Immortal Life in Death

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer with cervical cancer, unknowingly donated her cells to science. Since then, her "HeLa" cells have been used to develop vaccines, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and many more technologies. Her cells have helped in generating million dollar scientific advancements, yet her family remains in poverty.

Rebecca Skloot wrote a nonfiction book about the life of Henrietta Lacks and the ethics surrounding the HeLa cell line. The book, titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, contains photos and documents, as well as scientific and historical research. This story exposes a new field of ethics--bioethics--and the societal and legal implications that are bound to arise as we progress into an era where we must determine who owns our DNA: us or science.

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot captures the scientific, legal, and historical worlds, pulsing back and forth between them with each new chapter, weaving them closer together until they eventually collide. Although the book was published in 2010, Skloot conceived the idea when she was only sixteen years old. Her biology teacher had just taught the class the basics of cell division, and how it only takes one slight change in a protein to set the whole cycle off-balance, ultimately causing cancer. Almost as an afterthought, her instructor explained that these discoveries were made possible by studying a particular line of cancer cells: HeLa cells. Her instructor explained that although HeLa cells were the source of a wealth of medical knowledge, not much was known about their source. And just like that, Skloot’s curiosity was born. “Where was [Henrietta Lacks] from?” Skloot asked herself, as well as “Did she know how important her cells were [and] did she have any children?”

I chose this book because of the controversy regarding HeLa cell contamination of human cell lines. Entire studies have been falsified due to the identification of HeLa contamination in the cell lines being used. Further still, contamination in one study can lead to the falsification of data obtained from later studies that cited the initial study in which contamination was discovered.

Ozone: Symptoms without Disease

During her early career at Rutgers University, Zilinskas was highly influenced by Eileen Brennan, a fellow professor at the university. Brennan was a graduate of Douglass College who later went on to attend graduate school at Rutgers University and ultimately become a professor in the Plant Pathology department at the university. At the time that Brennan was hired, gender equality had not been fully resolved in the workforce. Brennan was hired during World War II, most of the male population was away in battle; however, Zilinskas speculated that the man who hired Brennan wouldn’t have done so had the circumstances been different. But the gender inequality didn’t stop there: throughout Brennan’s time as a professor at Rutgers, there were many instances when her superior took credit for her research. But, being the “special person” that she was—and I borrow these words from Zilinskas—Brennan “never really griped about not being treated as equal to a man."

But had Brennan “griped,” her voice would have been heard. At the time, Brennan was conducting research in a hot field of plant pathology. She was one of the first scientists to study the effect that air pollution had on plants. At this point in her story, Zilinskas pulled out what seemed like a scientific picture book and began to show me ozone’s damaging effects on vegetation. There were photographs of all sorts of sickly looking foliage: some of the leaves were splattered with tan-colored polka dots; others were marred by darker brownish splotches. Others still had turned an unhealthy brown or red color. What all these damaged plants had in common was a lack of pathogenic infection. This completely revolutionized the field of plant pathology because scientists could no longer use Koch’s Postulates to establish the causal relationship between pathogenic infection and disease-like symptoms. Koch’s Postulates state that if a microorganism isolated from a diseased tissue and reintroduced into a healthy tissue causes the healthy tissue to develop diseased symptoms, then it is assumed that that microorganism is responsible for the disease.

Yellowed Pages and Leaves

"You can see the pages are almost yellow" were the first words out of Dr. Zilinskas' mouth. When I sat down across from her, she was already light years ahead of me in her story, but with a jolt she rewinded. Her story began in the late 80's, when she received a grant to conduct research, as most scientific discovery stories begin.

This was around the time a key discovery in the plant pathology world was made: the discovery of abiotic factors. Abiotic, or non-biotic factors, are the environmental factors that influence a plant. One such abiotic factor is ozone. When a plant is exposed to ozone, it causes damage in the leaves that closely resembles the damage caused by plant pathogens. Upon dissection of these “diseased” plants, however, no pathogen could be found. The discovery that this leaf damage was in fact caused by abiotic factors opened up a whole new field in plant pathology.

The next step was to uncover how these abiotic factors achieved their effect in plants. At the time, a drug by the name of EDU was found to completely prevent ozone damage in leaves, yet no one understood why or how. Dr. Zilinskas hoped that by understanding how EDU worked, she could uncover how ozone works. No matter how hard she tried, however, she could not seem to discover the mechanism. Along the way, though, she was able to rule out various options, which ultimately narrowed her newest hypothesis. She will now be using modern sequencing technologies to test her latest hypothesis.

Professor Spotlight: Dr. Barbara Zilinskas

My interviewee, Barbara Zilinskas, is a scientist in the Plant Biology and Pathology department at Rutgers University. I met her many years ago when I first declared my major in biotechnology. Although Zilinskas is responsible for creating the biotechnology program at the University, her research lies more in the following two fields:

Her first area of research focuses on a plant's response to environmental stress. A plant is said to be undergoing oxidative stress when its levels of ROS (reactive oxygen species) are particularly high. These ROS must be removed before they inflict damage on the cell. Zilinskas concerns herself with the process by which plants restore the damage from ROS.

Zilinskas also conducts research in turfgrass improvement by means of genetic modification. The bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens is used to introduce genes into the grass that would improve its survival, increasing disease resistance and stress tolerance. The goal of this research is to produce cultivars that can be used commercially. In addition to working with turfgrass, Zilinskas has also begun to examine switchgrass, which could serve as a biofuel crop.

In addition to her heavy involvement in research and curriculum development, Zilinskas has served as a valuable mentor for her students. Upon stopping by her office, students are almost always greeted with a fresh cup of coffee (or piece of seasonal chocolate if a holiday is approaching). I had the pleasure of taking one of Zilinskas' classes before she stopped teaching this year.