Even before being subjected to the bio-alchemy that transformed my skin to neurons, it seemed strange and impressive that this piece of me could be kept alive and growing in a petri dish. I’m not surprised that, when living tissue was first grown outside the organism, the feat seemed like an act of occult magic that promised immortality.
It happened at the start of the twentieth century, and even many biologists didn’t see it coming. Newspaper reporters forecast an eternal life in which we would be sustained indefinitely by a succession of new body parts, grown in the lab to replace old, worn-out versions. For once the journalists could be forgiven their hyperventilating headlines, because some scientists gave them very good reason to believe such things, speaking of death as a “contingent process” and of cell cultures as “immortal”.
It was a classic example of what happens when science runs into mythical territory. Scientists are then as liable as anyone else to adopt fanciful language, allusions and associations. Before you know it, technology is feeding ancient dreams and no one quite knows where the boundary lies between fact and fiction.
This, after all, was the first intimation that our cellular nature disrupts and blurs old categories and certainties, and leaves us reconsidering some of what once seemed the basic facts of human existence. We became less sure of who or what we are.
* * *
It was long believed that flesh needs a body to survive. And for good reason: chop off a finger, and that finger is finished. Its cells will stop metabolizing and will decay. It quickly becomes dead flesh: raw material for bacterial metabolism to work on.
It is not the trauma that kills it; people have recovered the use of lost fingers if they are quickly grafted back onto the body. It looks almost as if the finger needs to draw some vital essence from the body to sustain itself. There was a sense, long confirmed by experience in medicine and surgery, that the life of tissues depends on their being a part of the integrity of the body. The individual persists in a way that bits of us cannot. In the late nineteenth century, French physiologist Claude Bernard supposed that the body creates an environment, which he called a milieu intérieur, that sustains life. Without this milieu, cells must die.
But in 1907, the American embryologist Ross Harrison showed this is not the case – or perhaps that a milieu intérieur can be created artificially. He kept tissues alive outside the body in a dish, sustained by a bath of nutrients.
Harrison didn’t consider that he had done anything remarkable, for culturing living tissue outside the body wasn’t his real goal; it was just a means to an end. He was seeking to settle a long-standing argument about how nerve cells – neurons – grow. Neurons are odd-looking as cells go: they are typically spindly and branching, their filaments looking like microscopic roots.1 These filaments are the connective “wires” by means of which neurons join into networks and send electrical impulses to one another. Physiologists in the late nineteenth century weren’t entirely sure if neurons were really separate cells at all; the Italian physician Camillo Golgi believed that nervous systems are instead one continuous network. His rival, the Spanish pathologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, was sure that nerve cells are discrete entities. Even when both Golgi and Cajal were jointly awarded the Nobel prize for physiology in 1906 for their studies of the nervous system, they remained unreconciled; Golgi rather ignobly used his Nobel speech to argue against Cajal’s position.
Harrison sought to resolve the matter by growing amphibian nerve cells from pieces of embryonic tissue kept alive in a nutrient medium in jars. Today, it might seem an eminently sensible approach to the question: just look to see if the cells grow as separate entities, like trees from shoots, or as a single unit. But Harrison’s experiment was notable not only for the bold idea that tissue might be kept alive outside the embryonic body. It was also an indication of a more general impulse in the study of life at the fin de siècle. All these quaintly old-fashioned descriptors we use for the life scientists of that age – physiologist, physician, zoologist, anatomist – reflect the fact that understanding the living world at that time tended to entail careful inspection, observation and categorization, whether it involved whole organisms, their structures and organs, or their microscopic cells. But from around the 1880s, it became increasingly common to intervene in and to manipulate living matter: to prise or shake apart tissues and embryos, and to tamper with their growth. The study of life was changing from an observational to a genuinely experimental science: it was becoming biology. Harrison’s culturing of embryonic amphibian tissue was very much in that spirit. It was still a relatively new and contentious idea that one could learn about living nature by changing it. And this is how the centrality of the cell could become recognized. As Hannah Landecker has put it, “In not just taking the animal body apart, but leaving it apart, cellular life that was autonomous, external, and dynamic came into being for biology.”
Harrison found that the nerve fibres extend by outgrowth of new neurons: by adding more cells. He also looked at how cells called neuroblasts (a kind of specialized stem cell that can generate several types of neuron) responded to other tissues nearby. Neuroblasts near skin cells would grow into neurons for sensing (for example in touch), whereas neurons near muscle cells grew into the types that drive muscle movements, called motor neurons. This was one of the first reports of how a cell’s fate when it differentiates may depend on the nature of the surrounding tissue.
