh we saw it. We were still kind of sleepy. So I've always been kind of bad at writing news book reports. Yeah, but you know, lots of material. Lots of material. Thank you guys. I don't I'm I hey have a good week. Keep it next week. Keep it crispy. That's not ours. That's not ours. We saw that. Have a great week. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening, and a big thanks to Carcy 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 Eathe Rich Pod at Gmail. You can follow me at the FunnyWalsh, and you can follow Danny at DMoss315. See you next week.