[Michael Gold] a Conspiracy of Cells One Woman's Despre Celulele HELA

8/19/2019 [Michael Gold] a Conspiracy of Cells One Woman's Despre Celulele HELA

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A Cnspry f Cs





A Cospiracy of CllsOne Woman's Immortal Legacy

and the Medica Scandal It Caused

Michael Gold

State University of ew York Press



Published byState University of New York Press, Albany

© 1986 Michael Gold

All ights eerved

Printed n the United States of Ameica

No part of this book may be ued o repoducedin any manner whatoever without written permissionexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied incitica article and eview.

Fo infomation, addres State niveity of New Yok

Press, State Univety Plaza, Albany, N, 12246Libray of Congres Cataloging in Publication Data

Librr of Congress Ctlogin-in-Publicion Dt

God, Mchae, 1953-A conpiacy o cel.

Bibogaphy: pInclde index.. Cance- Research. 2. HeLa ce.

cutue- Quality conto. 4 Cone cels

RC267 G64 1985 616.9'4'0072ISBN 0887060994ISBN 088706074 (pbk.)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

3 . CellI Title

8526264



To san Wes my e

an o an an een o my aens



Htt Lk



a man ill begin ith certainties ,

he shall end in doubts;But i he ill be content to begin ith doubts,

he shall end in certainties

rancis Bacon





Coes

1 Special Delivery 12 The Seed that Took 133 HeLagram 234 Out of Thin Air 33

5 In the Purple Palace 39

6 Keeper of the Cells 477 Mug Shots 53

8 Spreading the Word 7 19 Damage Report 8 7

10 Provenance 93

1 1 Another Runin with Reda 0312 Showdown 1313 Even the Best o f Labs 251 4 The Little Dutch Boy 33

1 5 Battle Fatigue 14 116 Legacy 1471 7 Epilogue 1 5 1

Acknowledgments 153Sources 155

Idx





1

pecia eivery

Jm Duff was carryng anodd little suitcase as he stepped out of the helicoter Itwas a box of molded styrofoam, like a small ce chest youmight take to a softball gam to keep a sxpack cool Except that this chest was made o thcker, more serouslookng stuff.

Walter NelsonRees knew what was nside It wasthe reason he had come out to the Berkeley helort to

meet Duff The two men shook hands, and NelsonReesnotced that Duff was a bt edgy

"We'd better go get a drink, said DufWhen they had driven te few blocks to Oakland and

found a bar, Duff gngerly placed the box onto the floorbeneath their table and started hs ptch "Walter, hesaid n a quiet, earnest tone, "these cells are dferentAnd youre going to have to handle them dfferently

Of course the cells are different, thought Nelson-Rees When had a bureaucrat from the National CancerInsttute ever flown from Washington, DC, to Calfor-nia to personally deliver a chest full of dry ce and malgnant tumor cells? There had been plenty of shpmentsover the yearshundreds, n fact but ar freght had al



2 A Conspiracy o Cells

ways sufficed. The National Cancer Institute trustedthe airlines, and when the airlines got the packages toOakland, it trusted NelsonRees to handle the rest.

Tall, with a sharp nose and thin lips, Walter An-thony NelsonRees had a slightly aristocratic look abouthim and a manner that suggested he was sure of every-thing he did . He operated one of the best cell banks in thecountry, if not the best, and seemed quite aware of that.The officials of the National Cancer Institute knew ittoo. In fact, NelsonReess cell bank existed largely toserve researchers woring under the aegis of the institute. They were the bigshots, some of the best scientificminds in the country, and they needed the best weaponsthey could get to fight "The War.

"The War on Cancer, as the newspapers called it.The year was 1 973 . Richard Nixon wanted to be remem-

bered as the president who brought cancer to its knees,and the Natonal Cancer Institute, lavishly endowed,was his war department.

Yes , the nstitute wanted only the best for its boys,the choicest cuts of cancerous tissues from which theymight extract the secrets of the disease, its cause and tscure. NelsonRees was the supply man. Cells from anyorgan taken from patients of any age, any race, either

sexyou name it, he had it. When a researcher managedto get a new kind of cell growing in a culture dish, a cellthat looked as though it could be useful for cancer experi-ments, chances are the institute would have a samplesent to NelsonRees.

He was as fastidious as The Odd Coupe Felix Un-ger, which was the perfect recommendation for someonein charge of nurturing sometimes delicate cultures, keep-

ing their identities straight, and protecting them from . . .well, from anything unexpected. NelsonRees com-plained regularly to maintenance workers at his lababout their inability to get the air pristine, free of dustand microorganisms. And few of those who saw it willever forget the scene following NelsonReess discovery



Special Del ivery 3

that a technician had used a hallway in the "clean sec-

tion of the cel l bank to fold up his parachute after hours."His sporeinfested parachute! wailed NelsonRees.

That's why he was one of the trusted keepers of thecells . He was a perfectionist.

Yet here was Duff, straight from a transcontinentalflight with his cancerous carryon uggage, going on abouthow special these latest cells were and how careful NelsonRees was to be. "You're not to do anything withthese, Walter, unless you get a prior okay from us. Justthaw them out, grow up a few separate populations, andstore them away. Jim Duff was the man who watchedover NelsonRees 's lab for the institute . He was a naturalbureaucrat with a bureaucrat's instinct to cover his rearflank. But he was also a friend to NesonRees, whotherefore nodded politey as he sipped his vodka and

tonic."This is very important, Walter. There's more to itthan just science. Duff paused to let the message sinkin.

nside the styrofoam case, within sealed plasticflasks, foating in a red nutrient bath at room tempera-ture, some of the cells were growing and multipying asth two men spoke. n a separate refrigerated compart-

ment, duplicates of the active cels sat motionless in tinyglass bottles, suspended in a frozen state. There were sixdistinct cultures in al, sixpack of human tumor cels,six new weapons for "The War.

And Duff was right; they were diferent. For onething, they had come from the Soviet Union.

Richard Nixon not ony dreamed of curing cancer, he

also hoped to take the chill off America's relationshipwith the Russians. Toward both ends he negotiated anagreement with Leonid Brezhnev in May of 1972 thatcalled for the two nations to cooperate in biomedical re-search. Soviet scientists were keenly interested in "TheWar, particularly any recent progress that their Ameri



4 A Conspracy o Cells

can counterparts, who were thought to be at lest sever

years ahead, were wiling to share So in November tefirst delegation of American cancer researchers traveledto Moscow to present their Russian colleagues with,among other things, a set of thirty viruses There were ratviruses and hamster viruses and wooly monkey virusesand gibbon ape viruses , all of which had been found to in-duce cancer in these animals

By studying viruses that caused cancer in animals,researchers hoped to find out something about analogousviruses that might cause human cancer In fact in theearly 1970s, almost everyone who counted at the Na-tional Cancer Institute seemed certain that in only a fewyears someone on their payro would find the virus re-sponsible for cancer in human beings So far, though, althey had turned up were viruses that produced cancer n

animal cells Even those few solated from human celsturned out to be animal viruses that had somehow foundtheir way into human tissue but were incapable of trig-gering cancer there

ndaunted, the institute pushed ahead, spending $60million a· year in the search for the human tumor virus Competition was stiff to say the least For to fnd the vi-rus that causes human cancer would open the way to a

vaccine, a shot, like the miracle vaccination that hadbeen immunizing people against the plague o polio forthe last few decades Cancer woul be on its way to extinction, and Nobel Prize woud be the least an appre-ciative world could do for the scientist who made it pos-sible The highpressure race had already led to severalpremture claims of victory in the Unted States One ofthe most recent "winners of the uman Cancer Virus

Sweepstakes even received official congratulations fromRichard Nixon after the good news was leaked to tepress Some months later the alleged agent was determined to be another animal virusthis one a mousevirus and the race was on again

In any case, the National Cancer nstitute figured it



Special Delvery 5

wouldn't hurt to give the Russians a few of these animal

viruses . The collection was all done up in handsome goldlettering and presented with much pomp. It was such ahit among the Russian scientists that they felt they hadto give the Americans something special in return. Whatwas special about the cultures of human cancer cells delivered by the Russians a few weeks later was that all sixhad viruses growing within them, viruses that the Sovi-ets suspected were the causes of the malignancies .

Well, as they say in diplomatic circles, it was quitesomething. Richard Nixon's scientific delegates wereunanimously skeptical that the Russians, with theirprimitive equipmen and lax laboratory techniques,could have come up with even one cell line that con-tained a genuine human cancer virus, much less six ofthem. No, it was too much to believe . And yet there they

were, six cultures of cancer cells taken from six differentpatients, each culture carrying some kind of virus. Quitesomething. "My God, suppose they somehow stumbedonto it? the Americans asked each other. It was sim-ply too potentially valuable to ignore. Besides, even thepurest of cynics on the American team knew there wasmore at stake here. These were Russians, this was de-tente, there were poltical ramifications . The Americans

smiled and thanked the Russians. They packed the cellsinto their suitcases and brought them back home.A couple of weeks later, Walter NelsonRees re-

ceived a letter from the institute saying that samples ofsome virusladen Russian cells, received in connectonwith the biomedical exchange program, would soon be de-livered to his cell bank. Only four other American scien-tists had been given samples of the cells, and only they

were authorized to experiment with hem, the letter ex-plained. As for NelsonRees, he was to keep some of thecells growing and to freeze the others as a safeguardagainst loss. The letter concluded "No one is to be pro-vided with these materials, o with any data acquired us-ing these cultures, unless specific authorization has been




obtained . . . . Dr. James Duff expects to visit you on Januay 10, 1973. He will hand carry the cultures to insuresafe delvery.

NelsonRees thought it improbable that the virusesin these cells would prove to be human cancer agents. Hewas, however, pleased with himself and his lab. Onceagain the bigshots had come to his tidy cloakroom tocheck their fanciest hats .

When they had drained their drinks Duff picked upthe Styrofoam case and followed NelsonRees to the car.It was about nine o'clock in the evening. They drovethrough Oakland's harbor district to the Naval Biosci-ences compound. It was here, through a confusng webof agreements between government agencies and theSchool of Public Health of the University of California at

Berkeley, that NelsonRees operated his cell bank. Before they entered the clean section where the cell culture work was done, where floors as well as counter topsgleamed like mirrors, NelsonRees asked Duff to removehis j acket and don a white lab coat. Then he handed hima pair of white nylon booties to keep the street dust onDuff's shoes from dirtying the floors.

NelsonRees recorded the arrival of the cultures in a

big black logbook. He put the plastic flasks in a tall alu-minum cabinet that looked like an oversied refrigeratorbut in fact was the incubator, where cells in culture grewin a tropical environment of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.The tiny glass bottles went into a cylindrical freeer ofstainless steel about four feet in diameter and five feettalltat was filled with liquid nitrogen at 300 degreesbelow ero. NelsonRees slammed the lid shut, forcing a

cloud of cold, white vapor into the roo, and turned toDuff.

"Okay?"Okay.

Walter NelsonRees's obsessions went far beyondnylon booties . "In order to run a successful cell bank that



Specal Delvery

stores thousands of dfferent tssue cultures, that growsup and sends out as many as a dozen samples a day to re-searchers al over the countrto do that' NelsonReesoften explaned, "one needs to know what one s workngwth. One has to know whch cell s whch. Identfca-ton, the art and scence of beng able to recognze tesubtle dfferences between cells, was hs stockntrade.All of whch s to say that he could no more leave sxundentfed cell cultures n hs deep freeze and ncubatorthan Felx Unger could sneeze nto hs hands .

A few weeks after Jm Duff told hm not to do any-thng wth the Russan cells, NelsonRees dsobeyed or-ders He sent samples of each culture to Ward Peterson, acolleague at the Chld Research Center n Detrot, whospecalzed n performng certan bochemcal tests . Thswas always the frst step n hs routne check of anythng

that came nto the bank. Whle watng for Peterson's re-sults, NelsonRees examned the cells' chromosomes,the rodlke structures nsde each cell's nucleus thatcarry all ts genetc nformaton. After several days ofgazng through a mcroscope at scores of sldes, he hadconvnced hmself that ndeed, these cells carred humanchromosomes; they were human cells. If someone hadsad to hm at that pont, "Well of course the chromo-

somes are human. The Russans sad they were all hu-man cells/' NelsonRees would have nodded and re-pled, "Mmm, of course But one must be sure aboutthese thngs

The cells were from human patents, all rght, but hehad notced somethng odd. Among ts many chromo-somes, every human cell usually has two that determnean ndvdual's sex The sex chromosomes come n two

varetes, one shaped roughly lke the letter X the otherlke a Y If a person's cells have two X chromosomesapece, that person s a female. If they carry one X andone Y the person s a male. What NelsonRees notcedwas that there were no Y chromosomes among any of theRussan cells How strange f by chance all sx cultureshappened to come from women. Of course, t was well



8 A Conspiracy of Cells

known to tissue culture experts that cells growing for along ime in a laboratory environment could simply losechromosomes now and then. Indeed, the Y seemed par-ticularly vulnerable to getting lost in the shuffle of divi-sion. Possibly there were some males among the origi-nal Soviet cultures whose Y chromosomes had been lostalong the way; that would explain things.

Still, it bothered him.

Peterson's results began coming in abou a monthlater. e had been analyzing the cells' enzymes, cata-lysts that speed up chemical eactions within the body.While some enzymes are standard equipment for humanbeingsnearly everyone, for instance, has te enzymegalactose1phosphate uridyl tansferase that helps breakdown a sugar ound in milk certain ones appear only nsmall segments of te human popuation. These en-

zymes, once observed and catalogued, can be used alongwith other characteristics to tell cells apart .In the first Russian cell line he tested, Peterson

found an enzyme called G6PD type A, a variant of a stan-dard enzyme that helps to metabolize glucose, anotherbasic sugar. The form of G6PD in most peope moves rel-atively slowly through an "electrophoretic gel, a kind ofJell smear hooked up to a battery or tansformer. Elec

trophoresis indirectly measures a chemical's electrccharge by testing how fast a certain voltage can dag itthrough this gel. The point is that in addition to the com-mon, slowmoving form of G6PD, there is another va-riety that moves faster, presumably because it has astronger charge. It was known from studies of many cellsthat tis variant, called type A, occurs almost exclusivelyin black people . And even among blacks it appears in just

one out of three people. Peterson's discovery of this un-common enzyme in one of the Russian cells was not initself unusual; there are blacks in the Soviet Union. Whatwas unusual was his finding it in the second cell line aswell, and, as the monhs went on, in the third, fourt,fifth, and sixth.



Special Del very

"It is somewhat unexpected that all six cultureswould lack the male Y chromosome, NelsonRees saidto himself "It is even more unlkely that all six cell cultures would by chance be from blacks And the odds thatall would also just happen to have the rare form of theG6PD enzyme are Wel, it's almost impossible

He decided to notify the bureaucrats in WashingtonJim Duff, ongdistance, was upse, though not as

much as might have been forecast based on his originacommandment on the special handling required for thesecultures Perhaps he knew NelsonRees well enough toexpect his friend would scrutinize them and send themto Detroit despite the warnings Or maybe the news lefthim stunned In any case, he told NelsonRees the observations were unusual, ut they pointed to no firm conclusion No doubt it occurred to Duff that, if true, the

findings might eventually prove to be embarrassingHe was inclined not to accept them, t least not untiNelsonRees had checked and doublechecked "There'stoo much at stake here, Walter, said Duff "Don't rockthe boat Don't rock the boat until you're asolutely, 1 00percen sure

The next call went to the man at the institute whohad direct responsibility for the care of the Russian cell s

He was a superior of Duff 's, superior not only in rank butalso in his ability to worry about matters of protocol, toevaluae every development in terms of how it might offend someone, anyone, orwho knows ? maybe evenendanger his j ob

"What do you mean you sent the cells out for testing?

"I sent them out for the purpose of identifying

them, said Walter NelsonRees"Those cells were not to go anywhere What has thisfellow in Detroit been doing with them?

"Nothing, just analyzing them You needn' worry But the bureaucrat was woried, and one of his more

intriguing worries was hat the institute might get nailed




for violating federal quarantine procedures. It was awk

ward enough that Nixon's delegation had smuggled theRussian cultures nto the United States in the first place.Being bathed partly in bovine serum, the cells were a po-tential source of hoofandmouth disease, a scourge thenrampant in the Soviet Union. Authorities with the U.S.Department of Agriculture had become quite agitatedwhen they heard about the cells ' unofficial entrance intothe country. They had calmed down slightly when thecancer officials permitted inspectons of the few labs authorized to work on the cultures. But now, if news leakedout that NelsonRees had been shipping the stuff wher-ever he pleased . . .

"Doctor NelsonRees, you were told specifically notto distribute those cells. ow could you have sent themto Detroit ?

"I 've just told you. I sent them to Detroit to be iden-tified.By the time the conversation had circled back

around itself a few times, it was clear to NelsonReesthat the bureaucrat was not interested in hearing abouthis findings . e then called Wade Parks, an institute virologist and one of the privileged researchers allowed toexamine samples of the Russian cells . Parks said he had

tentatively identified the virus from one of the cell lines .Unfortunately, it appeared to be a monkey virusanother confounded animal virus. This one, Parks said,had never been known to do anything related to canceror to be anywhere interesting. Not only that, preliminarychecks of the other cell cultures suggested they mightall be carrying the same worthless virus . he implicationwas that the Russian cells were duds . The elusive human

tumor virus, it appeared, remained elusive.

But NelsonRees was more interested in the cellsthemselves than the viruses they held. What with hisown findings and now this from Parks, there was something obviously strange about these cell lines. All lacked



Special Del ivery 1 1

the Y chromosome, all carried the rare enzyme, and nowall contained the same virus. The theory taking shape inhis mind was both obvious and preposterous; he had totry it out on someone. "Has it evr occurred to anyonethat these might be all the same cells? he asked the vi-rologist.

He would not have been surprised to hear Parks dis-miss the dea After all, how could they be the samecell s ? Each culture had come from a different research in-stitute in the Soviet Union. Each was seeded by a bit oftissue taken from different patients with different kindsof cancer. How could they now be identical? And whatkind of cell would they all be ? Parks, however, said noneof this. Instead he said that the same thought had oc-curred to im.

NelsonRees couldn't saynot precisely, any-

wayhow all the cell lines had become one. Nor couldhe say what kinds of cells were in the sx cultures origi-nally. But he was almost sure of what was growing inthem now. He even knew the name of te woman towom the cells, all of them, belonged But he neededproof.