It wasn’t immediately obvious that Harrison’s experiments, showing that cells can survive and proliferate in vitro, revealed anything fundamental about living tissue. Amphibians had long been known to be special – the salamander is unusual among vertebrate animals in its ability to regenerate lost limbs. Besides, it was known already that some organisms can perform much more impressive feats of regeneration. Cut the freshwater polyp called a hydra in half, and each segment will regrow the missing portion. You can even break it down in a blender into more or less its constituent cells and they will reassemble: an echo of our evolutionary history as cooperative cell colonies.
But when the French surgeon Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute in New York (now Rockefeller University) heard Harrison speak about his work in 1908, he quickly understood that the techniques mattered as much as the conclusions.2 Carrel wasn’t terribly interested in the argument between Golgi and Cajal, but he was extremely interested in keeping living flesh alive. He had been experimenting with transplantation: removing organs and limbs from animals and then sewing them back on again. His skill at suturing was legendary, and in 1912 he was awarded a Nobel prize for his achievements in joining severed arteries and veins. A major challenge in transplantation was to keep the organ viable while it was removed from the body. Could Harrison’s technique assist that?
In the space of just a few months, Carrel and his assistant Montrose Burrows at the Rockefeller worked marvels, adapting Harrison’s method until they could culture a wide range of different tissue types: from other mammals (including humans) and birds, from embryos and adult organisms, from healthy and diseased samples. Human tissue proved hard to sustain, generally lasting for just a few days. But Carrel and Burrows struck rich with tissue taken from the heart of embryonic chickens. The added benefit here was that they could tell instantly if the tissue was alive because it pulsed of its own accord, the result of waves of electrical activity that the cells generate and coordinate. That was convenient, but it was also mightily symbolic. What could speak more eloquently of the autonomous life of cells than their ability to produce a “heartbeat” independently of any host body?
Carrel became able to sustain such tissue for ever longer periods. By 1911, he could keep chicken-heart tissue pulsing for weeks, bathing the cells in a nutrient medium made from the ground-up embryonic tissue of dogs and then spun (centrifuged) to extract the vital “juice”. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this potion could look like an elixir of life, and Carrel nudged the popular reception of his work in that direction by speaking of death’s contingency, calling his chicken-heart culture “immortal”.
Despite an appearance of almost monastic intellectual sobriety, Carrel was a showman with a flair for publicity. He encouraged the view that culturing cells was an extremely difficult art, all the better to advertise his own skills. The process was, he claimed, like performing a “delicate surgical operation”, requiring “the perfect teamwork of well-trained assistants”. To add to his mystical aura, Carrel dressed everyone in his lab, himself included, in hooded black gowns: a piece of pure theatre alleged to be a protective measure against contamination and the perturbing effects of light. (It was true that success depended on ensuring the tissue samples did not get infected by bacteria – there were no antibiotics then to protect against it.) As well as boosting Carrel’s reputation for near-miraculous powers, these shenanigans discouraged others from entering the field and gave Carrel less competition. Nonetheless, some other researchers did manage to grow cell cultures, notably at the Strangeways Research Laboratory at the University of Cambridge – but there too the methods took on the status of magic spells that had to be followed to the letter.
He was deep into mythic territory, and he knew it. “Carrel’s new miracle points way to avert old age,” newspapers announced – “Death perhaps not inevitable.” On the twentieth anniversary of Carrel’s allegedly immortal chicken-heart culture, the New York Times gave as clear an indication as you could imagine of where matters stood. “In the next century, if infection, starvation, physical injury and poison are warded off,” it said, the immortal chicken heart “may become as sacred as a venerated religious relic.”
To the fury of his superiors at the Rockefeller, Carrel artfully curated the image of a man committed only to his science while at the same time stage-managing his fame. His Nobel prize took this celebrity to a new level, as did his collaboration in the 1930s with the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Arguably then the most famous man in the world after making the first solo transatlantic flight in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927, Lindbergh was no scientist. But he was a skilful mechanic, and he designed pumps and other instruments for perfusing organs with blood to keep them viable for transplantation. It was a bizarre, unlikely pairing, but fruitful and sincere. Lindbergh found in Carrel a father figure; the two men shared mutual trust and affection untrammelled by their fame. In 1938 Carrel, in black gown and white skull-cap, appeared with Lindbergh and one of their pumps on the cover of Time magazine, above the headline, “They are looking for the fountain of age.”
