OCR Text |
Show A conspiracy of cells o By JILLYN SMITH Science Writer Utah State University The volume begins like a neat little mystery story: A guy gets off a helicopter carrying an odd little suitcase. The suitcase, the reader learns on page three of Michael Gold's "A Conspiracy of Cells," carries a cargo from the Soviet Union. It's 1973. The materials within the suitcase suit-case are weapons for use in a war. The war against cancer. The suitcase contained six separate sepa-rate cancer cell cultures, each from a different research institute in the Soviet Union. To help in the worldwide worl-dwide search for the secrets of cancer, can-cer, the United States had given Soviet researchers a set of viruses known to cause cancer in animals. In turn, they received cultures of the most promising Soviet cancer cell lines. The Soviet cultures were delivered deli-vered to a National Cancer Institute Insti-tute geneticist, Walter Nelson-Rees, Nelson-Rees, and they led to some bizarre findings. When the characteristics chromosomes, chro-mosomes, proteins of the cells were studied, they were found to be identical. Nelson-Rees finally concluded that they were not cells taken from Russian cancer victims, but cells of an American woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had never been to the Soviet Union. Lacks died in Maryland Mary-land in 195 1 of a particularly rugged cervical cancer. Her cancer cells had been cultured at that time, and were known to researchers as the HeLa line. Cancer cell cultures can yield all sorts of information to scientists. They can use them to study cell multiplication and production of proteins. They can treat the cells with toxic chemicals and drugs and study their reactions. They can use them to study viruses and develop vaccines. But cell cultures are also touchy. It's hard to keep them going. HeLa happened to be a good one. It was provided to a lot of scientific laboratories, labor-atories, and it seemed to change a lot of scientists' luck. HeLa was so good, Nelson-Rees found, that over the years, it had contaminated a lot of other cell cultures, cul-tures, in laboratories as far away as the Soviet Union, without researchers resear-chers knowing it. Nelson-Rees put the puzzle pieces together to trace the HeLa contamination around the world. But humans were just as difficult: the scientific community was not happy to hear of the HeLa sabotage. This little book would make a good movie. |