As it happened he and an assis tant had just learneda technique that could help him get the proof. It was a

method of applying purple stain to a cell 's chromosomes.The chromosomes absorbed the color in selected areasand ended up looking like barber poles Instead of neatstripes of red and white, though, they had bands of purplerunning across them at irregular intervals The bandingpatterns were unique to each chromosome, like fnger-prints, which made cells eminently more identifiable. If aresearcher knew te banded fingerprints for various cell

lines, he could use them to identify an unknown cellwith far more certainty than by merely determining thelack of a Y chromosome, for example, or he presence of arare enzyme.

NelsonRees and his assistant spent several monthspreparing the Russian cells, staining the chromosomes,



1 2 A Conspracy of Cells

photographing the figerprints, and checking them

against the fingerprints of their prime suspect Whenthey were through, the conclusion was inescapableMaybe the bureaucrats didn't want to hear it, but theygot another phone cal It was bad news, reinforcingParks's impression that the cells were probably worthlessto the quest for the human tumor virus But it went be-yond that

These were not distinct cultures of cancer cells fromsix different patients in the Soviet nion They were allthe cells of an American who in her entire life had probably not been more thn a few miles from her home inBaltimore, Mayland

A housewife with four children, this woman hadbeen s tricken with cancer at the age of thirty She died in1 95 1 , more than twenty years efore a group of smiling

Russians proudly presented a group of smiling Americanswith six of their most promising cell cultures Her name was Henrietta Lacks



2The eed Tha Took

Who? Accordng to the

medical records, enrietta Lacks was born somewhere nVirginia on 18 August 1920, the daughter of John andEliza Pleasant. er mother ded while delivering hertenth child; enrietta was very young at the tme Underthe section titled "Personal and Social story, the records say that enrietta was the mother of four and thatshe had a happy home life er major anxet was due toa tenyearold epleptic daughter who could not speak As

for education, enrietta had gone as far as seventh gradeShe drank beer only occasonally. er husband Davdworked at the Sparrow's Point shipards and earned anadequate income. They rented a fveroom house wthcoal heating on New Pittsburgh Avenue n Baltmore

Under "Past ealth the description s medcallyunremarkable As a child she had chicken pox, measles,and periodic trouble with her tonsls As an adult she hadoccasional headaches and often suffered a stuffedupnose, probably the result of a deviated septum In short,the records describe a young woman who had been qutewell and relatively free of cares until January of 1951,when she noticed a pnk dscharge spotting her under-clothes.




By 1 February, the day Henrietta Lacks made her way

through the winter rain to the women's clinic of theJohns Hopkins Hospital, the discharge was blood red.

The gynecologist who examined her was baffled . Hequickly found the source of the bood; it was a puffy lobeof tissue about an inch in diameter on the left side of hercervix. But as to what it was exactly, this experiencedphysician couldn't say. All the cervical tumors he had encountered were pale, almost white, because they lackedan ample blood supply. In fact most were so starved forblood that they developed ulcers. Not this thing; it wasshot through with vessels and so full of blood that itseemed to glow a deep red. There were no signs of ulceration either. It was a mean and hardy thing, whatever itwas.

The gynecologist took Henrietta Lacks across thehallway to the venereal disease clinic, thinking it mightbe a lesion causd by syphillis . But the technicians therecould find no trace of syphillis bacteria within her cervix.Still puled, the gynecologist cut off a small section ofthe lump and asked a pathologist to examine it under amicroscope. Henrietta Lacks received the verdict thatsame day an unusual form perhaps, but this dark redgrowth of tissue was unquestionably cervical carcinoma,

a malignant tumor of the cervix.Eight days later she returned to the hospital for herfirst session of radiation therapy. A surgeon stitched atube containing radium capsules to the wall of her cervix.It remained there for twentyfour hours, bombardingthe tumor and the rest of her abdomen with highenergygamma rays. After a second operation to remove thetube, the surgeon wrote his report "Patient feels quite

well tonit. Morale is good and she is ready to go home. His records also note that during the earlier operation,he had siced off two tiny pieces of cervical tissueonenormal, the other from the tumorand had given themto a researcher in the Hopkins medical school namedGeorge Gey.



The Seed that T o 1 5

George and Margaret Gey were husbandandwife pi-oneers in the field of tissue culture. George, who stoodwell over six feet tall and had a broad chest, was an ideaman and a tinkerer. Among his many inventions wassomething called a roller tube, a sealed glass vesse inwhich living cells were periodically bathed in a nutrientsolution as the tube was slowly rotated. He blew theglass for the first tube himself and rigged up a primitiverotor using the pendulum of a clock. It became a standardin the field . A zealot when it came to the care and feedingof cells , George Gey once bought an entire boxcar full ofpowdered soap for washing culture dishes; it seems thelocal market had switched to a newfangled detergent thatsometimes left residues harmful to cells, and Georgewanted to make sure he'd never be forced to use the stuff.Although a native of Pittsburgh, he had a country boy's

air. He spoke plainly and with warmth as readily to cabdrivers as to scientific dignitaries . He ran his lab like aninformal college of tissue culture, sharing equipment andknowledge with any student or scientist who wanted tolearn. And for a few hours every Wednesday, he wentfishing.

Margaret, trained as a surgical nurse, was the metic-ulous director of daytoday operations in the laboratory.

As long as everyone did his share, she was an amicableboss . If necessary, however, she could play the role of theste head nurse. She saw to i t that the cultures were fedon schedule, that the glassware was sterilized accordingto specifications, that the records were kept in order.George was regularly out of the lab, hunting for fundsand lecturing, but Margaret was always there, workinglong days and weekends, all of it without pay.

Together the Geys were trying to put some scienceinto the folk art of growing cells. If reliable methodscould be devised to keep cells alive in a roller tube and totrick them into thinking they were still inside a body,then scientists could learn firsthand about human biol-ogy without having to experiment on human beings di



1 6 A Conspacy o Cells

rey. The workings not only of healthy cells but also osick ones could be revealed. That possibilityof capturing human diseases under glass and dissecting them fortheir underlying causeswas what lured the Geys andseveral other research teams into the business of culturing tissue . Their greatest hope was to establish and studylonglasting cultures of the most dread human disease, tohave, as some put it, "a tumor in a test tube .

But i t was slow, difficult, sometimes grizzly work. Inorder to give their cells a proper feeding solution, for example, they had to find the raw materials themselves.Several times a week Margaret went to the opkins hospital' s maternity ward to collect one ingredient believedto stimulate cell growth: blood from human placentas.One of the maternity nurses would press a button thatset off a buzzer in the Geys ' lab, signaling that a fresh pla

centa was being put aside for them. Margaret soon ar-rived, cleaned off the sac's umbilical cord, and, plunginga fat syringe into one of the cord's larger blood vessels,pulled out as much as 50 cubic entimeters, about a thirdof a cup. Back at the lab the serum component, theslightly yellowish fuid containing proteins, wasremoved from the blood and combined with what theGeys alled beef embryo extract. This was the groundup

remains of a threeweekold cattle embryo, collected periodically from a cooperative packing house. Beause therecipe also caled for chicken plasma, every so often theGeys visited a nearby poultry factory. They usually wentabout dawn so that few workers would be around to witness the spectacle. Margaret's job was to pull back thewing, swab the area around the ribs with alcohol, andhold the animal still while George poked the syringe di-

rectly into its heart. They took 50 cubic centimetersfrom each chicken, and most walked right off the tableand back to the yard. They had a deal with the owner tobuy any bird that didn't suvive. On such occasions Margaret cooked the unlucky animal for dinner that evening.

As for the cells to be grown in this elixir of plasma



The Seed that Took 1

and serum and embryo mash, the Geys had to go out andcollect them as well Every day George scanned the hos-ptal' s l st of upcomng operatons and procedures, ook-ng for nterestng sources of tssue e or Margaret orone of the techncans stood n the approprate operatngroom holdng a few petr dshes ready for a scrap Thenthey raced back to the lab, placed the pulpy fragment on aclot of chcken plasma, added the remanng parts o thercell food, and hoped that t would take.

It was dscouragng. No matter how clean ther glas s-ware, no matter how potent ther nutrent soluton, nomatter how careful ther technque, cel ls smply weren'tcomfortable growng outsde the human body The Geyshad had consderably more success wth anmal cells, n-cludng some that had survved for years now. But mosthuman cells shrveled and ded rght away Some held on

for a few weeks, coaxed and codded by Margaret's dlgence, and then gave up It was a testmony to the Geys 'abltes tat by early 1951, they had managed to keep afew lnes of human cancer cells alve for several monthsIt was a testmony to the determnaton that they kepttryng to establsh new ones.

Mary Kubcek, however, was runnng low on determnaton. A twentyoneyearold techncan just out of

college and newly traned by the Geys, Mary was frus-trated by her current assgnment an attempt to estab-lsh a culture of cervcal cancer cells Mary was shy andslghtly nsecure; that made her doubly careful and espe-cal ly hardworkng, even measured by the hgh s tandardsof the Gey ab Nonetheless after tryng samples of cerv-cal cancer from a dozen dfferent patents , all she and herfellow techncans had to show were dead cultures When

George Gey announced around noon on 9 February thathe had dropped off yet another cervcal cancer bopsy nMary's work area, she ddn't attend to t rght awayncharacterstcally, she lngered a few mnutes at thelunch table and fnshed her sandwch. What's the dffer-ence, she thought It'll just be another useless attempt.



1 8 A Conspiracy o Cells

The tumor fragment was red, roughly square, lessthan half an nch on a sde. Gey explaned that t hadbeen taken from a patent n the women's clnc just before she underwent radaton therapy. Followng theusual procedure, the tssue was codenamed wth therst two letters of the donor's frst and last names : HeLa.Mary cut away the decayng, brown tssue around theedges and slced the remanng chunk nto tny cubes.She ppetted a few drops of chcken plasma nto severalroller tubes and placed four cubes of tssue n each tube.She wated fve mnutes for the plasma to stffen nto aclot, and then added the rest of the feedng soluton. Fnally, she placed the tubes nto a rollng rack nsde thelaboratory 's ncubator.

Had Mary been starng through the glass doors of thencubator, she wouldn't have seen the early sgns of lfe.

It happens so slowly at frst and so sporadcally. Maybe twas a matter of hours, maybe the better part of a daypassed. At some pont, the cells n each lttle sland of tu-mor began to quver and dance . . . and multply. Wherethere had been one, there were now two. Where there hadbeen two, now four, now sxteen, now thrtytwo. In afew days, the sgns of growth were vsble: around eachcube a translucent band of new cells was takng shape.

On the fourth day Mary had to remove the burgeonngbts of flesh from the roller tubes, carve them up ntosmaller peces, and transfer the cuttngs nto addtonaltubes.

Every other human cel l lne n the Gey lab had eventually weakened and faltered. Yet as the months passedthe HeLa cells showed no such vulnerablty. They justkept growng, doublng ther number every twentyfour

hours " spreadng lke crabgrass ! was how Margaret Geydescrbed t. At one pont George Gey compared the performance of the cancerous HeLa cells to the performanceof the normal cervcal tssue taken from Henretta Lacks :the tumor cells were growng ten to twenty tmes faster.It was too early to start celebratng, and George Gey



The Seed that Took

wasn't the sort to stop and congratlate himself anyway.

Bt there was no dobt abot it, these cells were differ-ent.

The tmor within Henrietta Lacks was different too,thogh the doctors didn't know it at the time. Most cer-vical tmors especially those fond at an early stage, aswas Henrietta'swere easily beaten back by radiation.Most patients were still alive five years after therapy. Soafter several more radim treatments, the doctors gaveher one month of Xray therapy and hoped that wold bethe end of it. "o symptoms referable to the pelvis,wrote one who examined her in May. "Cervix is normalin size, mcosa red and smooth, cervix freely movable.Good radiation reslt. Rx Retrn in one month. In Jnehe wrote "Patient feels fairly well, bt contines to

complain of vage lower abdominal discomfort. Cervixappears perfectly normal . o evidence of recrrence. RxRetrn in one month .

By late Jly Henrietta' s side aches cold no longer bedescribed as vage . ow they were extreme and radiatingdown into the groin. ot only that, something was constricting the area arond her bladder so severely that herkidneys began to swell with rine. The doctors also

fond a large, stony mass of tisse on the inside of herpelvis and another tmor in a lymph gland. With shock-ing speed the cancer had reappeared and spread so extensively that the doctors considered it inoperable "For thisreason, we are giving the patient a second corse of deepXray therapy prely as a symptomatic therapy.

She was admitted to the hospital on 8 Agst, tendays before her thirtyfrst birthday. For the next twenty

two days she ran a constant fever of 100 to 102 degrees;she also began vomitng reglarly. Despite the Xraytreatment, tmors were filling her abdomen. The treatment was halted .

In midSeptember, with the fever, pain, and naseacontinuing, she developed remia, a bldp in the blood



20 A Consracy of Cells

of poisonos waste prodcts normally eliminated by the

kidneys and bladder The doctors tried to insert a cathe-ter tbe throgh the mass of tmors that choked herbladder bt failed They gave her transfsions replacingher own pollted blood with a fresh spply Her intes-tine however was also blocked and her abdomen was be-ginning to expand

On 26 September one of the doctors looked over herorder sheet the long lis t of varios drgs procedres andtreatments that had been prescried to try to save Hen-rietta Lacks At the bottom of the list he scrawled "Dis-contine all medication and treatments except analge-sics All he cold do was try to relieve the pain On 29September Henrietta Lacks became disoriented appar-ently confsed abot where she was and what she hadbeen going throgh She stopped breathing at fifteen min-

tes after midnight on 4 October 1 95 1 It had been only eight months from the time thesmall red patch was first discovered in her cervix to theday it killed her For cancer of the cevix the doctorssaid it was some kind of a recor

o one in the Gey laboratory laid eyes on their n-fortnate benefactor ntil 4 October when George Gey

noticed a listing for the atopsy and went to observe Be-case he wanted a few more samples of the remarkabletumor cell he asked Mary Kbcek to meet him thereand collect them

The Hopkins atopsy room was bried in the basement of another bilding Mary had never been there be-fore In fact she ad never been to any atopsy facility orto a morge or to anything like that She made her way

anxiosly throgh the maze of dim ndergrond hall-ways that connected the laboratory bilding to the otherbasement

The room had high ceilings and a bare stone floor Atthe far end Mary saw a body on the table A pathologist



The Seed tht Took 2 1

was hnched over it a t work and Gey stood nearby The

dead woman's arms had been plled p and back so thatthe pathologist cold get at her chest Even from a distance Mary cold see that the boy had been spl it downthe middle and opened wide

She walked to the table sidestepped one of the ot-stretched arms and held ot her petri dishes As shewaited she gape at the greyish white tumor globlesthat filled the corpse It looked as if the inside of the bodywas stdded with pearls trings of them ran over the sr-faces of the liver diaphragm intestine appendix rec-tum and heart Thick clsters were heaped on top of theovaries and fallopian tbes The bladder area was theworst covered by a solid mass of canceros tisse "Blad-der pshed to anterior abdominal wall wrote the pa-thologist "Almost entirey replaced with tmor

Mary's eyes wandere down toward the corpse 's feetand sdenly she was overcome The toes They werepainted with bright red nail polish and a dainty job itwas It sddenly made this carvedp cadaver real All thelaboratory experimentation had never hinted at the trag-edy of this disease Bt here she thoght over here onthe table is the proper demonstration Here is what can-cer does

The pathologist sliced pieces of tmor from dfferentorgans and dropped them onebyone into the dishes inMary's hands It seemed to Mary that he took forever F-nally she fled across the expansive stone floor and ot ofthe atopsy room throgh the catacombs and p thestairs from the basement Back at the lab she concen-trated on the task at hand ctting p the tisse andplacing the pieces into roler tbes In the bright familiar

srrondings her horror qickly faded The mage of thedelicatey polished toenails however lingered In theyears that followed that sight came back to her often

As for the caaveros cells they would not growThe remia had made it impossble for anything to live



22 A Consi ray of Cells

within the body of Henrietta Lacks The cancer's sabo

tage had been so effective, it killed not only its host, btalso itself.

That's not qite right, of corse. Part of what hadbeen Henrietta Lacks' s cancer was not dead. Some of thecells had escaped their own poisonos wreckage eightmonths earlier on the edge of a srgeon's knife, abettedby the tisse cltring skills of Mary Kbicek. Dining onclotted chicken plasma, chopped beef embryo, and theblood from hman placentas, the srviving cancer cellsof Henrietta Lacks were living qite comfortablythriving, in fact in glass tbes in George Gey's lab.



3

He a a

n the early 1950s manyAmericans wold have named cellophane science's niftiest invention To the small commnity of researcherstrying to grow hman cells in their laboratories however the trly great breakthrogh was the Hea cell Atlast here was a cell with staying power the first drablepiece of a hman being that cold be watched p closeand tinkered with o more racing to finish an expei

ment before a sickly cltre wheezed and fell dead Thiscell wold last not jst throgh one series of tests btthrogh dozens for months maybe for years

In fact George Gey and two coworkers at the Uni-versity of Minnesota showed that Hea cells were so rgged they cold srvive a 2500mile trip throgh themail They sent twentynine live cltres by air rail andtrck from Minneapolis to orwich ew York and

back; all bt one retrned in fine health A cell line thatheld on in the lab was what everyone had been hopingfor of corse bt one that cold endre handling by theU S Post Office was a blessed miracle

Soon it seemed every biomedical scientist in thecontry was either sending or receiving a Heagram Gey



24 A Consrcy o Cells

stated t by malng samples of Hea cels to a few close

coeages who gew p some exta cltes and sentthem to the frends who dd kewse When the frenzed demand fo Hea otpaced ths nfomal netwok anmbe of laboatoes set p fscle producton nesand began passng aond Hea cltes the wayMcDonald 's shovels ot ts bges and fes May Kb-cek ead that one shpment of HeL was beng caedby backpack nto Chle and anothe was on ts way toTkey In a few yeas Hea cells would even tavel ntospace aboad the Discoverer XV satellte

Cance eseaches caved Hea most of all becaset was the longsoght tmo n a test be Theywatched the cels eact to a battey of toxc chemcalsand photogaphed the wedly shaped chomosomes centsts nteested n the general workngs of hman cells

clocked the ate at whch Hea cells mtpled and std-ed the podcton of potens Voogsts who fondthat polo vrses mltpled a mllonfold jst two tothee days afte nfectng a Hea clte made Heathe majo new tool fo stdyng the vses yea atethey knew enogh abot polo to podce the frst sc-cessfl vaccne

nd of cose evey scentst who wanted to lean

the methods of tsse clte nssted on statng wthHea The newcomes had been told how fstatngmc of the work wold be how rarely a pece of tssewod yeld sstanable cell lne Bt wth Hea theyknew they coldn't lose The advent of Hea was notonly a boost fo the begnners thogh It also seemed tochange the lck of the eseachers who wee sgglng toestablsh othe hman cell nes

It was as thogh Geoge Gey had boken bology'sfomnte mle Once he had shown t was possble topodce a stong and longlved cel lne fom hman ts -se hs fellow cell cltrsts went back to the ab wthnew confdence and enthsasmand damned f theyween't able to do t too One scentst sccessflly clt



Hegrm 25

vated a hardy strain of human liver cells Another started

up a cell line from a bit of amniotic sac Then came a cul-ture from a tumor of the larynx, followed quickly bysturdy lines of embryonic kidney cells and adult heartcells and cancerous blood cels True, the cultures idntalways bloom right away But evenuay, a few days or afew weeks after being seeded, somehow they all begangrowing at a strong and steady pace For the next tenyears, from the early 1 950s to the early 1960s, the scienceof cell culture flourished as wel

A few of the old gad saw the caamity comingWith so many new cells in circulation, and with nomeans of positivey identifying them, they knew therewould be mixups So they tried to head off the prolemSome learned to tell cells apart by the shapes of the chromosomes, others by how antibodies reacted to partcularcultures The methods were crude, but they worked wellenough to show the scientists they had been right toworry

One of the first cultures they checked was a humanline that one day, for no apparent reason, lost its suscepti-bility to polio Their identification tests suggested thecells were no longer human but had somehow been re-

placed by mouse cells Then the same thing happened toa monkey cell line Soon they found human cels growingin what should have been pig, duck, and mouse culturesAnd there were mouse cells growing in rabbit culturesand rabbit cells where monkey cels shoud have been

Most cell culturists were still celebratng the renais-sance But by the late 1 950s many sampes of the usefulce linesboth the od, established anima cutures and

some of the new human oneshad lost their identitiesAn investigator who needed a normal monkey ce ll for hisexperiments could no longer be sure he wasnt workingon a tumor cell from a human larynx How could he in-terpret results when he couldnt even say what he hadbeen experimenting on?