What they were really looking for, though, was a way to preserve what they considered to be the superior civilization of the West. For Carrel was a white supremacist who advocated eugenics as a means of preserving a “superior stock” of humankind. He believed that democracy, a tragic invention of the Enlightenment, was creating a society that preserved the weak, inferior and diseased to the cost of the race as a whole. Despite a Frenchman’s instinctive wariness of German militarism, he approved of Hitler’s advocacy of racial purity. Lindbergh went further. An earnest and somewhat naïve man, he was seduced by the blandishments of the Luftwaffe and enthusiastically embraced the Nazi regime when he visited Germany in the 1930s. As tensions in Europe racked up, he implored US President Roosevelt to stay out of the hostilities, arguing that Hitler’s regime offered the best hope for preserving white Western culture. Carrel was in France when the Nazis invaded, and he accepted the invitation of the Vichy puppet government to establish a so-called Institute of Man to pursue his vision of human “perfectability”. He died in 1944 after the Liberation while awaiting trial on accusation of collaboration.
For Carrel and Lindbergh, sustaining life outside the body was part of a broader agenda to preserve culture itself. The subject was soon to become embroiled in racial controversy in other ways, and we will see later that the eugenic associations of cell biology and embryology have never gone away.
Carrel’s chicken-heart culture never was immortal. It is not clear quite how he kept it alive for decades (the samples were finally discarded four years after his death), but there seems little question that the original cells could not have proliferated for that long. In the 1960s, cell biologist Leonard Hayflick showed that mammalian cells can only divide for a limited number of times – about 30 to 70 – before they expire in a process of self-inflicted cell death. That’s a precaution installed by evolution against the accumulation of cell damage and somatic mutation that might otherwise lead to cancer. Hayflick speculated that Carrel’s culture might have been inadvertently replenished either by contamination or by cells remaining in the “embryo juice” in which it was bathed. One can’t rule out the possibility too that Carrel indulged in a bit of cheating. For mammals, that’s still the only route to immortality.
* * *
In the early days of tissue culture, it wasn’t just the press and the public but biologists too who struggled to assimilate the implications. An immortal heart in a jar sounded like something out of a Gothic fantasy, and indeed the Indianapolis News said of Carrel’s work that it had “the creeping horror of the most morbid narrative of Edgar Allan Poe, with the additional shiver that it is the truth and not the product of a fantastic imagination.” Thomas Edison, never one to refrain from mixing his spiritualist inclinations into the latest technology, said of Carrel’s organ-preserving experiments:
If some day the scientists arrive at a point where the human body, after life is extinct, can be thus preserved and after an indefinite time, through the transfusion of life-giving blood or fluid be brought back to resume its normal functions, who can say that we may not learn definitely that there is consciousness after death?
Resurrection of the body is of course an old myth. But tissue culture offered a vision of it that no one could have previously imagined: immortality of the flesh. That point was made by the physician Thomas Strangeways, the first head of the Cambridge Research Hospital that was soon to bear his name. The hospital was established in 1905 as a privately funded institution that admitted patients suffering from chronic diseases, which its staff would research. But from around 1919, Strangeways became captivated by tissue culture as a method to study rheumatoid arthritis via the in vitro growth of chicken cartilage. Soon the hospital stopped taking patients and became purely a research laboratory dedicated to understanding the living cell – which Strangeways regarded as an autonomous living entity.
In a 1926 lecture called “Death and Immortality”, Strangeways gave his audience an image entirely worthy of the grisliest of Poe’s tales. He asked them to imagine a dead body being minced up and made into sausages. No one would doubt that the person was then well and truly dead. But provided that the sausages were kept in cold storage, said Strangeways, one might, days or weeks later, pull out a piece of the meat and grow it into a culture of living cells.
To prove the point, Strangeways there and then produced a culture he had made from a sausage. He said he had got the meat from his local butcher, for which we must take his word. At any rate, the sausage was in some respect still alive.
Poe might have scripted the end of this tale too. After cycling home from that lecture, Strangeways suffered a brain haemorrhage from which he never recovered consciousness. It might seem callous to imagine he would have liked his colleagues to put his thought experiment to the test, but it is hard to dismiss the idea.3
The work at the Strangeways laboratory on tissue culture was cited in The Science of Life (1929) by biologist Julian Huxley and his co-authors H. G. Wells and Wells’s son George Philip Wells as an example of how biology was “bringing life under control”. In an echo of the sausage tale, they wrote that if Strangeways himself had been alive in the time of Julius Caesar, “fragments of that eminent personage might, for all we know to the contrary, be living now.”
The mutability of tissues and flesh was explored by Wells in perhaps his darkest and most vivid book The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Its narrator Prendick is marooned on an island where Moreau, a stranded and deranged British surgeon, remodels animals by vivisection to render them human-like. Wells’s book was evidently the template for a short story by Julian Huxley called “The Tissue-Culture King”, the sole example of his literary talents (which were not, sadly, to quite the same standard as those of his brother Aldous4). The tale made a sober debut in the scholarly Yale Review in 1926 before being brought to a wider audience the following year in the pulp science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories, a reliable barometer of the cultural reception of new science and technology.
