ImmortalityThe year 1973 is when Bobette Lacks, Henrietta's daughter-in-law, discovered that a part of Henrietta was still alive. Bobette was talking to Gardenia, her friend, brother-in-law. When he asked her what her last name was he was shocked. He told her that he had been working with cells in his laboratory at the National Cancer Institute that came from a woman known as Henrietta Lacks. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay At first, Bobette was in denial because she didn't think her cells could still be alive since she had been dead for almost twenty years. five years. He then started asking her a lot of questions about what she died and when she died. She was overwhelmed to discover that part of her mother-in-law was still alive and the rest of the family knew nothing about it. As Bobette approached her house she was yelling at Lawrence, Henrietta's eldest son and her husband: "Your mother's part, she's alive!" They began calling other family members, who also couldn't believe what they were hearing. I think it's crazy how the family finally found out that a part of Henrietta was still alive. I think they should have pursued the lawsuit they were talking about, suing Johns Hopkins Hospital for not telling them anything. A group of researchers gathered at the First International Workshop on Human Gene Mapping and started talking about HeLa contamination. They had the idea that to find out which markersgenetics were Henrietta's would have to obtain DNA samples from her immediate family to compare the DNA with hers. Victor McKusick, one of the first scientists to publish Henrietta's real name, told Susan Hsu, one of his postdoctoral colleagues, to go collect the family's blood. When she called David Lacks to ask if he could test their blood, he thought he was doing it to test them for cancer. For this reason, Deborah did not leave the scientists alone. He called almost every day to see if the results of his "cancer test" came back. What the scientists actually did with the blood was look for HLA genetic markers to try to identify Henrietta's cells. I believe that while he was taking blood from the families, Hsu should have explained exactly what he was taking it for so that there was no confusion that it was a cancer test. Deborah tried to learn about her mother's condition and cells through dictionaries and biology textbooks. . He kept a diary to write down passages from the textbooks he read. Researching this terrified Deborah, especially as she read articles about HeLa cells being used to study viruses like AIDS and Ebola. He imagined that his mother was suffering from the symptoms of these viruses. Symptoms include choking, bloody eyes and excruciating pain. When Deborah discovered that she could request a copy of Henrietta's medical records to learn more about what had happened to her, she was initially afraid to do so. He no longer wanted to think about how his mother had been affected or treated for cancer. In 1985 Deborah read an article by Michael Gold about her mother. In the article he quoted a lot from his medical records. The different symptoms he had and how he slowly died were documented in the article. Deborah couldn't help but imagine how much pain her mother must have felt during her illness. In addition to worrying about how her mother felt, Deborah and the rest of her family wondered how this reporter obtained Henrietta's medical records without their consent. Doing so was not illegal, but patient confidentiality had been a moral belief for centuries even before then. Even though publishing medical records without consent was not illegal at the time, I believe the publishers should still have obtained the families' consent just out of respect for them. Harald zur Hausen, the man who discovered human papilloma virus 18 (HPV-18), believed that HPV-18 was a sexually transmitted virus that caused cervical cancer. For this reason, he tested samples from Henrietta's original biopsy. The results showed that she had been infected with multiple strains of the virus. Scientists were able to use Henrietta's cells to study how HPV infections cause cancer. HPV inserted its DNA into the long arm of its 11th chromosome which deactivated the p53 tumor suppressor gene. We talked about this process a bit in class. Scientists are still trying to understand how this caused Henrietta's body to produce so many cells. Many people thought that Henrietta was “sleeping around” just because she had HPV, but that wasn't the case. HeLa cells also helped scientists understand how and what was needed for HIV to infect cells. Eventually, the theory emerged that HeLa is no longer human. Just like inside the body, cells change in culture. While they are outside, they are exposed to different environments that cause their DNA to change. Cells continue to pass on their new DNA with each generation. Since Leigh Van Valen, an evolutionary biologist, claimed that HeLa had become.