Te reasons for te mess were obvios to te odgard. In a word tese new people were sloppy. Teywere probably mislabeling cltres . He, tey were probably sing te same pipettes to feed different cltres, inadvertently picking p a few cells ot of one dis anddroppng them into anoter If te first cells werestronger, they wold grow over the second cltre and replace t. Sch fax pas slipped by nnoticed in many ectic labs where accrate record keeping had become a ostart. In addition, cell swapping was rampant. And whenone researcer traded materials wit another, e asotraded mistakes.

We, tings simpy codn't go on tis way, declaredte veterans wo had ncovered te confsion. Tey decided to resce te fied by setting p a centra cell bank,a Fort Knox for cell cltres. ot jst any cel cltres,

yo nderstand, ony tose wit clearly defined charac-teristics and carefy docmented stories. o shad-owy pasts allowed, no vagabond cels that had wanderedfrom one nameless lab to anoter. Wit te hep of theational Cancer Institte, wic was also beginning toworry abot te qality of cel ctres, the grop an-nonced in 962 tat te nation's "reference cellswold be osed at te American Type Ctre Collec

tion, a private spplier of bioogical materials in Wasington, D .C . Workers tere wod maintain tese prebred cltres and distribte them to any researcer whowanted te very best. Over te next for years, te celbank filled its refrigerators and incbators wit moretan two dozen ighqality cltres It looked as if tescience of tisse cltre had backed away from the brinkof caos.

Yet as carefl as tey were, te fonders of th e bankwere for years anted by dobts. Most of teir screeningtests determined only wat kind of anima a cel linecame from. Tey cold te mose from man, bt teycoldn't easily tel most man cells apart. Wat teyneeded were markers, cemica or strctra fingerprints



Heagram 2

that were readily recognized and niqe to each cell linethin a species.

In 966 a eattle geneticist named tanley arterstood p at a scientific meeting in Bedford, Pennsylvania,and offered the tisse cltrists jst what they needed. Inappreciation, the tisse cltrists practicaly ran him otof town.

As part of his sty of hman genes, arter hadbeen looking for longlasting cel lines that prodced cer-tain isoenzymes, enzymes that are present in every hman cell bt may va in style from person to personOne of the isoenzymes of interest to arter was 6PD,the glcose metabolizing enzyme that comes in twostyles, type A and B Another was PM, available intypes 1, 2, and 12, a combination of styles analogos to

the blood type AB.arter first analyzed the PM in a few of the established hman cell lines and was srprised to find thesame form of the enzyme in each type 1 . He tested a fewmore and then a few more He stopped at eighteen owit is tre that in an average poplation many peoplewold have type 1 in their cells, bt the statistics reqirethat nearly a third of them shold not. That was what

bothered arter. When he tested the cltres for the6PD enzyme, again they were all the same type A.That meant that every cell line he checked had comefrom a black person. Most of the estabished cell lines,however, had reportedly been cltred from Cacasianpatients. Only HeLa was known to have come from ablack.

Becase HeLa was the earliest sccessfl cell line,

sed in virtally every ab before the rest of these eighteen cltres came along, arter drew what he thoghtwas an obvios conclsion.

Oddly enogh he didn't think his serendipitos find-ing was all that important. After all, it offered no new sci-entific principle or insight The main point to him was



28 A Consrcy of Clls

that these vaiants of diffeent enzymes old be sed fo

telling hman ells apat; they wee pactial tools fosoting ot existing mixps and peventing fte ones In fact the title of the pape he sbmitted to the Bedfodconfeence was "Geneti Makes as Taes in Cell Cl-te Bt then tan Gatle was a genetiist, not a tissecltist

"My God, tey'e going to tea yo lmb fom limb, said a fiend when Gatle aived at the meeting to de-live his epot "I can't believe what yo'e saying

Gatle said it nonetheless He stood p in the convention hall of the Bedfod pings Hotel and said thathis tools fo distingishing hman cell ltes demon-stated that most of them weent diffeent at all He idthat the eighteen ell lines he tested, samples of whichwee now in the valts of the nation's new ell bank,wee eally jst the evepopla HeLa cels He added, al-most incidentally, that eseahes who had expei-mented on these cevial cane cells beleving they weelive, o blood, o bone maow, o anything else ad bette eonside thei findings "The wok is open to sei-os qestion, said Gate, "and in my opinion wold bebest disaded

The tisse ltists wee not pleased to hea this,

paticlaly fom a geneticist, paticlaly sine theyhad spent the last ten o fifteen yeas stdying samples ofthese cells, thinking they wee looking t many distinctfoms of ance and at nomal tsse fom lots of diffe-ent ogans Even the fondes of the el bank who hadsspected tobe fond it had to believe And to the e-seahes who had atally eated the ltes onae's list of spoiled goods, who had toiled fo yeas

and sffeed epeated disappointments befoe they finallygot those ltes to take oot, his findings wee impossi -ble They began hling skeptial qestions

Jst how did he know the ells hadn't been takenove by HeLa in his own laboatoy ?






In perfect deadpan, Hayflick annonced, " I have jsttelephoned my wife, who assred me that my worst fearsare nfonded.

The crowd thoght that was hilarios, and the tension eased. Bt Gartler wasn't so sre that Hayflick wasgeninely jovial. And when the laghter died down, theeminent cell biologist dismissed the geneticist' s conclsions, saying simply they were very difficlt for him toaccept.

Then rose Harvard Universty's Robert Chang, another lminary of cell biology and a trstee of the TisseCltre Association. Chang was the creator of one of themost poplar of hman cell lines. The Chang liver cl-tre was sed extensively in stdies of iver fnction.

Watever cltre Gartler claims to have analyzed,said Chang, it wasn't a cltre that came from Chang. " I

have never sent him any cell line, and I don't rememberever having corresponded with him.Gartler explained that one of his samples of Chang

liver had come from a coworker at the University ofWashington in Seattle. The other came directly from thecell bank at the American Type Cltre Collection. Infact, six of the eighteen cltres he examined had comestraight from that storehose of only the best and most

careflly screened cltres. The important point, saidGartler, is that while there may well be some geninesamples of these cltres at certain laboratories, thereare others in active se that are impostors . Unless experimenters can tell the bona fide from the bogs, he said,mch of the research done on these cltres is in dobt .

It looked to Gartler as if Chang was contemplatingmrderor sicidebt all he did was sit down.

More skeptical qestions, more icy speeches. Thesession finally ended at noon, Gartler escaped from theroom, and the tisse cltrists changed their tactics.ow it was a war of isolation. They ostracized him forhis wild and insolent claims. Throgh most of lnch hesat alone. One of the few who dared to join him was a



Heagram 3

yong researcher from California. As a technica advisorto the ce bank, the researcher was as distrbed as theothers abot arter's findings. At the same time,thogh, he admired arter for sticking his neck ot, andhe tod him so. The researcher's name was WalterelsonRees.





4

Ou o Th n A r

t wasn't unt two yearsater that arer's ncredbe concusons wee con-frmed By 1 968 two ndependent researc teams had ap-ped hs methos to a the human cutures deposted nthe ce bank at the Amercan Type Cuture CoectonOut of thrtyfour ce nes they found twentyfour tobe HeLa

How coud t ave happened?

The most lely expanaton was the same combna-ton of sloppness and opportunty that n the ate 1950shad shuffed mouse ces wth human ces and ducces wth monkey ces HeLa had a number of advantages that heped t pu the trck off on a dsastrousyarge scale nce t was the frst usefu human ce ne twas the most ubqutous wherever techncans werecareess there were always a few HeLa ces nearby to

take advantage Because t was aso one of the most vgor-ous cutures known t coud easy take over weker cu-tures f gven haf a chance

HeLa ws so tenacous n fact that t probabyddn't need to wat for a ab worker to use the same p-pette on dfferent cutures A startng seres of exper



3 A Consrcy of Cells

ments reported in 1961 by Lewis Coriell one of the old

gard who had helped start the reference cell bank hadshown HeLa cod literaly appear ot of thin air. Cor-iell working at the Institte fo Medical Research inCamden ew Jesey fond that merely pling a stopperfom a test tbe or dispensing liqid from a dropper coldlanch tiny airborne droplets containing a few HeLacells. When the dops landed on open petri dishes hodinglive cltres the HeLa cells began growing so feverishlythat in three weeks they overwhelmed the original cl-tres.

To some it had seemed an nbelievable observation.Bt now it ooked as thogh mch the same thing msthave happened to all the hman ctres tat appeared inthe 1 950s soon after HeLa. Those cells had probaby beenas weak and hard to cltvate as the ones that had beentried in the pioneering days; they were easy victims forHeLa. A few of the more cynica scientists sspectedthere had never been anything bt HeLa in those newcltes. The cells from the original tisse samples hadprobably died immediatey leaving a cltre dish of n-trients ripe and ready for the next HeLa cell that hap-pened by

Either way for Coriel and some of the other experts

HeLa's srreptitios spread explained a few pzzling ob-servations that cancer researchers had made in recentyears. One sch enigma was "spontaneos transforma-tion a mysterios process by which benign cells sd-denly trned maignant. There it was right in the dishthe very nt of the cancer problem healthy cells goingalong in a calm and orderly way abrptly brst into n-bridled growth. ot only did they grow faster they were

no longer bond by the normal cells' lifetime limit offifty to sixty divisions. The transformed cells ignoredtheir bioogical clocks and contined dobling withotend.

The weird thing abot spontaneos transformationwas that ntil the late 1950s and early 1960s it was



Out of Thn A r 35

never known to occr in hman cells Cltres of rat,

mose, hamster and other animal cells had been spontaneosly transforming for years, bt never a hman cellcltre Then sddenly it was happening all the timeot only that, these spontaneosly transformed cellsgrew rings arond many cells taken drectly from pa-tients' tmors obody cold explain why normal cellsthat ted malignant n the lab shold be more aggressive than cells that had become maignant while in thebody, bt for the moment scientists were delighted tohave all these tenacios new cltres

Mch later it became clear that these transformations were not spontaneos at all, bt had been triggeredby otside agents In the case of the nonhman cells,chemicals in the ntrient medim, oxygen in the air overthe cltres, even florescent lighting in the laboratorywere eventally fond to inflict genetic harm that cantrn normal cells canceros As for the hman cells,most "transformatons appeared to be nothng morethan takeovers of the cltres by the feisty HeLa cell s

Spontaneos transformation was no t the only mythHeLa created abot the natre of cancer Researchers hadobserved that cancer cells shared many fndamentalcharacteristics, and there had begn to emerge a nifying

theory all cancer cells grew reatively qickly and hadthe same basic ntritional reqirements; they seedednew tmors when inoclated into the cheeks of ham-sters; many had abnormally shaped chomosomes; andmost carried the same srface antigens, proteins on theotside of the cell that stimlate the body's immne system Like winning lemons in a casino fll of rigged slotmachines, these traits kept coming p one after another

in dozens of cell lines the scientists thoght had comefrom dozens of cancer patients The trth was they hadbeen stdying one line of cells masqerading as all theothers, and the common traits they saw were those of asingle tmor, the one that killed Henrietta Lacks

"They described a lot of things they thoght were be



36 A Consrcy of Cells

ing prodced by intestine and idney and other cels re

called Coriell years later "There was a ot of data in theliteratre that was jst wrong jst a ot of wasted timebecase they were all woring with HeLa

Cyril tlberg of the Chid Research Center in De-troit like Coriell one of the deans of cell cltre came asclose as anyone to assessing HeLa's effect on this earlyperiod of cel bioogy and cancer wor He made theremar in a letter to elsonRees many years afterarter's HeLa revelations "I didn't realize then whatthe scceeding years wold brng tlberg wrote "at-rally at the time I was very defensive becase I saw 1 5years wor go down the drain

Bt tlberg Coriel and the other veterans faced pto the calamity and began to cear away the wrecage sthe architects of the fledging central cel ban they wererelctant to simply throw ot the twentyfor eacon-taminated cltres Hea after all was a strdy line andthese individua s trains had varios qirs and characterist ics that made them particlary sef to certain fieldsof research The soltion they decided was an adden-dm to the cell bank's cataloge in 1968 warning thatthe twentyfor lines were actally HeLa and shodbe sed as sch Moreover they reqired even more de

tailed descriptions of new lines deposited in the banand recommended not only arter's enzyme tests btany other promising techniqes of identification as wel

This time they hoped they wold pt HeLa contamination and all the other chaos behind them nd indeedas the 1960s came to a close it appeared that the celbiologists had recovered from tan arter's bombshelarter himself went bac to stdying genetics having

done qite enogh for cell ctre

s for what made HeLa so damned stbborn in thefirst place the scientists cold only speclate In 190two researchers dg out the origina biopsy slides of Hen-rietta Lacks's tmor and ncovered one possibe answer





38 A Consracy o Cels

years later, all they cold say with certainty was that it

mst have slipped into the Soviet Union at some earlierpointbecase it was this strain of Hea cells growingin six separate cltres that the Rssians handed back tothe Americans in 1 972.



5

I e Pupe Paae

t woldn't be right to saythat the officials of the ational Cancer Institte weresrprised when elsonRees delivered the bad news inthe spring of 1973. Given the sorry state of Rssian research, it came as no shock that was the scentific pointof view Being breacrats, however, the institte people saw this as a political mess fraght with ironies thatwold delight the press and other antagonists It was bad

enogh that the earliest frit of ixon's scientific d-tente was the discovery that the Rssian cltres weregood for nothing Bt for the cltres to have beenspoiled by the cells of some posthmosly hyperactivewoman from Baltimore, cells that had probably slippedinto the Soviet Union as the reslt, however indirect ofsome American researcher's largesse many years earlierthat was too mch o, they were not srprised

They were mortified If tre the news of Henrietta's Rs-sian appearance wold be a diplomatic nightmare

Well, then, maybe it wasn't treThey rged elsonRees to check his reslts They

cationed him not to say a word to anyone They sggested this cold jeopardize the ftre of the entire bio




medical exchange with the Rssians And reminding himthat he had broken te rles by sending the cells to Detroit withot permission they extracted a written apology from him Bt along wth the apology NelsonReessent the evdence smmaries of the many tests and re-tests By early fall the breacrats had no choice bt tobegin qietly discssing how best to break the news tothe Rssians The Soviet delegation was de to visit theinstitte's headqarters in Bethesda Maryland in a fewmonths jst as the American entorage had visited Moscow a year earlier One of the main events s chedled wasa review of what the Americans had learned abot theRssian cel cltres

In October NelsonRees received a phone call fromJohn Mooney assi stant director for viral oncoogy at theinstitte and the leader of the American delegation to

Rssia Never before had NelsonRees received a phonecall from Moloney Moloney was jst one step downfrom Frank Rascher the director of the institte AndRascher nlike the directors of other US health instittes was appointed by the president himself It was alitte like a sixthcentry English footsolder getting acall from Sir ancelot

Moloney said he wold appreciate it if NelsonRees

wold come to Bethesda to make a presentation to bothinstitte officials and the visiting Rssians The topicwold be the "possible Hea origin of the Soviet cels

"Of corse we mst keep this information from becoming offensive to or Rssian collaborators headded "Especially to Doctor Zhdanov Victor Zhdanovwas Moloney's conterpart the senior scientist on theRssian side who had organized the presentation of the

cell cltreselsonRees fet honored by the reqest Bt as theexcitement of the phone call wore off as he looked overhis notes of the conversation he also began to feel vexed"Keep this from offending the Rssians It occrred tohim that no one was geninly interested in his work As



n the Purle Palace 4 1

far as NesonRees cod te, Mooney's depties had for

the past few months concerned themseves ony with theawkward ironies and procedra infringements that ithad stirred p Now even Mooney's persona invitationseemed to him argey a warning that we mst not instor comrades in science

Come on now, thoght NesonRees, this discoveryrested from a dandy piece of detective work Not onythat, it meant that HeLa contamination was stil a prob-emin fact t appeared to be a wordwide probemWhat abot a tte acknowedgment ? What abot a littefanfare? What abot my pbishing it in the scientificpress if yo foks aren't interested ? Or is the protection ofRssian egos more important than spreading the wordthat Henrietta Lacks is sti at arge?