In “The Tissue-Culture King”, a piece of flesh becomes just the kind of holy relic that the New York Times imagined of Carrel’s immortal chicken heart. The story tells of a remote African tribe whose king Mgobe has his flesh grown to make objects of worship by another rogue biologist named Hascombe. Like Moreau, Hascombe takes advantage of his remote situation to pursue experiments that would be forbidden or rejected among scientific peers.
The narrator is captured by the tribe – which includes physically anomalous individuals such as eight-foot giants and squat dwarfs – and taken to their town, where he discovers all manner of physical peculiarities among the inhabitants: transformations wrought by Hascombe to demonstrate his mastery over human flesh.
Captured 15 years previously, Hascombe saved his skin by showing the tribe a “great magic”. He demonstrated the microscope he had brought with him, revealing how human blood is composed of individual corpuscles. Then he persuaded the tribespeople to help him set up a primitive laboratory that he turned into a “Factory of Majesty”, or as Hascombe himself thinks of it, an Institute of Religious Tissue Culture. “My mind went back to a day in 1918 when I had been taken by a biological friend in New York to see the famous Rockefeller Institute,” says the narrator, “and at the word tissue culture I saw again before me Dr Alexis Carrel and troops of white-garbed American girls making cultures, sterilizing, microscopizing, incubating and the rest of it.”
Recognizing the sacred authority placed in the king’s physical personage, Hascombe has persuaded Mgobe to allow him to take “small portions of His Majesty’s subcutaneous connective tissue under a local anaesthetic”. He has cultured this into pieces of living flesh, which are dispensed to the subjects as items of supernatural power. As additional fetish objects, he has bred grotesque forms of animals such as the two-headed toads that the narrator sees at the story’s start. After making his escape, the narrator concludes with an awkward piece of moralizing – all the more incongruous coming from an author who professed a deep belief in science as a force for social improvement:
I commend to the great public the obvious moral of my story and ask them to think what they propose to do with the power which is gradually being accumulated for them by the labors of those who labor because they like power, or because they want to find the truth about how things work.
Beyond its Eurocentric condescension and prejudice towards other cultures, Huxley’s tale thus expresses ambivalence towards the emerging biological technologies that revealed the mutability of living form and matter. It was almost as though fiction could supply a vehicle for thoughts and fears that Huxley the scientist could not quite articulate. In that respect, fiction seemed to serve a similar role for Huxley as it did for Wells, who in his non-fiction came closer to boosterish advocacy of science; he furiously denounced Aldous Huxley’s own take on the prospects of growing humans in Brave New World as a betrayal of the future.
* * *
After their founder’s death in 1926, researchers at the Strangeways Laboratory stepped up efforts to popularize the science of tissue culture. Thomas Strangeways’s successor was a young zoologist named Honor Fell, who gave public talks and wrote about the research there. The work was also vividly advertised in time-lapse films of cells moving and proliferating under the microscope, made by the pathologist Ronald Canti. These movies were reviewed in the Times and even screened privately for the prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and the Duke of York. Blown up to the size of animals, the amoeba-like blobs took on a life of their own.
In 1930, Fell spread the word to the nation in a BBC radio broadcast titled “The Life of a Cell” – implying that the cell should be regarded as an independent organism. Fell suggested that, far from creating some artificial form of life, tissue culture let us see the “real” cell set free from the complicating influence of the body.
But was that freedom really to be desired? Biologists had come to appreciate that cancerous tumours were caused by cells losing their customary discipline and multiplying with abandon. Some biologists worried that cells in culture were more like this than like healthy tissue. In The Science of Life, Huxley and the Wellses likened cells in organs to people in “the City [of London] during working hours”, while cells in culture looked more like “Regent’s Park on a bank holiday, a spectacle of rather futile freedom”. That imagery may have been rather benign and carefree, but underneath it runs a fear of disintegration of the social order, a reversion to a primitive “state of nature” – even (like Moreau’s Beast-Men) to a more primal stage of the evolutionary scale. There are strong echoes here of Virchow’s politicized cell theory, albeit with no enthusiasm for the anti-authoritarian anarchy that he seemed to welcome.
It was no surprise, then, that in popular media the optimism of the Strangeways view of cell culture curdled into something darker. Preceding Huxley’s tale in an earlier issue of Amazing Stories that same year was a story called “The Malignant Entity”, in which a cell culture goes wild and devours its creator and several others before being killed with poison.
