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Henrietta Lacks circa
Born Loretta Pleasant
August 1, 1920(1920-08-01)
Roanoke, Virginia
Died October 4, 1951(1951-10-04) (aged 31)
Baltimore, Maryland
Occupation Tobacco farmer
Spouse David Lacks (1915–2002)
Children Lawrence Lacks
Elsie Lacks
David "Sonny" Lacks, Jr.
Deborah (Lacks) Pullum
Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman (born Joseph Lacks)
Parents Eliza (1886–1924) and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969)
Early life
Henrietta Lacks, née Loretta Pleasant, was born on August 1, 1920[1][3] in Roanoke, Virginia to Eliza (1886–1924)[4] and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969).[5][6][7] Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta; with Hennie as a nickname.[1] Eliza died giving birth to her tenth child in 1924.[1] Sometime after his wife"s death, John Pleasant took the children back to where their maternal relatives lived, and they were raised there by their mother"s relatives. Henrietta ended up with her grandfather in Clover, Virginia.[1] John worked as a brakeman on the railroad.
Later life and death
Henrietta Pleasant married her first cousin, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002), in Halifax County, Virginia. David had already been living with Henrietta"s grandfather when she moved there at age 4. Their marriage in 1941, after their first two children were born, (the first when Henrietta was just 14) surprised many in the family as they had been raised like brother and sister.[1] After convincing David to go north to search for work, Henrietta followed in 1943, bringing their children with her. David found work at the Sparrow"s Point shipyards and found a house for them on New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turners Station, now a part of Dundalk, Baltimore County, Maryland. This community was one of the largest[8][9] and one of the youngest[9] of the approximately forty historically African American communities in Baltimore County.
The couple had five children together: Lawrence (b. 1935), Elsie (b. 1939), David "Sonny" Jr. (b. 1947), Deborah (b. 1949), and Joseph (b. 1950, changed name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman). Joseph Lacks, Henrietta"s last child, was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in November 1950, just four and a half months before Henrietta was diagnosed with cancer.[1] Elsie was described by the family as "different", "deaf and dumb" and eventually died in the Crownsville State Hospital in 1955. Years later the family learned Elsie had been abused there and may have had holes drilled in her head during experiments. Elsie had been placed there about 1950, the same timeframe Henrietta discovered she had lumps and unusual bleeding.[1]
On February 1, 1951, just days after a march for a cure for polio in New York City, (according to Michael A. Rogers of Rolling Stone and Rebecca Skloot), Lacks visited Johns Hopkins because of a painful "knot" in her cervix and a bloody vaginal discharge.[10] Once she got the biopsy back, she found she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and the appearance of the tumor was unlike anything that had ever been seen by the examining gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones who, with his wife Georgeanna, would go on to found the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine at Norfolk, Virginia"s Eastern Virginia Medical School.[1]
Prior to receiving treatment for the tumor, cells from the carcinoma were removed for research purposes without her knowledge or permission, which was standard procedure at that time. During her second visit eight days later, Dr. George Otto Gey obtained another sample of her tumor; these cells would eventually become the HeLa immortal cell line, a commonly used cell line in biomedical research.[1] Lacks was treated with radium tube inserts, sewn in place, a common treatment for these types of cancers in 1951.[1] After several days in place, the tubes were removed and she was released from Johns Hopkins with instructions to return for X-ray treatments as a follow up. Lacks returned for the X-ray treatments. However, her condition worsened and the Hopkins doctors treated her with antibiotics, thinking that her problem might be complicated by an underlying venereal disease (she had neurosyphilis and presented with acute gonorrhea at one point as well). In significant pain and without improvement, Lacks returned to Hopkins demanding to be admitted on August 8 and remained until her death.[1] Though she received treatment and blood transfusions, she died of uremic poisoning on October 4, 1951 at the age of thirty-one.[11] A subsequent partial autopsy showed that the cancer had metastasized throughout her body.[1] Mrs. Lacks was buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery in Lackstown. Her exact burial location is not known, although the family believes it is within feet of her mother"s gravesite.[1]
Lackstown is located in the town of Clover in Halifax County, Virginia. Lackstown is the name of the land that has been held by the (black) Lacks family since they received it from the (white) Lacks family, who had owned the ancestors of the black Lackses when slavery was legal. Many of the black Lacks family were also descendents from the white Lacks family. A row of boxwoods separates the graves of white ancestors from those of the black ancestors.[1] The family name "Lacks" had originally been "Lax", but the spelling was later changed. For decades, Henrietta Lacks" mother has had the only tombstone of the five graves in the family cemetery in Lackstown.[11][12]