Bt in a etter to Mooney a few weeks ater Neson

Rees did not express himsef qite so crassy He otinedthe materia to be covered in is tak nd added simpy,"I wod ike to sbmit these rests for pbication assoon as yo fee that the necessary amenities have beenextended to a parties concerned

On 12 November 193, NesonRees fond himsefin conference room nmber 10 at the headqarters of the

Nationa Cancer Institte in Bethesda, ten mies north ofWashington, D C The cassiest of the institte's meetingpaces it was nicknamed "the Prpe Paace for themave carpeting and phostery that adorned its oterobby A fortyfoot tabe of eavy oak dominated theroom The tabe was ova and had a band of back eatheralong its edge pon which conferees cod rest their ebows There were microphones to mpify voices and ear-

phones to offer simtaneos transations The adiotechncians and transators sat in a sondproof booth be-hind a darkened window set in one of te soid oak was The ceiing was made of wooden sats arrange in a waffe pattern The carpet was thick and bish gray Thechairs were back eather reciners with whees



Cospray of Clls

On November, for the meeting of the U.S.U.S.S.R. Joint Subcoitte on Research in OncologicDisease, the table was bedecked with miniature fags.Thumbelia versions of ld Glory and the Hammerand Sickle stood side by side, sticking up out of woodenhockey pucks in front of each namecard and waterpitcher. On one side of the table sat the Americans, ohnMoloney and Nixon's appointed anticancer csaderFrank Rauscher at the center. On the other sat the Russians, arranged around Victor Zhdanov. Walter NelsonRees sat behind the American side of the table in a kindof raised gallery, the bleacher seats. About an hour intothe meeting, Moloney looked over his shoulder an motioned for Nelson-Rees to coe forward.

"We have examined the chromosomes and G6PDmobility patterns of six cell lines received in our labo

ratoy in anuay from the Soviet Union via Bethesda, Nelson-Rees began. He was nervous. Like a kidputting a lit match to a pack of fire crackers, he was bothlooking forward to and dreading the explosions he planned to set off around him.

"Quinacrine-fuorescence indicated the absencefrom al cells of a chromosome. (Translatio: Wecouldn't find a single chromosome in any of these cells.

Athough there are other explanations, this suggests allthe cultures came from females.)No reaction. He could see Victor Zhdanov staring at

him: crew cut, mustache, and spectacles, but no expression on his face.

"G6PD mobility for all lines was of type A variant,characteristic of HeLa cells . (All six cultures contain therare form of the G6PD enzyme, a form found ony in the

back population. Isn't that odd? Every cell seems to havecome from a female who was black. )

Maybe someone coughed. Several of the Aericandelegates may have nodded, their faces blank.

Neson-Rees placed an enlarged black-and-white micrograph of chroosomes on the easel at the head of the



n the Pure Paace 3

table . Chromosomes labeled as coming from the Russiancells were arranged in vertical columns next to chromosomes from known Hea cells Barber pole patternswere clearly visible on all the chromosomes. "A trypsinGiemsa technique for chromosome banding revealedmarker chromosomes common to all cel lines, as well asto our cu ture of Hea cells and to Hea cells reported inliterature. (As you can readily see, the fingerprints of theRussian chromosomes match those of the Hea cellsThe cells are identical. )

Dead silenceIt was as if he had been up there telling a long, co-

plicated oke and had neglected to deliver the punchline. "Uhhuh, and then what happened? several facesseemed to say

There were others who refused to look at him. They

riveted their eyes on the table before them, as if theywere ashamed of something, as if they were hoping hewould ust finish the talk and spare them anymore of thiscrude, unspeakable subect

There were also one or two faces fighting back theurge to smile at the whole humorous mess these Russiancells had been, but those faces were tued away for fearof breaching the solemnity of the occasion

elsonRees couldn't believe it. Maybe they simplyfailed to understand the data. Many of the Russian dele-gates were not well versed in the technques of issue cul-ture. es, perhaps the significance ust escaped themOr maybe the Americans were still peeved that he hadoverstepped his bounds in checking out these cells andhad risked unleashing a hoofandmouth plague on De-troit. Then again, maybe the whole lot of them had de-

cided the most diplomatic way of handling his discoverywas to ignore it.elsonRees had been girding himself for an explo-

sion, and there wasn't even a burp. It was embarrassingHe felt suddenly silly up there at the easel in front of allthese zombieeyed scientists. Moloney thanked him for




the presentation, and the meeting of the USUSSR

Joint Subcommittee on Oncologic Disease was adournedfor lunch

It was Victor Zhdanov who finally asked, "Whatdoes it mean?

Zhdanov, elsonRees, Moloney, and a few othershad gathered after lunch in Mooney's ffice I wasquickly apparent to elsonRees that the earlier sessionhad een ceremonial ow the Russians would have amore private and informal setting in which to discussthese curious findings Under other circumstances elsonRees might have been loudly indignant for being setup as part of the flag show in the Purple Palace But hewas so anxious to describe his wok to anyone honestlyinterested that when Moloney asked him to repeat thehighlights of his talk, he did so cheerfully Then, when hehad finished, Zhdanov asked his question

"First of all, said elsonRees, "it means you arenot in control of the situation You do not know whatcells these are You seem to have no contrl over wherethey come from or where they are going But more importantly these cells are one and the same, and the virusesare one and the same, and it ust isn't right to be calling

them six separate isolates of human cells, each carrying avirus with potential human cancer value This time there was no stony stare Zhdanov was

visibly upset, though it is hard to say precisely what wasracing through his head He may well have been pcturing the long list of Soviet research reports that were basedon examinations of these cultures n effect, elsonReeswas saying that most of the Russians ' work on viral can

ce in the ast few years was questionable at best Whatever he was thinking, Zhdanov quickly sought to takesome advantage u of the catastrophe "If you know somuch about cells and can do so good, said the Russian,"why don' you come to Moscow? Show our people Talkabout wha techniques you have



n the Pule Plce 5

"I'd be delghted, shot back elsonRees "if you

promise I can get back out of the countryThe Russian laughed loudlyelsonRees oined himSuddenly it was one big happy meeting elsonRees

ostled and oked furthe with Zhdanov With some of theother Soviet delegates, he discussed opera and ballet including the work of Rudolf ureyev, a Soviet defector Ia few of the American bureaucats were still sore aboutelsonRees's ndependence in the handling of the Rus-sian culturesand miffed anew at his accepting this invitation to Moscow without consultatonthey didn'let on Finally thought elsonRees, the wold is regaining its sanity

The Joua o Vroogy soon proved him wrongow that the "necessary amenities had been extendedto "all parties involved elsonRees was set to publishhis work The friendly conclusion of the Bethesa confer-ence had made him optimistic; the oint committee hadgone so far as to formally agree it was "extremely impor-tant that the findings be published He prepared a manuscript and submitted it to the ournal, which had ustprinted Wade Parks's conclusion that he Russian cells

contained only monkey viruses Certainly the ournalwould want its readers to know that the cells themselveswere not what the Russians had claimed either

The people at the ournal didn't see it that way"First of all it seems to be a gratuitous attack on the Russians, wrote one of the two technical udges of elson-Rees 's report "Secondly (and more impotantly) it eallyis a footnote to history and not a study with new scien-

tific implications I would hope someday it wouldappear as a footnote The other udge also suggested thatthe finding be presented only as a short blurb, and he pre-ferred that it be presented in somebody else's ournal

elsonRees was stunned and furious Were thesepeoplethese people who are working scientists de



6 A Consiracy of Cells

voted to communication among colleagueswere they

as worried as the bureaucrats about the politics of unpop-ular findings ? It was the same incredible blindness. Theycouldn't see what was so obvious to him: the scientificcommunity must be waed. The word must be spreadthat arer's list seven yeas ago was not the end of thestory and that the cells of Henrietta acks are still on theloose

When Parks heard the news, he wrote to the our-nal's editor gently recommending that he publish someform of elsonRees's paper. The editor sent a note toelsonRees saying that having thought about it furtherhe "would not be averse to publishing a much shorterversion of the report.

He woud not be averseelsonRees was not the sort of fellow to tell anyone

to roll up a manuscript and stuff it, but he came close tomaking the suggestion to the editor of Te Joua oVroogy Seething, he withdrew the paper and sent it toThe oua o the Natona Cancer Ins ttu te The udgesthere were not as hostile, though several had troublegrasping the importance of the paper. It was finally accepted in June of 194 and appeared in print threemonths later, almost two years after the Russian cells ar

rived in the U. S . and a year after the meeting at the Purple Palace.The whole experience left elsonRees sour. He had

been wrong to think that anyone wanted to hear this badnews, except, ironically, the Russians . The funny thing isthat the entire frustrating misadventure tempted him toump in with both feet. It was almost enough to start himoff on a personal crusade. Almost.



6

Keepe of e Ce s

Growing up in Germany inthe 1 940s, Walter Rees was an outsider. He had been bornin Havana and lived there until his parents separatedwhen he was nine years old. Walter's mother then tookhim and his older brother to Karlsruhe, a town on theRhine River. iving in Germany was the only way theycould claim a small inheritance, left to his father, thatwould finance the boys' schooling. Walter 's father, a Ger-

man who sold farm equipment to sugarcane growers andlater owned the PepsiCola bottling plant in Havana, de-cided to remain in Cuba.

Being the sons of a German man, Walter and hisbrother were considered by the Third Reich to be Ger-man themselves. The term was Ausandsdeutscher, anoutland German. It was an appropriate description for ayoung German boy who spoke only Spanish and English.

ine months after Walter and his brother beganclasses at a strict, religious boarding school in southwest-ern Germany, Hitler invaded Poland. The Rees boys, likeall th other children, oined the ungvok, the cub scoutsof the Hitler Youth. Young Walter didn't enoy themarching and the patriotic singing the way many of his




classmates did When he heard about plans for a military

camp out in the country that summer, he announced thathe wasn't going An older boy, one of the group leaderswho held the title of Fhrer, beat him severely for pre-suming he had any choice n the matter

Walter was a good student He learned to be disci-plined and neat He could do anything they asked of himhe ust didn't feel a part of it And he was happiest whenhe escaped Whenever he could, Walter ran off to a sec-tion of the Black Forest that surrounded his school Therein the woods he and a friend built tree houses and pre-tended they were exploring the dark contnent Some-times Walter would tell stories out of adventure books hehad read or describe the realife dreamland of Cuba

o one spat at Walter as they spat at the little Jewishboys who were forced to wear Stars of David, and he wasthankful for that But as he war intensiied and theAmericans entered to fight Germany, he felt a preudiceagainst him and his family ust the same, a sense that ev-eryone knew they ddn't belong His mother, having beenborn in Havana during the US intervention that fol-lowed the SpanishAmerican war, was considered to bean American citizen Once when she was travelling toMesskirch, an official swept through the train, de-

manding to see identification papers That was not un-usual in wartime Germany When he arrived at her com-partment, however, the man smiled and said, "That's allright, you needn't show us anything We knew you wereriding with us, Frau Rees They had been watching her

Walter's mother taught him to be polite , helped himdiscover art and music, and encouraged him to be verygood at whatever he did She never said it quite this way,

but what Walter heard was: be perfect Show them thateven if they won't accept you, you can be ust as good asthey are Years later when Walter was in college, hismother tried to kill herself with sleeping pills Hethought that somehow he had disappointed her "Thatled me to want to excel at many things, he told a friend



Keeer of the Cells

"I wanted to do everything at least as well as the bestaround

Walter was sixteen in 1945 when the Americanforces arrved to occupy Germany, though to him itseemed more that they wee liberaing the country Afteryears of rationing, suddely there were chocolates andcigarettes and fresh frut What's more, there was noschool Walter got a ob wh the 485 th US Army Medi-cal Collecting Company, a kind of minihospital that hadset up near his home in Karlsruhe He translated orders,typed letters, and washed and sterilized medical equip-ment Although he had never been particularly interestedin science, he decded then to become a doctor After thwar Walter returned to Havana, finished high school, andleft for Emory University in Atlanta

He dropped his medical ambiions after fainting in a

dentist's office while a friend was having a toothpulledthe sigh of the blood had been too much forhim but he was already hooked on the study of plants,insects, and cells He would sit at a microscope mesmer-ized as the cells of various animals doubled and redou-bled before his eyes Grasshopper cells put on the bestshow because they had the bigges and most visible chro-mosomes That was what he fancied most, the chromo-

somes, those mysterious strands of genes that threadedthemselves into intricate knots, emerged in orderly pairsof original and perfect duplcate, fell nto formatonacross the center of the cell, and then marched to opposite ends, cueing the cell to split in two In the spring of 95 1 , a few months after Henretta acks's cervcal tu-mor cells were put into culture, Walter Rees graduatedwith a bachelor's degree in biology A year later, having

earned a master 's in cytology, also from Emory, he oinedthe US Army He had decided to remain in the UnitedStates, and the only way to quickly become a citizen wasto enlist

After three years at Dugway Proving Ground inUtah, working n the Army's biological weapons pro



50 A Conspracy of Cells

gram, he received his citizenship, canged his surname

to include his mother 's family name, elson, and headedwest, enrolling in a doctoral program in genetics at theUniversity of California at Berkeley There, under theguidance of Spencer Brown, a world renowned researcherwho later became president of the Inernational GeneticsFederation, elsonRees turned his idle fascination withchromosomes into serious study. Brown, known to someas Mr. Chromosome, taught elsonRees the importanceof finding and memorizing the chromosome patterns incertain cells, especially the oddball patterns. ook for theoddalls, said Brown, they're the clues to something in-teresting and useful .

Brown was an impatient man with fanatically highstadards for laboratory tecnique. As exacting as el-sonRees had always been about his work, he found anew level of perfection in Brown's style, and he knewhe'd never last if he didn't assume the same zealous ap-proach. He found the challenge exhilirating, and he ex-celled. He became the favored member of Brown's reti-nue of graduate students . He actually looked forward toexams so that he could show his s tuff He began to talk ofthe beauty and elegance of a wellprepared slide of chro-mosomes. And he became known for leaving parties at

ten o 'clock to check a fly colony, count mealy bugs, or dosome other chore in the lab, where he would end upspending most of the night . It was no hardship for him tobe so devoted to his experiments. The truth was he feltthere were better things to do than to dull his brain cellswith alcoho and small talk.

When he had completed his doctorate in 1960, thechairman of the cel cultue department at Berkeley's

School of Public Health invited him to oin a new labthey were setting up in Oakland to support the nationalcell bank, the one at the American Type Culture Collec-tion in Washington, D .C. At first he applied his skills tothe identification of animal cel ls by their chromosomes.In the la te 1 960s, when "The War on Cancer heated up



Keeper of the Ces 51

and officials at the National Cance nstitute wanted toebuild the weckage that Stan Gatler had left behid,they asked the Oakland lab to initiate and collect newhuman cell cultues to be used in the institute's mostambitious endeavor, the via cance pogam. That waswhee the money was. That was whee the action was.And thee was NelsonRees, quietly woking his way upto the top of the new Oakland cell bank.

By the ealy 1970s, the institute was relying moeheavily on the Oakland lab, and on its new diecto ofcell production, NelsonRees, than on the AmericanType Cultue Collection. If his people didn't have whatthe nation's top cance esearches asked fo, they wentout and got it. Thymus one day, spleen the next, and tu-mo tissue fom Asian and Ameican Indian patients theweek afte. These institute scientists also depended on

NelsonRees to check the identities of cultues they ob-tained fom othe labs. Those familia with the Oaklandopeation knew it was NelsonRees 's meticulous mannethat made it so successful, so eliable .

"Walte's one maor attribute, the institute's imDuff once said, "is pefection.

Wade Paks, the viologist who helped analyze theRussian cells, put it this way "Walte's a little blunt

sometimes . But he's neve wrong. Thee was, howeve, a oke about the status of po-ects such as the Oakland lab, proects that wee fundedby the institute but were not conducted by institutepesonnel as pat of the inhouse progam. They weecalled the outhouse pograms. NelsonRees used to e-peat the oke goodnaturedly, though he did feel adistance between himself and the poect leades. Thee

was no doubt that they knew who he was and appe-ciated his wok, but in many ways he was still anAusandsdeutscher





7

Mug Shots

Officially hey calle i heCel Culure aboraory of he Universiy of California aBerkeley, bu in fac i was locae in Oaklan No inOaklan' s fashionale resienial hills bu in he wesernflalans, he marine inusrial isric This was he parof own you saw firs as you rove from San Franciscoacross he Bay Brige: he sorage anks, he warehouses,he big Rusoleum re conainerships a he ocks, an,

looming over i all, he giganic meal cranes like a herof mechanical inosaurs foaging among he cargo a hewaer's edge You knew you were in Oakan's harborisric when he roasie billboars soppe rying osell you Johnny Walker Re an sared pushing Tascoinusrial valves.

The cell culure lab was house in a former mess hallwihin a hreesquaremile supply compoun run by he

U.S Navy There were no signs of Berkeley's rollinggreen lawns, he quas where suens gaher o picnican play music, or he maesic marble builings ofhigher learning Here he office builings were gray wihdiry winows Huge anchors an propellers were srewnaroun aluminum warehouses In he alleyways soo



Conspacy of Cells

dingy yellow forklifts. Scores of cargo conainers, each

the size of a Greyhound bus, were stacked high behindchainlink fences topped with barbed wire. Down the roadwas an outfit that hauled these "piggybacked containersby rail and truck. It was called the Southern PacificGolden Pig Service .

And yet inside the whie building that held the cellculure lab there was no hint of the surrounding clutter.There was order and, through a certain set of doubledoors, there was cleanliness beyond imagination.

ou couldn't go through the doorsthey werelockedbut you could peer through their windows intoa bright, gleaming hallway. To get to that hallway youhad to step into what looked like a large closet next tothe double doors. Inside, a wooden bench ran from oneside of the closet to the other, blocking your way. Whereyou entered, the floor looked like most institutionalfloors; its patte of charcoal gray swirl was dulled by ahazy buildup. But ust past the bench, it was a polishedgem, the proverbial "floor you can eat off. On the wallwas a large blackandwhite sign :

Obsere Change RueNeer Come into Laborator ith Sreet Shoes Alone

The sign hung next to a series of shelves with forty-eight cubby holes, each labeled with the name of a labworker, each holding a pair of shoes. Staffers had tochange out of their street shoes and into a pair they woreonly in the lab. For visitors there were white nylon boot-ies in small, medium, and large .

The trick was to sit on the bench, put on a clean shoe(or sip a bootie over a dirty one) and swing it over to the

clean side; then repeat the process for the other foot. Labworkers found the maneuver quite natural. But visitorsoften had trouble, accidentally bringing a cean bootiedown onto the dirty side, in which case a new bootie wascalled for; or landing a dirty shoe on the clean side, whichrequired a quick swabbing of the deck; or nearly fallingoff the bench in an attempt to avoid doing either.



Mug Shots 55

The door in the clean section of the closet led intothe gleaming corridor. Several individual lab statons ex-tended along the hallway's left sde . At the near end wasthe assay area, a large open space where newly arrivedcells were logged in, examined without opening theflasks or dishes that held them, and stored until theycould be analyzed more horoughly and n the security ofone of the "clean rooms a little farther down the hall.