Flesh living outside of, or beyond, the body is a stock trope of creepy tales. The severed hand crawling towards its victim had become camp well before a young Oliver Stone rather unwisely elected to make the B-movie The Hand (1981), while Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) conjures up the heart of a murdered man beating after death when the murderer hides the dismembered corpse under the floorboards. Zombie narratives often attribute an independent animation to every limb and lump of the “living dead”, and this notion too owes something to Carrel’s work on sustaining flesh and prolonging life.
Carrel’s research was again blended with the Moreau archetype in a 1927 story in Amazing Stories which anticipates the zombie genre from its title – “The Plague of the Living Dead” – onwards. Once again an outcast biologist, here called Farnham, carries out his dodgy experiments in some distant land where the prejudices of the day permit the author to spin fantasies of savagery and conquest among other races. On a Caribbean island, Farnham tries out a serum of reanimation on inhabitants killed by a volcanic eruption, only to end up pursued by a mob of the undead: “Doctor Farnham had a fleeting, instantaneous vision of the two fellows being chopped into bits or torn to pieces and each separate figment of their anatomies continuing to live.” Four decades later, George Romero appropriated this imagery in his smartly political low-budget shocker, which turned the prejudices of those old stories on their head. The hero of Night of the Living Dead is a black man, shot dead in the end by a posse of white men who mistake him for a zombie while all too clearly representing a modern lynch mob.
Cultural and feminist theorist Susan Merrill Squier astutely recommends that we resist the temptation of a simple dualism that makes literature “the unconscious of science”. Nonetheless, it is clear from Huxley’s Tissue-Culture King that literary modes of expression can refract the social meanings of science in valuable ways. Researchers involved with the Strangeways Hospital supplied another instance of that when they indulged an urge to contextualize their work on cells through poetry. Conrad Hal Waddington, who visited there in the 1930s, expressed his thoughts in stanzas depicting the operation of “organizers” that direct embryo development (see here) as a kind of dance between the autonomy of the individual and the inclinations of the collective:
Now every separate part is tied
to particular performance
but still within itself is free
to organize its own affair.
Meanwhile the description by Strangeways researcher Arthur Hughes of the tissue culture of mammalian sex organs by his colleague Petar Martinovitch seems to echo the opening scene of Brave New World:
Explanted in a row
Grown by Martinovitch
In vitro.
Martinovitch’s reply to his colleague’s versification shows how the researchers liked to adopt a cell’s-eye view of their work, anthropomorphizing them and making the cell or the tissue culture a stand-in for the whole organism, with every bit as much autonomy and agency:
At the Strangeways lab a certain lad
Sits on the bank (always left) of a blood vessel and follows;
Myriads of little creatures
Of similar birth but different features
Carried by a stream of swift motion,
With powerful sweep and great commotion –
To their unknown destiny.
It’s not clear what impulse led the Strangeways scientists to this decidedly unusual way of processing their work, but the whimsical cell’s-eye view was adopted too by Honor Fell. “There is something rather romantic,” she said, “about the idea of taking living cells out of the body and watching them living and moving in a glass vessel, like a boy watching captive tadpoles in a jar.”
* * *
Carrel helped to make tissue culture a general procedure for all kinds of cells, including those of humans. But despite the headlines proclaiming imminent immortality, cultured human tissues were hard to keep alive.
That changed in 1951. When the American doctor George Gey at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore removed cancer cells from a 31-year-old patient named Henrietta Lacks, he found that they were like no other sample he had seen. Lacks died of the cervical cancer later that year, but her cancer cells continued to proliferate in culture, seemingly without limit. The extraordinary vitality of these so-called HeLa cells (thus identified by the conventional anonymized abbreviation of the donor’s name) soon made them the standard strain for human cell experiments worldwide. In particular, they were used for testing drugs without placing living people at risk. Gey began using HeLa cells as a host tissue to grow viruses, which cannot persist without cells to colonize. By 1954, such work had yielded a vaccine for the polio virus, discovered by the biologist Jonas Salk.
The HeLa story has been told many times in newspaper articles, television documentaries and books, the most powerful and comprehensive being Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. As Skloot’s title implies, the mythical tropes have become so thoroughly mixed into this narrative that it is hard to find a vantage point that reveals the full context. Hannah Landecker identifies what is at stake: these accounts, she says, “are responses to something otherwise not easily comprehended in narrative: infrastructural change in the conditions of possibility for human life”. HeLa, says Landecker, was “living proof of the unexpected autonomy and plasticity of the human somatic cell”.