Legacy
In the early 1970s, the family started getting calls from researchers who wanted blood samples from them to learn the family"s genetics. The family wondered why and this is when they learned about the removal of Henrietta"s cells. No one else in the family had the traits that made her cells unique.[1]
The cells from Henrietta"s tumor were given to researcher George Gey, who "discovered that [Henrietta"s] cells did something they"d never seen before: They could be kept alive and grow."[13] Gey named the sample "HeLa", after the initial letters of Henrietta Lacks" name. As the first human cells that could be grown in a lab and were "immortal" (did not die after a few cell divisions), they could then be used for conducting many experiments. This represented an enormous boon to medical and biological research.[1] According to reporter Michael Rogers, the growth of HeLa by a researcher at the hospital helped answer the demands of the 10,000 who marched for a cure to polio just shortly before Lacks" death. By 1954, HeLa was being used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio.[1][11] To test Salk"s new vaccine, the cells were quickly put into mass production in the first-ever cell production factory.[14] Demand for the HeLa cells quickly grew. Since they were put into mass production, Henrietta"s cells have been mailed to scientists around the globe for "research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits".[11] HeLa cells have been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other products.[1] Scientists have grown some 20 tons of her cells.[1][15] Doctors still have not discovered the reason for HeLa cells" unique vigor. There are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells.[1]
In 1996, Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia and the mayor of Atlanta recognized the late Henrietta Lacks" family for her posthumous contributions.[16] Her life was commemorated annually by Turners Station residents for a few years after Morehouse"s commemoration. A Congressional resolution in her honor was presented by Robert Ehrlich following soon after the first commemoration of her, her family, and her contributions to science in Turners Station.
In 1998, Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh, a one-hour BBC documentary on Lacks and HeLa directed by Adam Curtis, won the Best Science and Nature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Immediately following the film"s airing in 1997, an article on HeLa cells, Lacks, and her family was published by reporter Jacques Kelly in the Baltimore Sun. In the 1990s the Dundalk Eagle published the first article on her in a newspaper in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and it continues to announce upcoming local commemorative activities. The Lacks family was also honored at the Smithsonian Institution.[17] In 2001, it was announced that the National Foundation for Cancer Research would be honoring "the late Henrietta Lacks for the contributions made to cancer research and modern medicine" on September 14. Because of the events of September 11, 2001 the event was canceled.[18]
Events in the Turners Station"s community have also commemorated the contributions of others including Mary Kubicek, the laboratory assistant who discovered that HeLa cells lived outside the body, as well as Dr. Gey and his nurse wife, Margaret Gey, who together after over 20 years of attempts were eventually able to grow human cells outside of the body.[1]
In her 2010 book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot documents the histories of both the HeLa cell line and the Lacks family. Henrietta"s husband, David Lacks, was told little following her death. Suspicions fueled by racial issues prevalent in the South were compounded by issues of class and education. For their part, members of the Lacks family were kept in the dark about the existence of the tissue line, and when its existence was revealed in a 1976 Rolling Stone article by Michael Rogers[1][19] , family members were confused about how Henrietta"s cells could have been taken without consent and how they could still be alive 50 years after her death.[17]
Skloot also told the story of Henrietta Lacks on an episode of Radiolab,[20] in which she mentioned that despite the contributions of Henrietta Lacks" cells to medicine and science, Lacks" own family does not have health insurance to be able to benefit from the medical discoveries made with her cells. The episode features audio footage of Skloot and Deborah traveling together, as well as footage of Deborah Lacks talking about her mother"s cells. In May 2010, The Virginian-Pilot published two articles on Lacks, HeLa, and her family,[1][21] which mentions that the Morehouse School of Medicine has donated the money for Henrietta"s grave as well as her daughter Elsie, who died in 1955, to finally have headstones. Her grandchildren wrote her epitaph: "Henrietta Lacks August 01, 1920 - October 04, 1951 In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife and mother who touched the lives of many. Here lies Henrietta Lacks (HeLa). Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever. Eternal Love and Admiration, From Your Family"[1][21]
In May 2010, HBO announced that Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball would develop a film project based on Skloot"s book.[21]
On May 17, 2010, NBC ran a fictionalized version of Lacks" story on Law & Order, titled "Immortal". An article in Slate called the episode "shockingly close to the true story."[22]