Each clean room was really a oom within a room.The anteroom, about the size of three telephone booths,was where two technicians i surgical masks, caps,gowns, and gloves prepaed for the task at hand, readyingequipment, squirting alcohol over bottles of nutrient so-lut on to kill bacteria, removing sterile wrapping on theglassware they planned to use. They then entered thepristine inner sanctum, closed the sliding door, and set to

work: perhaps feeding a cell culture, transplanting por-tions of it into other flasks, or replacing the liquid me-dium with a fresh supplychanging its diapers, as thecrew described t. The inner room had is own source offiltered air that kept the pressure there hgher than in therest of the lab, prevenng airborne undesirables fromdrifting inside. When the door was opened, the air alwaysrushed out of the room, never in. The tecnicians worked

in pairs because it eased the load of monotonous chores.Open the flask, withdraw 10 ccs of medium, close theflask, label a new flask open it, dspense 10 ccs of medium . . . Working in pairs they could also keep an eyeon each other. They were not to talk unless absolutelynecessary in spite of masks, talking increased the chanceof spitting out microorganisms that might endanger thecell cultures. To eliminate the risk of crosscontamina-

tion, they worked on one cell line at a time, re sterilizingthe whole show before another line was brought in. Itwas an expensive, timeconsuming procedure. Theystayed n there for two to three ours at a time. But thenobsessive care was wha made Oakland so special.

When work on a particular culture was finished, anymaterials to be discarded were placed in pans full of dis



56 A Consprcy of Cells

infectant and taken to the far end of the hallway to theautoclave, a little chamber of hell that subected its con-tents to lethal temperatures and pressures All glasswarewas sent to be washed and rinsed in scalding, deionizedwater Every working surface in the clean room was thenwiped down with alcohol Just in case some scrap of liferemained at large in the room, and to kill off anythingthat might creep in later on, one of the techniciansflpped a switch on the way out, bathing both compart-ments in ultraviolet light On the door to each cleanroom was a sign that said in red letters

KEEP CLOSEDAdmittance to authorized personnel onl

Visitors and personnel not assigned to tis areacontact W NelsonRees

On the other side of the corridor were the crampedquarters where elsonRees and his coworkers mulledover the results of the lab work Bob Flandermeyer hadthe office next to elsonRees He did most of hismulling while hunched over a table, pawing through apile of photographs like a man searching for the rightpiece in a igsaw puzzle

Chromosomes, chromosomes, you could always findBob Flandermeyer at that table sorting through hundredsof blackandwhite enlargements of chromosomes ong,strait chromosomes; short, stubby chromosomes; chro-mosomes that looked like bow ties black ants, and lico-rice twists and all wearing stripes, the irregular barberpole stripes known as banding patterns Slowly, deliber-ately, poddngy Bob Flandermeyer would cast his big

soft eyes over each photograph, studying the shapes andpatterns

Flandermeyer was a bear of a man with blond hairand a wide, friendly face He spoke softly and a little pon-derously His laugh, loud and sharp, was startling punc-tuation to his sleepy speech In early 19 73, he left his ob



Mu g S hots 57

as a techncan in a neighboring avy laboratory. He had

been working on a study of how bacteral dseases spreadamong troops, whch had little to do with cell biology.evertheless, elsonRees hired hm to help apply thetechnique of chromosome banding to the identificatoof cells. Two other lab assstants before Flandermeyerhad tried and failed to make it a practcal system. Thework was too tedious for his predecessors but Flandermeyer mastered it

The frst part of the technique was othng morethan what karyologsts, chromosome analysts, had beendoing for years. The dea is to catch the cells n a stage ofther growth cycle called metaphase, whe the chromosomes line up across the center of each cell n orderlyrows. You do that with colchicne, a drug derved fromcrocuses. Colchcne prevents the formaton of tiny fi-

bers that normally attach to the chromosomes and dragthem to opposite ends as a cell prepares to splt. It haltsthe chromosomes in their lineup like dancers in midstep. Then you add a solution to make the cells swell,which spreads the chromosomes apart so they don't overlap, and then an alcohol "fixative to kill the cells. Thenext step is to attach a drop full of cells onto a microscope slide and flatten it into a layr thin enough that ev

erything will be in focus for the camera. One popularmethod of flattening was the fivefoot drop holding thedropper at eyelevel, you aim at a group of slides arrangedaround your feet. From that height, a drop spreads itselfito a broad, thn film, and if you're lucky the film endsup covering a slide instead of your shoes or the linoleum .For those wth more flamboyant tastes, there was thecrpe suzette technique a match is put to the slide, g-

nting the alcohol fixative, which burns away in a fewseconds, dramatically reducing the volume of liqud nthe drop. Once the sample is properly flattened, you mixin a little Giemsa stain and place the slide under a micro-scope. The chromosomes show up n silhouette darkblobs without detail. Based on their shapes, a good kar



58 A Conspracy of Cels

yologist can tell the species of the donor: man, mouse, or

whatever By studying the shapes and counting the num-ber of chromosomes, he can also tell if the cells are ab-normal Victims of Down's Syndrome, for instance, haveone more than the usual human complement of fortys ixchromosomes

That wa s conventional karyologyIn the new banding echnique, before staining the

cells , you dip a slide full of them into trypsin, an enzymethat eats away parts of the protein coat over the chromo-somes Then, instead of painting the entire outer coatingof the chromosome, the Giemsa stain is absorbed into it,but only in certain spots, creating discrete bands of dark-ness next to blank areas The problem is that the trypsinand the stain have to be a particular concentrations andtemperatures, and the slides have o be dunked into eachsolution for precise periods of time Even if you figure outthe proper combination, the technique doesn't work un-less you catch the cells at ust the right moment in themetaphase stage For some reason, the enzyme can't eatthrough the chromosome's coating otherwise

Flandermeyer studied several days with a group of re-searchers who were using the technique at the Univer-sity of Indiana He returned to Oakland and began experi-

menting Time and again he would prepare a bunch ofslides, dip them in trypsin while couning off the sec-onds , then dunk them in the stain, only to find the famil-iar dark blobs where he had hoped to see barber polesThat meant he had exposed the cells to the enzyme fortoo long, allowing the stain to seep in everywhere Or hadhe got the temperature wrong? Other times, when hedidn't keep them in long enough or failed to catch the

cells in metaphase, no readable patterns appearedFinally he h it on a reliable recipe fo r producing good,clear bands He stained stacks and stacks of slides, thensat down at the microscope and scanned one after an-other, searching for the most photogenic cells He photo-graphed hundreds of them, printed up enlargements, cut



Mug Shots 5

out each banded chromosome, and mounted them all onwhite cardboard, grouped according to their banding pat-terns After that the real work began

First he had to memorize the pattens of normal hu-man chromosomes Every healthy cell as two copies ofchromosome numbers 1 through 22, one from each par-ent, plus either a pair of Xs in the case of females or an Xand a Y for males So there are twentyfour different typesof chromosomes , each type absorbs the stain in a charac-teristic set of bandsits mug shotand Flandermeyerhad to know each one on sight He stared at the photo-graphs for weeks Through brute force of will he devel-oped an eye for all twentyfour But because these werenormal chromosomes, present in every human cell, theywere really no help in telling cell lines apartnot di-rectly He needed to kow the normal chromosomes on-

ly so that he could recognize the misfits, the ones withfunny shapes and weird banding patters Te misfits, the theory went, resulted from random

errors in the duplicating process Such errors occur fre-quently in tumor cells, where the usual mechanisms ofreplication and growth run amk The lower arm of anumber 5 chromosome might break off and attach itselfto a severed upper arm of a number 3, for example This

unlikely goat with a ion's head, passed on to daughtercells, becomes a unique marker of that particular tumorand of any cel line derived from it The odds were slimthat an identical misfit would arise by chance in anothercell line And it was close to impossible for one cell lineto randomly create a set of three or four misfits thatmatched those in another culture Only cells with a com-mon origin would have the same aberrant marker chro-

mosomesFor elsonRees, who had always been partial tochromosomes, and who had learned the value of misfitsfrom Mr Chromosome hiself, these markers wereamong the more powerful means of identifying humancell lnes When the ational Cancer Institute made the




Oakland lab its hot new repository for human cultures,

he decided that his quality contro arsena had to include a method of recognizing markers But conventionalstaining wouldn't do it To spot a marker you have to beable to make out which pieces of normal chromosomeshad combined to form it or that level of detail, you needto see the bands That was why elsonRees needed Boblandermeyer And hat was why Bob landermeyer, havig learned every normal banding pattern, began staringat photographs of the abnormal markers, forcing hismind to associate each strange patchwork pattern withthe cell line it had come from The first markers helearned to spot were the four that other researchers hadfound in Hea cells

My God, he's slow, thought elsonRees as hewached landermeyer pick his way through the photo

graphs of unidentified cell cultures, looking for markershe had already memorized and memorizing the ones hecame upon for the first time "Ein Stier, NelsonReeshad once called him, "an ox

There was considerable art to he method, thoughlandermeyer knew that a banded chromosome's appear-ance often depended upon the angle from which he photographed it and whether it happened to be drooping or

twisted or contorted in some other way There was a lotof visual udgment involved, and landermeyer was notone to ump to conclusions

elsonRees and some of the other researchers whohad leaed to read banded karyotypes with landermeyer's help would often ask him o confirm their ownassessments He was, after all, the expert On these occasions, landermeyer would stare at the photographs end

lessly as the rest of them paced about inally, when hehad convinced himself that yes, here was a marker chromosome in a suspect cell ine, a marker that he recognizedbut only when he was dead surehe wouldsmile broadly and say, "Well, lookie here

With those words, landermeyer had helped elson



Mug Shots 6 1

Rees finger the Russian cell cultures as Hea contami-nants in the fall of 1973 ke a dogged assistant detec-tive, he had pored over mug shots of the Russian chromo-somes for hours until "Well, lookie here he foundall four of Hea's kown marker chromosomes The us-sian case had been heir first practical application of thebanding technique Now, a few months later, Flander-meyer sat in his offce, methodically sorting through themug shots of two more cell lines of questionable identityOne was a line of breast cancer cels called HBT3, HBTfor human breast tumor; the other was a culture of hu-man embryonic kidney cells designated HEK

NelsonRees had become suspicious of the two cultures several weeks earlier after waking in on a conver-saton between Adeline Hackett and Trudy Buehring,two researchers at the cell culture lab who worked inde-

pendently of his cell bank Hackett and Buehring weretalking about this puzzling culture they had come acrosswhile studying the common structures of breast cancercells Spread out on the counter in front of them werephotographs of cells from a number of established beastcultures The pictues, taken through an electron micro-scope, showed that one of the cell lines, HBT3, had noneof the features found in the three or four others

"They ust don't look like breast cells, Buehringwas saying "They don't look like norma breast cells,and they don't look like cancerous breast cells

"Isn't that strange? said NelsonRees Then he re-membered that he too had seen something funny nHBT3, almost a year earlier, when a California researcherunder contract to the institute sent him a sample foranalysis and deposit in the bank Flandermeyer had not

yet oined the staff and the only means of checking chro-mosomes was the conventional staining NelsonRees'sexamination confirmed that HBT3 cells were of humanorigin, and that was as far as it had gone

Except that he had seen an oddly shaped chromo-some His conventional staining had shown no detail,




but the outine of the thing clearly resembled two little

ears. Someone had called them Mickey Mouse ears. Andcome to think of it, he had seen a somewhat similar set ofmouse ears in another cel line three years before that, in1970 They were in a line of embryonic kidney cellscalled HEK. Maybe this oddball cell of Hackett andBuehring's doesn't look anything like a breast cell because it i s actually from a kidney, thought elsonRees .

He hurried off to pull the old sample of HEK out ofthe deep freeze and get Flandermeyer working on a comparison of the two cultures. The banding techniquewould show for certain whether the ears in one were thesame as the ears in the othe.

"Well' said Flandermeyer after an eternity, "lookiehere.

The banding patterns of the mouseeared chromosome in HBT3 precisely matched the patterns of the onein HEK. But that wasn't the end of it. There was anotherabnormal chromosome in HBT3, a new marker that Flandereyer had never seen before, a long and boldly stripedthing whose twin brother was smiling out at him fromHEK as well. Two markers in common made an evenstronger case that these were the same cell line. But . . .

what's this? Something else? Uhoh, lookie here fourmore weirdos that Flandermeyer recognized instantly.elsonRees was amazed. Buehring and Hackett

were flabbergasted It appeared that HBT3 and HEK hadbeen mixed up, as elsonRees had suspected, but nei-ther cell line retained its original identity. Both cultureswere now HeLa, actually a previously unknown sub-strain with two new markers, but HeLa ust the same. In-

stead of a cancerous breast culture and a normal kidneyculture, what they had stumbled ontoand what manyinvestigators interested in breast cancer and kidneyswere no doubt wasting their time studyingwere thosefamiliar cervical cancer cells of Henietta Lacks.



Mu g Sh ots 63

They were still reeling two weeks later whenFlandermeyer emerged from a long session of mullingover mug shots to deliver more shocking news Cell lineHBT39B, yet another culture of supposed breast cancercells that had been sent in for a routine check, also dis-played the same six marker chromosomes.

It was like that point in every horror movie when thecharacters know there's no escape. True, there were noSaint Bernardsized lumps of Hea cells blocking theexits and gnawing through the telephone wires, but thishorror story was for real .

First the Russian cell lines and now this Three cul-tures from American scientists, cultures effectively se-lected at random, all taken over by the runaway cells of"our lady friend, as elsonRees had started callingHenrietta acks. It reminded him of a remark made a few

years earlier by a group of Johns Hopkins researchers whowere marveling at Hea's tenacity "Hea, they hadwritten, "if allowed to grow uninhibited under optimalcultural conditions, would have taken over the world bythis time

The director of some other cell bank might havethrown out every culture of HBT3, HBT39B, and HEK,and left it at that. But to elsonRees it didn't make any

sense to merely note the problems, keep the cell bankpure, and let the calamities unfold elsewhere. Being theperfectionist that he was, elsonRees couldn't stand thethought of all that error and confusion, not to mentionthe time and money undoubtedly being squandered byHea's victims. Being the keeper of the cells for the insti-tute, the man armed with the latest techniques of cellidentification, he felt almost duty bound to sound the

alarm, to track down the fugitive cells of Henriettaacks, and to set things straight.

This was the quiet beginning of the crusade. Therewas no formal declaration. elsonRees never called thetroops together to say, "The war is on, and map out




strategy What he did, quite smply, was throw the entireoperation nto high gear He began by tracing the path ofthe frst breast culture HBT3 had come to Oakland froma researcher at the California State Health Department,who, elsonRees discovered, got it from a scientist atthe Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, who got itfrom Robert Bassin, an institute scienist, who originaedthe cell line in his Bethesda laboratory elsonReeswrote to all three "Fully realzing the embarrassment tothe originatos of these cell lines andor to the investiga-tors from whom I obtained them, I would be very pleasedto discuss this matter in detail with you to get at thesource of this contamnatio, if indeed this is what isshown, he wrote "I welcome and in fact must insist onfurther analysis of these and related' cell lines Iwas like a note from he school nurse informing the par-

ents hat little Darlene had VD, and it drew the kind ofreacton you'd expectBassin was the first to respond Being a careful scien-

tist, he was well aware of the threat of Hea contamina-tion, which is why he had kep Hea and all other humantumor cells out of his laboratory when he establishedHBT3 in 9 7 . Furthermore, his lab was housed in build-ing 4 , the institute's Emergecy Virus Isolation Facility

Building 4 was cut off from the world o agentfrom the outside environment could leak in to eopardizethe purity of he experimental conditions there; none ofthe viruses or other nasty things they handled inside wasable to leak out There were o windows in building 41,no doors that opened without special clearance The flowof air througout the building was carefully controlledAccording to institute legend the high security so im-

pressed a young medical inten who worked there onesummer that it later moved him to wrie a science fictionnovel about a deadly germ from outer space, The ndromeda Strain In fact the book's author had never setfoot inside building 4, but he facility's hermeticalysealed atmosphere inspired those kinds of stores It also



Mug Shots 65

made Bassin confident that Walter NelsonRees didn'tknow what he was talking about Bassin telephoned totell him so

First of all, Bassin argued politely, i t is very difficultto prove scientifically that two things are the same It'ssimple to say they are different, of course All you have todo is find some characteristics they don' have in common But the fact that a few funnylooking chromosomesappear in both HBT3 and Hea doesn 't prove they are thesame cell Bassi questoned NelsonRees about thismethod of examining banded chromosomes Could he besure the markers matched idntically?

Quite sure, said NelsonRees, adding that HBT3 wasalso carrying the A type of the G6PD enzyme, the typecarried by Hea cells

That didn't prove a thing, Bassin came back, since

the woman whose tumor established the HBT3 lie wasof northern Mediterranean extractionGreek or Ital-ian Although it happened very rarely, type A had beenknown to show up in these populations And even if theculture of HBT3 in Oakand truy was Hea, wasn't itperfectly possible that the ones he worked with in Bethesda were bona fide? Maybe the California scientistwho sent the cels in to be checked had contaminated

them with Hea in his own lab Or maybe it happened inAtlantaPerfectly possible, NelsonRees agreed, which was

why he needed to examine a culture from Bassin's personal supply

The following day, a shipment of breast cancer cellstook United Airlines flit 5 from Washington, DC, toSan Francisco A messeger delivered them to Nelson

Rees, who passed them on to Flandermeyer for analysisNelsonRees also shipped a sample to Ward Peterson inDetroit for the G6PD testing As he waited for the results, he continued writing letters, making phone calls,notifying and debating researchers who were connectedwith the three contaminated cell lines ike Bassin, none




of these researchers had been working with Hea, or sothey claimed. one put much credence in the ethod ofchroosome banding. And tose wo conceded theremight be a problem unanimously pointed the finger elsewhere.

Ernest Plata, the an who had originated HBT39B,the other breast culture, had considerably more in com-mon with Bassin than any of the others. He had startedhis cell line a few months after Bassin had got HBT3growing. And he had done it ust down the hall fromBassin 's lab, in the institute' s windowless fortress.

Well, well, what a coincidence, thought elsonRees . It was obvious to him that a Hea culture was run-ning around uilding 41, masquerading as at least oneother cell line. And while te Hea cells couldn't leakout the carefully montored vents or te airlocked doors,

they were far from trapped. Every so often Bassin, Plata,or perhaps some other unwitting accomplice of Henriettaacks would wrap up a few samples of contaminatedcells and mail them off. elsonRees would have to havethe test results to be sure, of course, but it looked asthough the ational Cancer Institute was distributingHea cells, under various false names, all around thecountry.

The last member of the triad, HEK, elsonReescould not trace back to its source. I t had been establishedten years earlier by a laboratory that no longer existed.Although it had been widely used in research, there wereno records of the donor's race, sex, or any other characteristics that could have been checked by his chromosomaland biochemical techniques The earliest cultures hecould find wee in the hands of researchers at Pfizer abo-

ratories in Maywood, ew ersey, who had had themsince December 1 964 . He asked for a sample .