The story has taken the shape of a parable. It appears to speak of the mistreatment of minorities and disadvantaged social groups in medicine, in an age before proper ethical regulation. That Lacks’s cells were kept and used by Gey without her consent was normal practice for the time, but the story highlights the gulf that separated a poor black family from the world of modern medicine and research in the 1950s. The Baltimore hospital was already widely feared by the black community, wherein rumours circulated that black patients were experimented on in the basement. This was not mere paranoia born of racial tension and mistrust on the faultline between the American north and south. No secret experiments were conducted at Johns Hopkins, but in 1932 black sharecroppers had been recruited at Tuskegee University in Alabama for a study of the progress of untreated syphilis. The volunteers were given free meals and health care, but some were infected with the disease and none was given treatment with the antibiotic penicillin, known to be effective against it. The study continued for an astonishing 40 years until a whistleblower revealed what was happening.5
But the story of Henrietta Lacks is more complicated than a tale of exploitation. It speaks partly to the distance between biomedical research and public understanding of it and its motivations at that time. Lacks’s family was baffled and disturbed for many years about what had happened to her. They suspected that the doctors had stolen her cells and profited from them, and had denied her relatives any share of those profits. They were understandably confused and angry. Yet Gey himself never sought to make money from these cells, which he delivered, sometimes by hand – kept warm in a test-tube in his shirt pocket – to colleagues who asked for them. Traffic in human cells and tissues from the operating theatre to the research laboratory was considered perfectly acceptable at the time and conducted in an open manner. Neither scientists nor the public seemed to feel there was anything untoward about it.
The case of Henrietta Lacks also highlights the confusion of categories that tissue culture created. Without any knowledge of cell biology, and never having had the process explained to them, her family was unclear whether Henrietta herself was not somehow being kept alive, perhaps even still suffering. It is tempting to attribute these misunderstandings and fears to the Lackses’ paucity of formal education and their suspicion of authority – a matter that could have been resolved if they’d had access to the right information. And indeed some of that anxiety was laid to rest for Lacks’s daughter when, sensitively accompanied by the intrepid Skloot, she was taken into a Johns Hopkins lab in 2001 and shown HeLa cells by a young researcher. But the Lackses’ responses were, at root, entirely apt – for no one knows quite how to think about the “immortal life of Henrietta Lacks”.
Consider, for example, the description of the events given in a 1971 tribute to Gey after his death, in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. The tissue sample that he took, say the authors,
has secured for the patient, Henrietta Lacks as HeLa, an immortality which has now reached 20 years. Will she live forever if nurtured by the hands of future workers? Even now Henrietta Lacks, first as Henrietta and then as HeLa, has a combined age of 51 years.
What is going on with this strange identification by these academic authors of the cells with the person? They are no more able to frame that state of affairs than the Lacks family were. What’s more, the authors offer up the same kind of narrative of an out-of-control cell mass as we saw in the gruesome tales of Amazing Stories, writing that, “If allowed to grow uninhibited under optimal cultural [!] conditions, [HeLa] would have taken over the world by this time.”
Taken over the world. In these retellings of Henrietta Lacks’s story there is, Landecker says, “a constant preoccupation with mass – what she would weigh now.” The figure – the mass of HeLa cells cultivated from those taken from Henrietta’s tumour – was estimated by one scientist in the early 2000s at 50 million tons. Such crazy, meaningless figures reveal – or is it conceal? – an attempt to grapple with the notion of life that overflows its mortal container.
We are, albeit less decorously, back with Carrel’s monstrous chicken towering over the land. Yet now this outsized, threatening being is not a fowl but a black woman, and in its shadow lurk all the racial anxieties that bedevil the United States.
It is only the flipside of this image of monstrosity that transforms Lacks into an angelic figure granted a sort of eternal life for the benefit of all humankind. This was how she was portrayed in a 1954 article in Collier’s magazine on HeLa cells, as a Baltimore housewife “thrust into a kind of eternal life of which such a woman would never dream,” in Landecker’s words – with no mention of the fact that she was poor and black. It’s not obvious that we do better now to turn her into the powerless victim exploited because of her race, or indeed into a kind of latter-day saint whose mortal remains proliferate beyond plausibility as sacred relics.
Race is a constant and inevitable theme in the HeLa story. In the late 1960s, geneticist Stanley Gartler claimed that these cells were highly invasive, to the point where many other cell lines used in research, both human and from other animals, had been colonized by them. He sought to identify HeLa cells by looking for the presence of a biological “marker” – a genetic variant of an enzyme involved in red blood cell metabolism – that was specific to those cells. This marker, Gartler pointed out, had been found only in African-Americans.
