some good old fashioned science weirdness¶
I wanna take a quick break from thinking about the rising tide of fascism, the permanent pandemic, and the climate apocalypse to get into some good old fashioned science weirdness.
I want to tell you the story of the single-celled woman. Our story begins with the beginning of life itself.
Living things are made of tiny cells, which contain both the genetic instructions and the physical machinery for making more cells.
The first life forms were just single cells that could replicate themselves. These single-celled organisms evolved over time because of two simple facts:
1) Every time they copied their genetic material, tiny mistakes were made that could change the new cell
2) Changes that made the new cell able to make more new cells became more common Over time, tiny changes added up. Cells gained the ability to harvest sunlight, eat other cells, grow bigger... and eventually, stick together in cooperative colonies.
Cell colonies could share resources and ensure that more of them survived, making their genes more successful. These colonies gave rise to a new advancement in evolution: specialization. Depending on where in the colony a cell was located, it would turn some genes on and switch some genes off. Cells on the outside could focus on defense, while the inside could focus on growth. This was the beginning of multicellular life: things like trees, dogs, and you!
From an evolutionary perspective "you" are your sex cells, whose goal is to reproduce... Plus a bunch of other stuff like stomachs and brains to help those cells accomplish that goal. It's really a great strategy to have all that extra stuff. But it comes with a need for very strict rules: every cell in your body MUST behave. 32 trillion human cells, all of which could reproduce, but give that up to help the sex cells. No going rogue! Except sometimes they do go rogue.
Cancer is what happens when your body cells start doing single-celled stuff again. They've been reproducing this whole time to replenish old cells, evolving all along. If they mutate to the point where they can ignore those rules... Cancer. A cancer cell is essentially its own single-celled organism living inside your body. It wants to do what organisms do: collect energy, replicate itself, and spread its genes. The problem is that it does this by stealing your energy and pushing everything out of the way. This is what happened to Henrietta Lacks, a black woman with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. While seeking treatment, her cancer was biopsied and studied by George Otto Gey. He noticed some odd properties to these cells, and continued to grow them and study them. This was done without the knowledge, consent, or compensation of Henrietta or her family. It wasn't until decades after her death that her family discovered this malfeasance.
In that time her cancer cells had continued to be replicated in labs, used for their unique properties. These cells behaved less like human body cells, which eventually stop replicating as the DNA wears down, and more like single-celled organisms, which can replicate endlessly.
This lineage, called HeLa, are human cells that grow and evolve exactly like you'd expect from bacteria. Their DNA is a human genome. They have mutations that make them different, but so do the cells of different humans! These cells are unambiguously human. If you gave an alien some HeLa cells and a sample of your cells, it would look at them and say "these are the same species." Henrietta Lacks died on October 4th, 1951, succumbing to the cancer. That parasitic organism that shared most of her genes had spread throughout her entire body.
She was only 31 years old. Through the actions of an unscrupulous researcher, the thing that killed her lives on to this day.
It is used by researchers all over the world: a single-celled organism that evolved from a human, and is still human enough to allow us to study human cells. There are probably around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of Henrietta's cells out there right now: they are the single-celled lineage of a multicellular human.
She is now recognized and honored by the scientific community, decades too late.
May her memory be a blessing.