By February 1974, two months after elsonReesand colleagues had found the first indications of thisthreeway contamination, they had called in and analyzed two or three specimens of each cell line. In every



Mug Shots 67

one of them, Peterson had detected type A G6PD. Inevery one of them, including Bassin 's personal supply ofHBT3, Flandermeyer had found te marker chromo-somesthe four traditional markers as well as MickeyMouse and the one with the old stripes, which they adnamed the Zebra.

Because this strain of Hea had developed two mark-ers not present in other known Hea cells, NelsonReesand Flandermeyer decided tat it must have een evolv-ing on its own for some time, perhaps in isolated en-vironment such as institute laboratory. Personally,elsonRees suspected that this variant of Hea had firstcontaminated HEK, the oldtimer, and then gone on dis-guised as HEK to spoil HBT3 and HBT39B. But such re-constructions were a secondary concern at the moment.

It was time to get the word out. n te few months it

had taken to track these three lies, they had comeacross two other popular cultures that were contami-nated with Heaone a line of prostate cells, the other aculture of liposarcoma, a tumor of fatty tissue. Thereseemed to e Hea contaminants everywhere theyturned, though few people aside from the researcerselsonRees had contacted had any hint of troule.elsonRees was still pushing, unsuccessfully, to pu-

lish the very first Hea mixup they had uncovered, thecase of the Russian cell s. Originally he had wanted to usethe Russians' misfortune as a warning that Hea mightyet be alive and lurking around American laoratories aswell. That warning was now well behind the times.These latest findings about five American cultures de-manded some kind of allout emergency alert.

"Anybody interested in working with characterized

cell lines of ona fide purity of origin would be interestedin this article, he wrote to Philip Abelson, editor of theournal Scence "Knowing that cell cultures presum-ably derived from human embryonic kidney, humanbreast carcinoma, human prostate tissue, and human lip-osarcoma cells are indeed derived from a human cervical









8

pead e Wod

he daily press knew howto handle this story So what if Scence uried elson-Rees's report in the back pages under the stodgy title"Banded Marker Chromosomes as Indicators of Intra-species Cellular Contamination The newspapers, prop-erly horrified, played it on page one with headlines moreto the point :

CANCER WAR SET BACKGOOF COSTS 20 YEARS OF RESEARCH

A line of huan tuor cells used b laboratoriesaround the world for re than 20 ears a have invali dated illions of dollars worth of cancer research, according to a scientist s report As a result, sas he author, Dr Walter A Nelson-Rees, checks are in order fordozens of laboratories engaged in cancer research LosAngees ea xane

DEAD WOANS CANCER CELLS SPREADNG

Dr Walter NelsonRees, one of the ost experiencedcell biologists in the world has reported that ancell l ines are b no eans what the are tought to be bthe laboratories handling thea ea




A SHOCKER FOR S CENTSTS

"The ain si tuation has probabl existed for ears saidthe ain author of the report Walter A Nelson-Reesa highl respected researcher Nelson-Rees said hecontainating potential of the HeLa cells is wellknown but that sufficient precauions against it have apparent not been taken .- an Francsco Chroncle

All this publicity made no sese to a umber of sci-etists Why was NelsonRees taing bows now whenStan Gartler had dropped the origial bomb in 1 966 ?

Part of the reason was that NelsonRees's paper wasprinted in Scence one of the fe technical ournals thatnonscientsts particularly reporters find accessible Onesection prepared by the ournal' s news staff was actuallywitten in English and in the 7 Jue 1974 ssue the sec-tion carried a story that translated NelsonRees's article

beautifully "If NelsoRees is right wrote Barbara Cul-liton "a lot of people may have ee speding a lot oftime and money on misguided research If for exampleyou are studying the properties of human breast tumocells hoping to find features that distinguish breast cellsfrom othes and ae all the while dealing unknowinglywith cervical tumor cells you've got a problem Thatwas plain enough even for a newspaper reporter to under

stand and to embellish ad bang out fo the monigeditionBut what really made NelsoRees a media star was

the dramatic background of his shocking esults: "TheWar In arter's day Hea contaminatio had been thedity little family secret of the tissue culture crowd Itsbroader ipact was not obvious In 1 974, however " TheWar had been officially declared and ragig for several

yeas Eveybody knew that the nation's most briliantmedical experts were at this very moment working feverishly against the scourge of cancer It was a national prioity

NelsoRees's message made this large and seriouseffort seem a little silly Sure the istitute was spending



p h W 73

miions of doars sending its brave recruits over the topagainst the enemy But it turns out our boys were shooting with banks! It was a scanda, and there's nothng thepress ikes better than a scanda Besides, this story camewith a bonusthe awkward adventure of the RussianHea ces, unti then unpubicized The reporters ovedsprnking that one in: we've not ony screwed up cancerresearch, foks, we amost bew dtente on account ofthese crazy cels.

esonRees returned from his week n ami iethe oca boy come home from batte Reporters were sti pursuing him Friends showered him with cngratuatoryphone cas and etters And the aboratory's residentbard immortaized his accomplishments in a imerickthat appeared on one of the office buetin boards :

A perceptive ung Nesn naed ReesDubfunded genetic piceWen eLa e fundT abund al arundn cell lnes fr West and fr East

In addition to a the excitement t generated thepubication of their report brought great reief to eson

Rees, Flandermeyer, and the rest of the crew. It had beenfrustrating to know what hey knew without having ameans of broadcasting it Now that the news was out, itmight be easier to spread the word about future screwups

Yes, spreading the word, that was the goa here hepubicity was fun, of course It was nice for an " outhouseproect to stea the show for a moent But getting the

news out to those who needed to hear itthe scientificcommunitythat was the main point of a this Andthe pubication of their paper was reay ust the beginning.

Frantic scientists had been caing and writing froma over the United States and severa other countres to




request copies of the artice. a few weeks NelsonRees's

secretary had mailed out all 400 reprints and had to orderanother batch from Scence The author himself was inequally hig demand. Wold he give a lecture at theStanford School of Medicine? Could he address a meeting of viral cancer researchers in Hershey, Pennsylvania?Would he bief a grop at the Argonne National Labora-tory in llinois?

NesonRees hit the road, preacing and proselytiz-ing ike biology's Billy Graham. At one stop he would tellthe stories of such victims as Bassin and Plata who,through lack of vigilance, fell prey to HeLa 's sabotage. Atanoher he would describe the waste and futiity of tryingto learn about breast or prostate or kdney cels by studying cultures of cervical cancer. And he would always con

clude ith the exhortation: Never trade cells without reliabe information about what they are and where theyvebeen. And always doublecheck them, befoe and afteryou experiment.

In some respects NelsonRees's early evangelizinglooked like a touring revival of arter's performance atthe Bedford Springs Hotel . Like arter, NelsonRees wastelling audiences they had torpedoe years of their own

work by being sloppy and etting HeLa creep in on them.He encountered the same reactions shock and skepticism. And he too was offering new tools, chromosomebanding along with other techniqes, to help set thingsstraight.

But elsonRees soon added a new message that wasless scientific in tone and more philosophical or perhapsmore political. It was at a 1 975 meeting of cell culturists

and cancer researchers in Lake Placid, New York, that hebegan to talk about two different reasons for cell mixups. One was simple sloppiness. "t can be combattedin individua laboratories by adherence to increasinglystricter techniques, he explained. The other effect was"more lasting and insidious. It had to do with research





76 A Cspacy f Clls

srcsticy from Abeson's rejection etter: The mnu

script nd the referees' comments re enclosed. I trustthe comments wi be hepu to you when you preprethe pper for submission esewhere

Stn Grter hd certinly never done this. e hdpresented his findings, disturbing s they were, mde couple of suggestions, nd tken his leve. But here wsNesonRees huing out the dirty undry. e ws pointing out the stins nd expining how they hd got there,nd more thn few members of the udience were strt-ing o squirm.

To sy tht few ce ines hd got shuffled round,tht ws one thing. But to suggest ht scientists wereletting their egos ge in the wy of good science or thtthey voided pubishing importnt informton becuseit might be controversi . . . we, it ust wsn't done

Robert Stevenson ws frequent in the udience tNesonRees's presenttions, though Stevenson neversquirmed. Knowing NesonRees s wel s he did, Ste-venson more or ess expected him to sy something str-ting.

NesonRees nd Stevenson frst me in 196NesonRees hd just been hired s reserch ssocite

with U.C. Berkeey's Schoo of Pubic eth. He wssent to Wshington to tour the ntion's centr ce bnkfciities t the Americn Type Culture Colection nd totk with Stevenson bout the school's roe in ssistingthe new progrm. As hed o the Ntion Cncer Insti-tute's ce bnking progrm, Stevenson ws helping to or-gnize nd fund the network of outside support borto-ries. These incuded Lewis Coriel's Institute for Medc

Reserch in New Jersey; the Child Reserch Center ofMichign, where Cyri Stuberg nd Wrd Peerson werebsed; nd Berkeey's new ce cuture lb in Oknd.

Bo Stevenson ws not typic bureucrt. For onething, he spoke his mind. e routinely cled those re-sponsibe for the confusion in ce cuture rn mteurs,



Spreang the or 77

and he said it in print as wel as in conversation Until1960 when te institute recruited him to develop highquality virology research materials cell lines, in particularhe had been head of a tissue culture lab at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda . He had seen his share ofaccidentally contaminated cells, which gave him a firsthand appreciation of what the confusion meant. In fact,tough still n his early thirties at the time, Stevensonwas one of the old gurd who discovered the original mixups among animal cells and called for a central cell bankin the late 1 950s, yeas before arer's first discovery ofHeLa contamination.

Stevenson had an hnes, friendly manner that fithis cherubic face . His cousin, an illustrator for children'stextbooks, had used that face as a model for Dick of theDck and ane elementary readers. But Stevenson also

had a devilish grin and a mischievous streak. He liked to"stir up the muck, as he put it, "to get people thinkingabout stuff they don' usually think about, but should.When he left the lab bench for a desk at the institute,Stevenson thought of himself as being scientifically castrated. The only way to keep contributing, he figured,was through others, by encouraging them to do provocative experiments and to trumpet their own findings.

Maybe that was why he and NelsonRees hit it off.NelsonRees was a kindred spirit, a young and energeticperfectonist who was still in the lab They quickly became allies, beginning a long partnership. Stevensonmade NelsonRees a member of the advisory board to tecell bank, the group that judged whether a particular culture was qualified to be in the "reference library. Basedon his analyses in Oakland, NelsonRees would tip off

Stevenson about suspicious cell lines. As executive secretary of the board, Steveson would then ensure that theproper probing questons wee asked at the meetings.NelsonRees would report, for instance, on the nonhumanlooking chromosomes of a purportedly human culture, and the culture would be reviewed and rejected.



7 A Cospacy of Clls

Later, when Stevenson moved up throuh the hierar-

chy and then left the institute in 1 96 7, passin oversihtof the Oakland lab to Jim Duff, he continued to encour-ae NelsonRees. In telephone pep talksusualy whenNelsonRees had uncovered somethin controversial asin the case of the Russian cells or the three American cul-tures that followed Stevenson would ask him, Is yourwork ood?

The answer never variedWell, then, Stevenson would say, tellin Nelson

Rees what he wanted to hear, it doesn't matter that theshit is oin to hit the fa.

After NelsonRees's report appeared in Scence Stev-enson kept tryin to et him moe involved in activitiesof the Tissue Cuture Association, the professional roupfor cell culturists. Stevenson, who by then was back atthe institute as manaer of the Frederick Cancer Re-search Center, formed the association's Committee ofStandardization, Collection, and Distribution of Cellsand Tissues, and appointed NelsonRees as a member.Toether they sruled to convince the roup of theneed for a listin of bona fide cells to be circulated amonthe association's members. They also launched a cam-pain to persuade journal editors to require complete, au-

thentic descriptions of every cell line used in a publishedresearch report, includin a summary of what tests wereused to verify that the cells' species, sex, chromosomes,enzymes, and other traits matched those of the purporteddonor. NelsonRees and Stevenson never tired of sayinhow ludicrous it was that the associations own journal,In Vtro had no such reuirement. As chairman of theroup, Stevenson also had the committee officially en-

dorse NelsonRees's findins and recommend that hekeep up te ood work. And bein a quintessential ora-izer, Stevenson was constantly settin up conferences tostress the need for careful monitorin of cell lines, con-ferences that often featured a presentation by Nelson-Rees.



pa h W 79

For two fiends, both interested in stirring things up,it was funy how different their styles were Stevensonwas easygoing, informal, naturally ikeable He was fondof teling stoies, sch as the one about the New Yorkmedical examiner who performed rectal autopsies so thatreatives of the deceased woudn't notice the incisionsNelsonRees on the other hand was stiff, painfuly hon-est, and sometimes hoierthanthou; he just automatically got certain peope's dander up If tact consists inknowing how far to go in goig too far, as Cocteau oncewrote, then NelsonRees was tactless

Stevenson had tried to explain the benefits of a littedipomacy to NelsonRees "You're very valuable, Wal-ter, he once said to him "You have a real talent forsniffing out trouble But it might be advantageous totak more softy and still carry that big stick

"You cannot ask a leopard to ose his spots, Bo/'NelsonRees would respond, "I am wat I am

And what he was looked very much ike obnoxiousto some people He was so high and mighty about HeLacells and so full of himself In his talks he had started tomake comments like, "This slide shows the now wekno marker chromosomes of HeLa or, "In he

case of the no w we-kno Russian HeLa cals as ifto say, "You've al heard of me, no doubt, and my veryimportant and well publicized work

He described his 9 74 trip to Russia like a mission-ary returning from the jungle with word that the heathenhad seen the light Not only that, he said, they didnthave any of this trouble with ego or funding worries

"Contray to being an insult to our Russian col-

leagues, our data resulted in a most generous invitationto Moscow ast November/' he tod the crowd at onemeeting "There I visited five major institutes and atleast fifteen individual laboratories, gave three seminars( translated simultaneously), and witnessed the initiationof at least four new cytogenetic control sections for cel



80 Conspacy o Cells

lne montorng at derent sttutes As you can see Iwas also alowed to return ater a very warm and rendyrecepon.

A rght, Water, you're terrc Coud we move onto somethng nterestng now� Some thought al ths takabout sterle condtons and strct montorng soundedmore lke a thgrade personal hygee class than ser-ous scentc dscusson neve swap cells, boys and grs,and remember to loss every day. Whenever he rose at aconerence to ask a queston or make another one o hspublc servce announcements or care and qualty, thesepeople would glance at each other and roll ther eyes .

There wee many, o course, who took h s talks serously. Even Du and the other bureaucrats at the nsttute were convnced hs work was mportant and hs mo-tves were unselsh, though he dd make them nervous.

But there were also a ew who saw NelsonRees as a dan-gerous publcty hound, a Joseph McCarthy o the cellculture crcut who wanted to urther hs own career yrunng the careers o others . They brsed every tme hechallenged colleagues about the denty o cels used nexperments or asked how that dentty was determned.And he was dong that a lot these days .

One aternoon n June o 975, Walter NelsonReesand Relda Calleau were standng n the lobby o Montre-al's Queen Elzabeth otel screamng at each other. Theoccason was the annual meetng o the Tssue CultureAssocaton; t had been about a year snce the publcaton o NelsonRees 's report n Scence

NelsonRees ha d begun the conversaton by askngabout a cell lne Calleau had ntated sxteen years ear-

ler, a ung culure called MAC2. Caleau exploded."You're an assassn. You're vndctve. You're justout to wreck people's reputatons !

"Relda, there's no need to scream at me, Nelson-Rees screamed back at her.



pai h 81

"We know all abou cell culure. ou have no righo aack us.

"elda, he very way youre elling me o mind myown business is wha makes i my business! Nelson-ees's Dudley Doo igh enor rose and fell in pich,sounding over he din in he lobby like an air raid siren.

They were quie a sigh. Nelsonees, sixoohreeand gangly, owering over Cailleau, all of ive fee, around oughalking bundle of volailiy She had a largenose, daring eyes, and hick, dark eyebrows. As she ar-gued in her high scrachy voice, she ossed her head fromside o side and waved her arms around.

"elda was her moher's maiden name speledbackwards. The former ose Adler, her moher adoped"ose elda as a sage name while singing a he OperaComique in Paris. "I can curse real wel in French,

Relda someimes old new acquainances o whom shewas describing her background.Waler and elda wen way back, hough elda wen

back even farher on her own. In he early 960s, whenhe Oakland lab and Nelsonees were boh us saringou, she was already an accomplished cell culuris work-ing a he U.C. San Francisco Medical School. Theywould bump ino each oher all he ime a local and na-

ional scieniic gaherings, always as coureous col-leagues, if no close friends . In 966 , however, hey had afalling ou over he quesion of an evening's enerainmenan inciden ha Nelsonees believed o ehe s ar of a cold war beween hem.

Te way Nelsonees old he sory, he was chair-man of he organizing commiee and she was in chargeof rooms and faciliies for a San Francisco meeing of he

Tissue Culure Associaion. Nelsonees had proposed acruise on he bay wih a buffe dinner and Californiawine asing. Cailleau sure ha he summer fog wouldspoil he fesiviies, fough he idea bu was overruled.The cruise, complee wih a waercolor sunse and radi



2 A Cospacy of Clls

ant full moon, was a rousing suess. Although they

lived ess tha a mie from eah other in San raniso,NelsoRees and Cailleau rarey spoke again In 1 970 shemoved to Houston to work at he M. D Anderson Hospi-tal and Tumor Institute.

But of ourse it wasn't the ruise that was botherigCailleau at the moment In the past year she had wathedNelsonRees rusading, making speehes, basking in thelimelight, and she didn't like what she saw. His methodswere antagonisti, and his goals appeared more destru-tive than onstrutive. On top of that she oudn't standhis attitude.

"He's so busy showing of what a great guy he is,how he's always right, she one ompained "He's sosuperiious it riles the hell out of me.