It was, in fact, only at this point that the race of the HeLa donor, previously undisclosed, became an issue. HeLa cells became “black” and “female”, and they were “aggressively” and unstoppably contaminating other cell lines – mostly taken from white folks. As some researchers wrote, it took only a single stray HeLa cell to “doom” a culture.
Under cover of a neutral reporting of “biological facts”, what perilous stories science sometimes tells.
You might be wondering why HeLa cells are so useful at all, given that they are not even regular human cells but abnormal, cancerous ones. But for the purposes to which they are put, this does not really matter. As a host for viruses – to explore vaccines, say, or for the research conducted since the 1980s on HIV and AIDS – cancer cells work perfectly well. Likewise, potential drugs may be as toxic to HeLa as they would be to ordinary human tissue.
All the same, there clearly is something that sets HeLa apart from other cells, making them such a vigorous and robust strain. It seems to have something to do with their telomeres: segments of DNA at the ends of the chromosomes that are degraded and shortened on each cycle of replication (see here). Cancer cells in general produce an enzyme that repairs telomeres and so protects against this form of cell ageing – but HeLa cells appear to be especially adept at this.
One thing is clear: HeLa is no longer simply a specific and unique kind of cell. After this much proliferation, it is inevitable that the cell lines will have accumulated many mutations: they have evolved, subject to all kinds of selective processes. In fact, evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen has argued that HeLa should be regarded today as a separate species, distinct from humans, which he called Helacyton gartleri6 – a kind of microbe bred by humans from humans. By no means all biologists accept that idea, but it offers a striking reminder of the blurred boundaries between organism and cell community. In Van Valen’s picture, HeLa has been forced, during decades of in vitro culture, along a sort of reversed evolutionary trajectory to a “simpler” state of being.
But surely HeLa still has human DNA – indeed, Henrietta Lacks’s DNA? Well, not exactly. As with bacterial strains, the cells evolve and adapt to prevailing conditions, and have developed distinct forms with quite different nutritional needs and metabolic processes – different “individuals”, you might say. In 2013, researchers in Europe sequenced the genome of one strain of HeLa cells and found, unsurprisingly, that it was a mess. Many cells have extra copies of some chromosomes, and many genes have acquired extra copies or have been extensively reshuffled. Some of these changes might have been present in, and responsible for, the original tumour, but it seems likely that many have appeared subsequently. At any rate, the findings raise questions about how good a proxy HeLa really is for the human body, let alone how much we can continue to assert that these cells represent an “immortal” woman who died over half a century ago. What is perhaps surprising is that the accumulation of chromosomal abnormalities – which would make it impossible, say, to use HeLa to clone a human being even in principle – seems to do nothing to diminish the vitality of the cells themselves. It’s likely that this resilience to chromosome defects reflects the fact that HeLa cells only need to use a small portion of their genome: all they need to do is keep dividing.
* * *
Tissue culture complicates, as no other biological advance has done, the connection between the life of the individual and the life of their cells: between flesh and body. That complication demands new narratives, a task that Susan Merrill Squier has aptly described as an attempt to “replot the human”.
Human tissue is treated in laboratories now as if it were a kind of material, like a polymer or ceramic. There is no disrespect in this attitude; indeed, in my experience people who practise tissue culture think (and must think) carefully about the ethics of their work. All the same, as Julian Huxley’s curious story recognized, tissue is more than this: more than an active, responsive material, a biomedical resource, a convenient host medium for pathogens and test-bed for drugs. As social scientists Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell say in their study of organ and tissue transplantation and donation, Tissue Economies:
Tissues that move from bodies to tissue banks to laboratories to other bodies bring with them various ontological values around identity, affective values around kinship, ageing, and death, belief systems and ethical standards, and epistemological values and systems of research prestige as well as use values and exchange values.
Some of those values are economic and legal. Research on tissues can’t operate without a legal framework for establishing the boundaries of the permissible. I was taken by surprise (although not in the slightest bit disgruntled) to discover that once my fibroblast cells had divided in vitro, they were no longer legally a piece of me but were classified as a cell line. This enables scientists using tissue cultures to assert intellectual property rights over knowledge gained from these living entities bearing the genome of an individual (live or dead). Personally I’d have been delighted if Selina and Chris had found a way to derive knowledge with commercial as well as scientific value from “my” cells. (Sadly, but just as expected, they were never so special.) But this isn’t always the way the transaction goes. In 1984, an Alaskan engineer named John Moore brought a court case against his former physician David Golde of the University of California at Los Angeles, after Golde derived a profitable “immortal” cell line from cancer cells surgically removed from Moore’s spleen. These tumour cells turned out to produce a protein that stimulates the body’s immune system to fight infection.
The court ruled that Moore had no property rights over the cells, nor any claim to profits derived from them. They were simply “discarded tissue” – a kind of waste.7 That decision benefitted potentially life-saving biomedical research, which would be immensely obstructed if all original donors of tissue from which cell lines are generated could assert ownership. It was also reasonable insofar as it recognized that turning Moore’s cancerous cells into a viable source of the protein demanded considerable technical ingenuity on Golde’s part. But it also reflects a regulatory system that works to transfer rights from donor to recipient. In the UK, for example, IVF clients who agree to the use of their spare embryos in research must make the donation as a “gift” with no commercial strings attached, even though the researchers who use them can claim property rights over any product derived from this tissue.
There is nothing obviously bad about that – as I say, it enables valuable research to happen. But it reminds us that flesh is, among other things, now a commodity.
And haven’t we heard that idea before?
If you repay me not on such a day,
In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me.
When Shylock is told he may take his quota of flesh from Antonio only if it does not shed a drop of the man’s blood (indeed, in an escalation of the antisemitic tensions, of “Christian blood”), he is unwittingly given a glimpse of the market forces that would come to play in the “tissue economy”: which tissues, how much, who has ownership of what? Richard Titmuss, a pioneer of social policy on public health and welfare, argued in the 1970s that “the human body exists beyond relations of commerce … its value is intrinsic and unquantifiable.” But that was more an expression of hope. In reality the market in tissues – with its payments for blood donation and underground trade in organs – would fall in line with the usual pattern for any commodity uniformly distributed across the population, whereby the poor end up selling to the rich.
The dilemma created by Shylock’s demand exists because it plays out in a zero-sum game: Shylock’s gain of a pound of Antonio’s flesh must be balanced by Antonio’s proportionate loss of the same. Tissue culture changes that game. It makes the generation of our flesh and blood an industrial process of mass production. Alexis Carrel could have offered Antonio a safe solution, although Shylock’s actions might well have confirmed his suspicions about the problem with “bad Jews”.
The social and philosophical questions raised by tissue culturing are more than operational, however. They are questions about who we are. These are not to be settled by legal diktat. “What does it mean,” ask Waldby and Mitchell,
when the human body can be disaggregated into fragments that are derived from a particular person but are, strictly speaking, no longer constitutive of human identity? How is the status of the individual (strictly speaking the in-dividual, he who cannot be subdivided) altered to accommodate these possibilities for fragmentation?
As a part of me – and yet not (legally, at least) a part of me – grew into something resembling a brain in an incubator five miles across town, I asked myself that more than once. I haven’t yet found an answer.
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In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed a tiny “leather jacket” made not from cow hide but from mouse tissue: cells derived from mouse embryonic stem cells grown on a polymer scaffold that guided them into the shape of the diminutive garment. The jacket didn’t last long. A few weeks into the show, called “Design and the Elastic Mind”, a sleeve fell off, while cells also began to separate in clumps from the polymer scaffold. In the end, the show’s curator Paola Antonelli was forced to stop the culturing process. “I had to make the decision to kill it,” she said:
And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice [on abortion rights] and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat … That thing was never alive before it was grown.
The artwork, called Victimless Leather, was made by “bio-artists” Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the SymbioticA laboratory of the University of Western Australia, a unique collaboration of artist-provocateurs working within an academic establishment to challenge – by actually using – biotechnologies such as tissue culture. The “mouse-cell coat” was, the artists say, intended to critique
the idea of in vitro production of leather-like materials as a solution to problems associated with the manufacturing of animal leather for human consumer goods, and was part of a larger body of works that dealt with the ways in which technology is being used to obscure, rather than eliminate, the victims of our consumption.
One of SymbioticA’s earlier works was Pig Wings: three small wing-like structures made from pig bone-marrow stem cells on polymer scaffolds that were intended as a comment on the “genohype” that the artists perceived to surround the Human Genome Project. That the wings looked decidedly underwhelming was the whole point. The work, said Catts and Zurr, adopted a deflationary “aesthetic of disappointment”:
People … would be drawn to see the piece because they believed that flying pigs and other biotechnological wonders would be presented to them. Instead they would be confronted with tiny, humble-looking detached wings, made of tissue, which will never fly.
Artistic responses like this may supply an arena where our confusions about the technologies of living matter – and how they might be used – can be explored. What happens when such matter becomes a commercial product? What qualifies as life, and what duties do we have towards it? Where are the boundaries, both physical and ethical, of what we might grow? The science informs and constrains these questions but cannot answer them. The art of flesh developed by SymbioticA reminds us to be unsettled, and not to normalize what should in fact be destabilizing, exciting, perplexing and disturbing. Tissue culture began a century ago, but we have yet to come to terms with what it means.