And now he was trying to pu that stuff on her try-

ing to attak her ell line, MAC2 1 NelsonRees always insisted he wasn't attakiganyone, really. He said it was just part of his normal i-formationgathering routine He sruinized every elline sent into Oakland for anaysis, he sanned the jour-nals for signs of mixups, and he waked into every on-ferene with his eyes and ears wide open, onstantysearhing for lues, ontinually trying to make onnet-

ions.In the ase of MAC21, he had stumbled aross itssuspiious nature about a month earlier while hekingthe validity of two other ell lines developed by a ol-league of Cailleau's at the Anderson Hospital. It hap-pened at a meeting of aner researhers in San DiegoNelsonRees otied in the program an announement oftwo new breast tumor lines, SH2 and SH3. Even in 1975

breast ells were very hard to ultivate Researhers hadput hundreds, perhaps thousands of tumor fragmentsinto ulture, hoping for a longlived el ine to take root,but there were only one or two established ultures . Bas-sin 's HBT3 and Plata 's HBT39B had been elebrated addi



pa h W 3

tions to the shot supply until NelsonRees came along

The epot of two band new beast cance lines wastheefoe of geat inteest

What made NelsonRees suspicious of SH2 and SH3wee a couple of chaacteistics descibed in the pogamTo begin with, both cultues wee said to have comefom Caucasian patients, yet both caied G6PD type A,the enzyme vaiant that is vitually nonexistent amongCaucasians Thei ealy histoies wee stange too SH3had sat domant, baely gowing in the cultue dish fothiteen months befoe it bloomed into a fastexpandingcell line; SH2 had taken thee yeas to do the same Nev-etheless, the announcement took pains to point out thatthe chomosomes and seveal othe chacteistics of theSH lines wee clealy dffeent fom those of HeLa cell s

NelsonRees went o a talk given by a membe of theAndeson goup, patiently sat though i, and ose duigthe questionandanswe peiod Have you any infoma-tion, he asked, on whethe chomosome banding tech-niques have been appled to these cells to exclude thepossibility that SH2 and SH3 ae, fist of all, not one andthe same cell lne, and secondly that they do not have awhole complex of make chomosomes in commonwith many now wellknown HeLa stains ?

Gabiel Seman, the Fenchbon viologist who hadinitiated the SH lines, answeed that in fact banding hadbeen done by collaboatos at the Institute fo MedicaReseach in New Jesey, who assued him that they weenot HeLa cells

One of the advantages of NelsonRees's public displays was that it tuned up exta clues, often volunteeedby colleagues who smelled something otten but wee

not as eady as he to stand up and make a spectacle TheSH cells mit have wiggled off NelsonRees's hook except that as the audience was filing out, Lewis Coiell,the diecto of the New Jesey institute, pulled Nelson-Rees aside to say that he too was botheed by the unusual



A Conspacy of Cells

characteristics of these cell ines . He said he would dis-

cuss them with his karyologist, Bob Miller, who haddone the analysis for Seman.

Back at Oakland a couple of days later, NelsonReesreceived a letter from Coriell expainng that months ear-lier Miller had indeed concluded from his analysis ofbanded chromosomes that SH2 and SH3 were identcalcell lines . Why Seman had reported them to be two idependent lines was a ystery. In addition Miler had seensome similarities between the SH chromosomes andthose of a HeLa culture he had in his lab, bu he had de-cided the SHs were not HeLa because there were alsomany dissimilarities. "You have looked at more HeLacell lines, wrote Coriell, "and he [Miller] woud like tohave your opinion of his inerpretation. Mug shots ofthe cells were enclosed.

Three chromosomes in each SH line were so obvi-ously HeLa markers that Fandermeyer "the Slow andDeliberate made his pronouncement the very same daythe etter arrived. The markers, coupled with the obser-vation that these cutures from Caucasian women wereboth carrying the black type A enzyme, convincedNelsonRees that both cell lines had been taken over byHeLa . He notified Coriell and Miller.

"In view of this additional informatio it wouldseem probable that the lines are cotaminants, Milerthen wrote to Seman. "I realize this differs somewhatfrom my original interpretaton but hope that the situa-tion is now clarified.

Yes, there was somewhat of a difference betweensaying SH2 and SH3 are cultures of breast cancer and say-ing, "Oops, they're HeLa.

Seman was incensed, though it s hard to say whatupset him more Miler's new diagnosis that the preciousbreast cultures were Henrietta Lacks's welltraveledcervical tumor cells, or the fact that Miller dared sendthe SH photographs to another investigator. "Wizzoutmy permission ! as he put it. Sema was even angrier



peadng he od 5

with NelsonRees or using inormation that Seman de

cided had been obtained unscietiically and illegally"Eeet's a case or my attorney, he declared

Seman's coleagues at Anderson, Relda Cailleauamong them, were equaly outraged NelsonRees hadacted irresponsibly and unethicaly, they all agreed Itwas the same trick he had payed on other unsuspectingresearchers To them the question o Hea contaminaton was somehow a secondary concern

Not to NelsonRees, though, who or the momentwas oblivious to the reputation he was building at theAnderson Hospital Having nailed SH2 and SH3, heturned his attention to MAC2 1 He remembered seeinga reerence to MAC21 in the paper announcing the SHlnes Speciically, the report had said that the SH cellswere like MAC2 1 cells i that they had the type A orm

o G6PDow MAC2 1 had been around a ong time, used ex-tensively in lung cancer research, yet NelsonRees didn'trecall ever hearing that it ad this unusual trait So it wasthat a month later when e saw Relda Calleau descending the stairs at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montrealhe walked up and said, "What 's this I read about MAC2 1being type A? Have you ever checked it? That's when

Cailleau erupted"You're doing this to everyone, are you? You're as-sassinating people!

"ook, we know there's a problem with SH2 andSH3 They were both type A G6PD and we oud outthey have He a chromosomes

"MAC2 1 is ot HeLa I'm absolutely positive They went on or ten minutes like that Finaly Nel-

sonRees went ito one o his commercials Cailleaumight be interested to know that he and Bob Stevensonwere iring up the cell standards committee o the associ-ation to advertse the need or careul controls and regu-lar monitoring o cell identities, he said "But I don'thave to tell you the importance o keeping things



86 A Cospacy of Clls

straight As you know Reda I'd be gad to chec any of

your cutures for youAt hat Cailleau stomped out of the obby

It was during this eary period of the crusade withina year o the Scence artice that an amusing teegram arrived at the Oakand ab he unsigned message offeredNesonRees a highpaying and prestigious new job in re-search It aso offered a oneway ticket to get him to thisvery attractive position in Uganda



9

Daage epo

t as too ad tat Neson-Rees didn't ave an accountant travein aon on tecrusade, someone to assess te pies of spoied researce ad du up and eft rottin in is ake, a ookkeeperof te ereaved to record te numer of ours squanderedand researc doars frittered aay Te nespapers saidmiions ad een asted y Hea's unexpected spread,ut tere ere no officia damae reports Te ureau-

crats at te Nationa Cancer Institute never tried to sur-vey te reckae, and tey proay oud ave faiedad tey attempted it Very fe of Hea's victims, eventose asked pointan, oud ever detai o muctime, effort, and money tey ad asted, or o manycoeaues tey ad ed astray

Take Ernest Pata, for instance, te cutivator ofHBT39B, one o the to eacontaminated reast cu-

tures tat came out of te institute's uidin 4 Pataestaised HBT39B in te summer of 97 and studiedit on and off over te next to and a af years, opin tofind vira cues to te cause of reast cancer After Ne-sonRees convinced im tat is maignant reast cesere in fact mainant ces of te cervix, Pata put tem





Damage Repo 8

hei days o he effor, o purify and isolae an enzymefom he cells and o idenify i as reverse ranscripaseIn Augus 9 73, Gerwin, Bassin, and heir associaes published a repor in he Proceedings o the Nationa Academy o Sciences announcing he find

Gerwin and her assisan hen spen anoher hree orfour monhs combining he enzyme wih blood serumdrawn from paiens wih breas cancer The heory washa if his enzyme were realy manufacured by viusesha caused breas cancer, hen here would be anibodiesin he blood of breas cancer paiens ha would aackhe enzyme Bu hey found no evidence of an aack Iwas abou ha ime, oward he sa of 974, ha Nel-sonRees's leer arrved, making i clear why he bloodof he breas cancer paiens had no reaced o he enzyme from heir "breas cancer cel line

I ook anoher monh o wo, bu Gerwin and Bassinbecame convinced ha BT3 was acuay ea, andha hey had been wasing heir ime ad i been an-oher kind of cancer cel ha slipped in, hey migh havesalvaged a few observaions abou ha cancer 's relaon-ship o viral enzymes Bu o in he case of he ealine ea had been in so many labs and so many diffe-en microbiological environmens, hey knew, ha i

could have picked up all kinds of hings ha had nohingo do wih vial cace They abandoned heir work onBT3

Neary a decade laer, Gerwin ad Bassin calcuaedhe damage Gerwin figured he half year of puifying andidenifying he enzyme was no a oal wase since someof he echniques developed she applied o ohe experi-mens Pehaps hee of hose six monhs were for

naugh She and her echnician wased anoher heemonhs esing he paiens' serum agains he enzymeThe combined sixmonh salary of a PhD and a echnicia in he mid 9 70s was abou $20000 To ha Gewiadded suppor coss, anyhing fom he pumbing and



0 A Cnspacy f Cs

heating to ce cuture materias, which she guessed

came to another $20,000. The overa loss for Gewin'send of the project, then, was about $40,000.

Before Gerwin even started her work, however, Bas sin had spent three months nursing the ces into a sustaiable cuture and performing various tests. Hethought it cost at east $25,000 in wages and aboratoryexpenses. In other words, the HeLa ces that overranHBT3 inflicted $65,000 worth of damage on the groupthat initiated the cuture.

The damage didn't end there, of course. Bassin hadsent twentyseven shipments of what he thought wasHBT3 to twenty research teams around the world, fromthe University of Rhode Isand to the Karolinska Insti-tute in S tockhom. The shipments went out etween Au-gust 1972 and August 1973, meaning that scientistscould have been working with the cells for anywherefrom eight months to a year and eight months before theyreceived Bassin's notice about the HeLa contamination.If ony four of the twenty groups invested as much effortin this culture as did Bassin's team, the tota damagewoud be $260, 000.

There were ony two other sad taes fo which anyone woud try to figure a tab. One was the Russian ca

per, NesonRees's first brush with HeLa. According toWade Parks, leader of the team of American viroogistswho anayzed the viruses in the six Russian cuturesthe viruses some hoped woud incude the human tu-mor virus, the ones that turned out to be monkey viruses the laboratory work aone cost $50,000 to $60, 000. Asfor the tota costincuding such incidentas as investigators' time, the price of hiring a commercia ab to grow

arge quantities of the ces, and the expense of eaboratemeetings to discuss the findingsParks estimated itmany years ater at a quartermilion doars .

And then there was MA160, a bogus uture of hu-man prostate cells that NesonRees featured in his 1974Science article. Seeing that artice, a cel bioogist at the



Dama Rpo 9 1

Universiy of Colorado named Muka Webber scannedhe scienific lieraure and found ha six recenly published sudies had been based on he erroneous assumpon ha MA 1 60 was a prosae ce A he ime she gaveno quaniaive assessmen of he harm done, hough researchers familiar wih he field woud evenually esimae he price of hose six misguided sudies a $30, 000o $40,000 apiece a oal of $2 10,000 to $280,000 As iurned ou, Webber had found only a porion of M 1 60' smisadvenures

Bu aking even the minimum damage esimae of$210,000 for MA160 and adding a quartermillion eachfor HBT3 and he Russian cells, he cos of jus hree insances of HeLa conaminaion approached $1 millionTo say nohing of he wo oher culures on NelsonRees's 1974 lis or he moneary equivalen of fifeen

years of work los in he early era of cancer research, longbefore NelsonRees joined he chase Or he wase dueo holdover culures fro hose days, lines such as heChang liver and he WISH amnio, which, despie beingbranded as HeLa, were sil surfacing eriodically inpublished research repors as bona fide liver and amnioncells Or, finally, he many new eLaconaminaed celllines ha NelsonRees and Flandermeyer were sill un

coveringBob Sevenson, a one ime he man in charge of cellculures or he insiue, was one of he few officials everto guess a he oal damage HeLa had done Some enyears afer he newspapers firs repored he sory, Sevenson would look back and figure hey were right Byhe ime NelsonRees had published his repor in Scence the losses added up o millions of dollars

"Millions is probably he righ ballpark, Sevensonwould say "Bu you're no going o ge anyone o admitha I's like somehing uered in a confessional









Pvac 95

couldn't appreciate the work When was it painted,

where was the artist working at the time, who were histeachers, was it ever exhibited? It was probably under theforce of this compulsion in 953 that he had changed hisvery name, from ees to Nelsonees, thereby specifyingboth parents, his own provenance And so it was withcell cultures If you didn't know everything about te cellline you were experimentng on, especay its true iden-tity, then you didn't know anything

So it was probably inevitable that Nelsoeeswould publish a second ist of ea casualties As itturned out, though, there were other good easons

Since the first article the one that had "ndictedfive cell lines as ea, he and Flandermeyer had dscovered eleven more eacontamiated cultures WhenNelsonees told the people who established these cul-

tures that the cells were spoiled, any simply refused tobelieve him It was not enough to delve the bad news tothese researchers and hope that, ike Bob Bassin, theywould do the hoorable thing As each of the eeventurned up, it became increasingly apparent to Nelson-Rees that he would have to warn the world himselfthough another published lis t

SH3, the purported breast cancer culture establshedby Gabriel Seman at the MD Anderson ospital, wasone such case Seman consulted a karyologist at Ader-son who disagreed with Fladermeyer and Nelsonees 'sjudgment that SH3 had ea chromosomes, the conclusion with which Miller had concurred Seman alsochanged his story about the origin of the culture Afterexamining a photograph in his files, he concluded that

the woman wo donated te cells was not Caucasian ashe had originally reported, but Mexican Snce the raretype A enzyme occasionaly appears among interracaMexicanAmerican populaions, according to Seman,this meant S3 was not necessarily a eLa culture

aving satisfied himself that S3 was a bona fide



6 A Cnspacy f Clls

breas culure, Seman saw no reason o curb s use or

warn colleagues. Whle NelsonRees was preparng hsnew ls, whch would bow he whsle on SH3, he cellline was already being used by breas cancer researchersa he Memoral SloanKeerng Cancer Cener n NewYork and by a group n he Sovie Unon, as well as by aninvesgaor who worked separaely from Seman a Anderson. Indeed Seman would soon publish hs own reporn he journal Cancer offcally announcg he avalabiy of hs new breas cancer culure o he scienfccommuniy a large. In he arcle, he would rule ou hepossibly of HeLa conamnaion.

ElCo was a cell lne ha NelsonRees chose o nclude on hs second ls for smlar reasons. Accordg ooncologs Roland Pallo, he man who esablshed i,ElCo was ye anoher breas cancer culure. n hs laboraores a he Medcal College of Wisconsin, Paillo hadused he cells o es he effecs of ceran chemoherapydrugs before admserng hem o he woman fromwhom he cells had supposedly been aken. He also suded he reacon of oher breas cancer paens o his"breas culure usng a skn es somehng lke heones used o check for allergies. These paens showed

an immune reacion o ElCo as if her bodies had alreadybeen prmed agans , suggesng o Paillo ha dfferen breas umors mgh have cerain characerisics oranigens i common.

The only problem, NelsonRees old Pallo afercheckng he culure, was ha ElCo was neher a breascancer culure nor represeaive of Paillo's paien. Iwas a HeLa culure.

Palo proesed ha breas cancer paiens wouldnever have had an mmune reacion o h cells unlesshey were genune breas cancer cells. He would laerconcede, however, ha he never esed ha assumpionby checking paiens' reacons o HeLa cells. Pailloalso explained ha he knew all abou he infamous u



Pvnac 7

mor o Henrie Lcks, hving been n ssoce in he

lborory o George nd Mrgre Gey soon er MryKbicek plced h el bi o isse ino he rollerbe B he sid he hd no HeL cells in his own lb, soconminion ws impossible

Nohing in his lb ws abeed HeL, h ws reB he hd been experimening wih noher bres culre, Bssin's HBT3, nd pprenly HBT3 hd droppedin nexpecedly on some o he oher cell lines in heneighborhood NelsonRees nd Flndermeyers nlysisshowed h ElCo conined he very sme bnded chromosomes s did HBT3 nd is eLconmined cosins : he or sndrd HeL mrkers nd he newer pr,he Mickey Mose nd Zebr

Pillo js didn' believe i He kep working wihElCo s i i were bres mor clure nd kep pb

lishing resls Th's wh relly go he wheels rollingrond here, Flndermeyer reclled h 's he kind ohing h go Wler ll ired up nd pblishing new lissnd wriing leers o ediors

B wh worried NelsonRees more hn Pillo'srecion ws he c h HeL cells were sil l circling in heir old HBT3 disgise HBT3 hd been on heirs lis in 1 974 For he ls wo yers he hd been mk

ing s mch noise s he cold bo BT3 nd he oroher eLconmined clres he hd originllysmbled pon And ye here ws Pillo climing hehd no HeL in his lb lhough, yes, he did se lileHBT3 now nd hen

nornely, HBT3 ws no he only cive lmns rom he irs lis Nerly everyone, i seemed, ws

sill sing MA160, he bogs prose cell h by hemid1970s hd helped reserchers wse n esimed$200,000

MA160 ws developed in 1966 hrogh he collborion o severl scieniss nd mn nmed MonroeVincen, prner in he biomedicl spply irm o Mi



98 A Cnspacy f Cls

crobiological Associates, Ic The scientists provded

some of the technical expertise; Moty Vincet perso-ally contribted the cells, a mp of tisse that had beetaken from his own prostate The lmp was biopsied byhis doctor who was cocered that it might be malig-ant Fortately, it trned ot to be beg

It also rned ot to be a good sorce of cltrablecells, or so t seemed The cells from Vincet's prostatelangished n the laboratory for a few months ad the,toched by the miracle of " spotaeos transformatio, were rebor as a bch of fantic cacer cells The irstloglived le of prostate cells, MA160 became a best-seller

As it happeed thogh, the ces were exactly theopposite of what they were spposed to be Not mae, btfemale Not prostate, bt cervix Not from a white door,bt a black one MA160 was argably the most tastelessof HeLa's practical okes

Stan arter was the frst to ail MA1 60 as HeLa in1 968 He added it to his list of the oiginal 1 8 eLacon-taminated cltres based on its having the A type ofG6PD ezyme Vicet ad his cocltivators, however,dismissed the fidig i their first official description ofthe cell lie i Scence in 1970 They theorized that Vi-

ce might have had Negro acestors from whom he in-herited the rare, black ezyme They added that the cellscotained Y chromosomes, proof they had come from amale donor

In 1 9 73, however, Ward Peterso, NelsoRees' s reglar parter i Detroit, reported that he cold find o Ychromosomes even in the earliest samples of MA160avalable Frthermore, having tested Vincent's own

blood, he cold say withot a dobt hat whatever exoticancestry Vincent claimed, he had eded p with type BG6PD, the type expected for whites "His cell line wascertaily ot his aymore, bt that of a black woma In1 9 74, NelsonRees and Fladermeyer fond that MA1 60



Povnanc 99

not only had the type A enzyme and was missing is Y

chromosome, it also displayed banded marker chromo-somes identical to eLas . Another group that had beenwoking with the culture, a team at the Anderson ospi-tal, no less, soon came to the same conclusions

It wasnt long before Mukta Webber, the Coloadocell biologist, reported that MA 60 failed to roduce pro-static acid phosphatase, a chemical normally manufac-tured by prostate cells Webber also eported that despiteits unprostatelike behavior, MA60 was still a popularresearch culture, describing and givng references to thesix recently published "prostate studies based on thecell line.

But that was not the end of MA 60 Early in 975 aWest German scientist named Frederick Schroeder an-nounced the establishment of a new prostate cultue at aconference in Italy NelsonRees, who happened to be at-tending, heard Schroeder describe the new cel ine,EB33, as quite similar to the postate cuture MA60,which Schroeder also had been studying in hs ab In cer-tain respects, EB33, like MA60, behaved strangely, ac-cording to Schroeder NelsonRees began asking ques-tions A few months later, having analyzed severalsamples of EB33, he wrote Schroeder that his new pros-

tate culture was definitely MA 60, which was definitelye La.And still MA 60 and its alter ego endured Many re-

searchers went ahead and worked with EB33 just as oth-ers had continued to use MA60. Some, includingSchroeder, used both cultures in their expeiments, pre-sumably to increase the validity of the observationsee it was again, NelsonReess nightmare come true

Researchers were not only using MA60 as if it were abona fide prostate culture, they were exposing all theothe cell lines in their labs to a eLa culture in disguiseWhich wa s why in addition to warnng people away romthe eleven newly spoiled cultures ike EB33, ElCo, and



1 00 A Conspacy of Clls

SH3, NlsonRs dcidd his scond lst would hav to

rmind thm of th contaminatd culturs h had publicizd arlir.

In fact h dcidd ot only to rpat th lins h indictd n 1 974, but also to quot vry rport h could layhis hands on that brandd any cll cultur HLa. Amongothrs, h citd artr 's original findings, rcnt studisby Ward Ptrson in Dtroit, and a papr soon to b publishd by rsarchrs at th Amrican Typ Cultur Collction. In th manuscript h submittd to Scenceaccompanying this scond list, h xplaind how widsprad "scondary cotamination had bcom andadmonishd his collagus, "HLa by any othr namscan spll troub. 11

Th list, publishd in January 1976, was an imprssiv and distrssing invntory. Mor than forty diffrnt

rsarch culturs had bn commandrd by HLa. Ifach cultur had cost scinc a quartrillion dollars, ashad th fw for which damag stimats could b madthis list rprsntd $ 1 0 million in losss . Th vidncagainst ach cultur, organizd in a dtaild chart, wasovrwhlming too. Not only wr ths clls idntical toHLa on th basis of thir G6PD nzyms an markrchomosoms, but many had also bn tstd for th n

zym PGM and for a fw mor biochical traits calldHLA antigns. Ths al matchd HLa's charactristics.And, oh ys, thr was on othr pic of nforma

tion undr ach cll lin in NlsonRs's scond list arsarchr's nam. Any scintist who had suppid himwith a cultur that turnd out to b HLa was immortal izd in what cam to b known as NlsonRs 's hit list .No on considrd this an honor. A fw flt dply b

trayd and nvr spok with him again. And th ranks ofthos who thought NlsonRs was ust out to mak anam for himslf grw considrably.

Jim Duff and som of th othr buraucrats at th institut wantd to know why h had to nam nams."You kp pushing popl, 1 1 Duff complaind. Why, thy







1 1

Aother Ru- i With Relda

NesonRees ws rowsinthrou the Apri 1977 issue of the Joual of th National Cancr Institut when he cuht te scent ofsoetin idy suspcious on pe 863

ow soe peope woud hve sid he went ookinfor bd news, especilly fter tht hit ist with the neson it But the wy he sw it, he just wnted to ke surethe reports of ood news were enuine And strtin on

pge 863 of the institute's journ there ppered to bevery good news indeed, repor of soe proisin findings bout un cncer

Richrd Akeson of UCLA edic schoo d foundsever specific ntigens ssocited wth the ces in un tuor cuture Antigens re ike biocheic dotgs, tiny neptes on ce 's surfce tht cn e reconized by the body's iune syste, touh in the cse

of cncer the syste sees une to successfuy ttckeven when it reconizes the eney. Whie the discoveryws preiinry, Akeson wrote, such ts ight eventuy help doctors dignose this prticur kind of luncncer ore effectivey, perhps erier, nd hep theonitor its progress . Furtherore, though Akeson didn't



1 04 A Conspacy o Clls

actuay mention it, there was aways the hope that itumorspeciic antigens could be ound or certain can-cers, they might serve as signposs to be oowed by can-cerkilling drugs or other seective assauts to be devel-oped in the uture. Such was the promise o an antigenound to be unique to a particular kind of tumor ce.

NelsonRees knew rom experience, however, thatantigens speciic to a certain type o celand only thattypewere practicay impossibe to ind. And, ocourse, inding a unique antigen wasn't enough. You asohad to be certain o the tumor cell' s identity in the irstplace, so that ater when you saw that antigen on theces o an unidentiied cuture you coud say, or exam-pe, aha, we must have a dishu o Russian bladder can-cer here. Given the procivities o biologists to mixthings up, NesonRees gured, any tissuespeciic caim

was worth a coser look.According to the "Materials and Methods section oAkeson's report, the ung tumor cel line was caed 2563and had come rom Litton Bionetics, Inc. , in Kensington,Maryland. Foowing that bit o normation was a oot-note tha directed NesonRees to the bottom o the page.There amid the ine print, quite unexpectedly, hebumped into none other than Relda Cailleau. It seemed

that 2563 was another name for MAC21, the lung cul-ture tha had triggered the hotel lobby screaming matchin Montreal two years earier. Despite Caileau's assur-ances at the time that MAC2 1 was not eLa, the matterwas let very much unresoved in NesonRees's mind.Now that someone was basing important new caimsabout lung cancer on this twentyyearold cuture, he decided the question had to be settled.

He ordered samples o 2563 rom Litton Bioneticsthat summer, and by September the verdict was in. Ac-cording to Ward Peterson's analysis, the culture's G6PDenzyme was type A, the same as HeLa's. Athough Cail-eau had taken the origina MAC21 ces rom a ity-threeyearold man, NesonRees and Flandermeyer saw



Anthe Runin wit Rela 1

no male Y chromosomes And in neary every cell, theyfound abnormal chromosomes whose shapes and bandingpatterns matched three of HeLa's bestknown markersNelsonRees wrote a detailed letter to John C Baiar III,editor of the Joual o the National Cancer Institute as-serting that 2563 had been containated by HeLa andwas not at all characteristic of lung tumor cells He askedthat the letter be published as soon as possibe, saying hisresults were "an important addition to the increasingknowledge of what does and does not constitute organortissuespecific antgens

Three months passed with no word NelsonReescalled the journal, and someone there explained they hadsent copies of his letter to Akeson and Cailleau so thatthey could write rebuttals to be published along with hisletter Akeson's repy had come in, a cautious concession

that the "ung cancer ces were apparenty HeLa, butthey were s till wating for Caileau's Convinced as ever that the cells were pure, Caleau

had pulled out the one remaining ampule of MAC2 inher possession and had it analyzed by Sen Pathak, a chromosome banding expert at the MD Anderson Hospital,and Michael Sicilano, the local enzyme man She was"disappointed, as she later described it, when Pathak re-

ported seeing HeLa's marker chromosomes in MAC2and Siciliano said not only was the G6PD HeLa's type,but thirteen other enzymes he tested matched as wel

Disappointed, but undaunted, Cailleau still insistedthat MAC2 had been a genuine lung cancer cell formany yers, and if it was HeLa now, well, that was some-body ese's doing She explained to her coleagues, as shewould afterwards to anyone who asked about MAC2,

that she had shared the cells with other researchers inSan Francisco before coming to Houston When shemoved she took with her two different batches one oflive samples from hose researchers and another of frozensamples that only she had used Then in the early 970ssome fool technician had failed to keep the freezer





Another Run-in with Relda 1

oneparagraph statement from Calea concedng thatthe sngle cltre of MAC2 1 she had checked was eLa." am certan that the orgnal MAC21 was obtanedfrom a mcod adenocarcnoma of the lng and remanedncontamnated for several years, she wrote wth atrace of controlled testness . "The addton of HeLa cellsto or cltres occrred later and the transfers were car-red ot by several people.

Arond the tme of this embarrassngly pblc cellmxp, NelsonRees receved a draft report from a m-croologst at the Natona Cancer nsttte. t was anextensve revew of breast cancer cltres avalable to ex-perimenters, and, as NelsonRees was so experenced ntellng good cells from bad, the mcrobologst asked hmto crtqe the report before t was sbmtted for pblca-ton. Oddly enogh, there were several cltres lsted

whose techncal descrptons were mssng. The coverletter explaned these were Calleas cltres, and Cal-lea had asked that all nformaton on them be deletedfrom any copes of the draft that NelsonRees mght see.

NelsonRees was amazed frst that Caillea woldhave the gall to dctate the handlng of someone esesmanscrpt and, second, that the athor wold kncklender. When NelsonRees called to fnd ot more, the

mcrobologst sad that Callea had been " adamant onths pont; absve, in fact. Obvosly Callea had been more than jst mffed

by her latest dealngs wth NelsonRees. She was deter-mned to make the MAC21 ncdent the last tme hewold ever stck hs nose nto one of her cell ctres .

A few weeks later, the Tsse Cltre Assocaton

asked NelsonRees to evaluate a stack of abstracts, orsmmares, of research reports sbmtted for the assoca-tons pcomng annal meetng. e fond one of the ab-stracts partclarly interestng. t descrbed an nsalsample of breast tmor cells that exhbted a srprsngnmber of characterstcs smlar to HeLas. In fact,





Aothe u wth elda 109

as the guru of cytogenetics, had put his name on the man-

uscript, adding considerable credibility to it What the earlier abstract had only impied, this

twentyfivepage paper announced loud and cear thatthe standard tools of eLa huntingenzyme tests andchromosomal analysiswere of questionabe valueWhat's more, it suggested that every eLa case Nelson-Rees had ever published was now in oubt In short, itlooked like the gang from Anderson was indicting the in-dicter himself

"The eLa markers have been extensively used byinvestgators to identify cel line contamination, theauthors wrote, citing references to three of NelsonRees'spublished reports, including the latest hit list Becausethey found chromosomes similar to eLa markers in thistissue sample that was clearly not eLa, they concluded

that "marker chromosomes alone are not unequivocalevidence for identifying cellular contaminationWait a minute, thought NelsonRees From what he

and Flandermeyer and Lavappa could see, there were noHeLa markers in these ces ure, maybe there were afew that looked vaguely simila Maybe someone with anuntrained eye might be confused But there was not asingle marker chromosome in the photographs that a

qualified karyologist should mistake for ea's Andeven i there were, Walter NelsonRees would never labela cell culture eLa based solely on marker chromo-somes There were also the enzymes to consider

But the folks from Anderson observed that twelveout of fourteen isoenzymes tested in their breast cancercell were identical to eLa "The suggestion, then, thatcell lines showing only three enzyme characteristics in

common with eLa be considered de facto strains ofeLa may be overly simplistic, they wrote, offeringfootnotes to two more of NelsonRees 's reports

Overy simpisti NelsonRees couldn't believe thisstuff e'd never claimed that enzymes alone are enoughBut if the marker chromosomes match and you pick the



1 1 0 A Conspray of Cells

proper enzymes to check, then three can be plenty. The

single finding of type A G6PD, for instance, in a cltrethoght to be from a white donor is more than enogh totell you something is awry.

bt the "HeLalike cells reported in this man-script had come from a black woman who carried the Aform of G6PD. How convenient, thoght elsonRees.

As he scanned the rest of the report, he noticed theathors neglected to point ot that many of the other en-zyme variants they tested were common to 90 percent ofthe human poplation, inclding the late HenriettaLacks, and therefore of relatively little vale in distin-gishing their breast cancer cell from HeLa. And by astrange coincidence the two enzymes that trned ot dif-ferent from HeLa's happened to be the very last two theytested, even thogh one of them, called PGM3, had be-come a standard test for HeLa, and therefore likely to beamong the first checked by anyone really interested infinding ot if he had a HeLa cell or not.

The handling of the enzyme data was not the onlything elsonRees fond sspicios. He called Flander-meyer in and they pored over the chromosomal mgshots Pathak, Caillea, and colleages had sed to provetheir case . In an hor or so they were both shakng their

heads, astonished.The mg shots were photographic composites, con-strcted from bits and pieces of varios photos of varioscells in this breast cancer cltre.

When yo're comparing banded chromosomes fromtwo different tisse samplesa know HeLa cltre,say, and one yo sspect may be contaminated withHeLa there' s only one correct way to do it, according to

elsonRees and most other karyologists. After search-ing hndreds of photos yo begin to recognize the samecomplex of markers, the same grop of defective chromo-somes, appearing in every one of yor suspect cells. Yothen pick a single cell n which this grop displays itsbanding pattes clearly, ct ot the defective chromo-somes, and pt them next to markers from a HeLa cell



Aother Ru- wth Relda 1 1 1

you've analyzed and photographed. In a given sideby-

side comparison the mug shots must come from onlytwo individual cells . If you have to pick one chromosomefrom this suspect cell and another from ha in order tofind ones that match those from the eLa cell thenyou're reaching.

Apparently hat's just wat te Anderson workershad done. After a close look at al the photographs Nel-sonRees and Fandermeyer were convinced that thecomparison photo didn't display mug shots of chromosomes from only two cells one from the breast cultureand one from a eLa line but from at least seven fourdifferent breast cells and three eLas. What's more theeLa mug shots appeared to have been taken from an-other researcher's published report not a culture he Anderson workers had studied themseves. I fact they had

cut out and reassembled so many mug sots in order tomake their comparison look convincing they had evenpasted in the image for one of the breast chromosomesupside down and reversed.

So this was what Pathak was going o unveil at theannual meeting. And as if that wasn't enough the Anderson gang wanted to publish the entire argument in theou o he Nion Cnce Insiue as well. Nel

sonRees was astonishe that anyone would go to suchlengths to discredit him.For the next few days he drove Flandermeyer and the

others hard. e demanded a detailed analysis of the mugshots showing that they weren't eLa markers despitethe photographic sleightofhand and offering alternativedescriptions for each chromosome. When that was doneNelsonRees sat down poison pen in hand to draft a

statement he planned to deliver at the annual meetingfollowing Pathak's presentation. When it was done hetook it to Flandermeyer who recommended toning itdown. They removed a few of the more offensive pas-sages including a final statement Flandermeyer felt wasparticularly undiplomatic. NelsonRees then returned tohis office and wrote the venom back in.





1 2Showdown

As s as NesRees arrved at te Dever lt te, were embers f teTissue Cuture Assocat were gaterg fr tertwetyt aual meetg, a fred cae up ad sad,"Te Aderso group s ut t get you 11

Te fowig orig, the flaable Reda Ca -eau gted at the mere et of s ae. Se was at

a eeting f the assciat's executive coucil, wereshe leared tat NelsoRees ad bee elected vcepres-det f te assocatin ad was t be fficially istalledte ext dayad se cd 't cota te fre ad fury

"My gd, 11 se blurted ut "ow culd e ave beeelected vcepresidet ? 1 1

She ld er startled few coucl ebers wNesoRees ad attacked er work ad that of ay

welrespected scetists, ow s etos were atag-stc ad is otves destructive "s apprac s aways, I 've got to prove I' rgt ad you're wrg, ' seraled "My God, the ma is paraoid! 11

Cailleau urged te coucl to demad hs resiga-to, a dfficult task as NelsoRees did't yet old te



1 1 4 A Consracy of Cells

office. But she hd mde her point, severl times over,

nd set the stge for the min event lter in the dy.elsonRees ws set himself. Erlier he hd told Bob

Stevenson, "I 'm rely going to hrow the ft on the fire . "Think bout it, Stevenson nswered.Some 200 people pcked ino the Hlton's Vil Room

tht fternoon, considerbly more thn were originlyexpected for the session on mmmry tissue. They hdherd there ws quite show in store. Some si it mightrelly get ugly. They cme not necessrily to root for oneside or the other, butlike decent townsfolk gtheringon rootops nd peering out of windows t gunfight inthe street ust to wtch.

The pper by Pthk, Cileu, nd Sicilino, enti-tled "resh Peurl Effusion from Pient wih BrestCncer Showing Chrcteristic HeL mrkers ws

scheduled third. The udience st restlessly through thefirst nd second tlks. Then, bout thirty minutes intothe progrm, the chirmn red the title of the pper, ndPthk, the young Indinbo chromosome expert, cmeforwrd to deliver the tlk. Cileu ws s itting in the udience bout hlfwy to the bck of the room. elson-Rees ws bout ten rows behind her. Sicilino hd styedhome in Houston.

Pthk seemed pprehensive. He spoke bit shkilyin tht Britisheducted, Indin ccent, pinfuly formlnd poite . Whenever he mentioned collegue, i t ws l-wys by title nd full nme, pronounced in one breth sif it were ll single word "We exmined chromosomesin cells obtined by DoctorReldCilleu . . . . soenzymesfrom DoctorReldCilleu's cells were nyzed byDoctorMichelSicilino.

Pthk described the findngs in strightforwrdwy These cells tken directy from brest cncer p-tient showed chromosomes tht were quite similr toHeL 's chrcteristic mrker chromosomes, he sid . Andthirteen of fifteen isoenzymes checked were identicl toHeL's. (They hd tested one dditionl enzyme since



Showdown 1 1 5

writing the drat report NelsonRees had seen.) There

were no direct reerences to NelsonRees, no otrightchallenges to the selness o his techniqes as therewere in the written version o ths talk that had been sentto the ou o te Ntion Cncer Institute. Still, tosome members o the adience, especally to Nelson-Rees, the insination was clear.

When Pathak had finished, NelsonRees raised hishand. The session chairman, having heard that troblewas aoot, qickly called on someone ese. NelsonReesdecided he wold not be denied again. When that qes-tion was answered, he simply stood p and withot theaid o a microphone began to read his statement .

"As a reeree o this abstract or the program com-mittee, qestioned the se o the adective characteris -tic' in the tile, ollowed by similar' in the text. Dr.

Pathak sbseqently sent me a photograph o themarker' chromosomes stating he was pzzled regardingthis observation.' am pzzled as well, not with the ob-servations bt with the way they are being presented.

The chairman tried to ct him o, explaining thatthe presentation had gone over its allotted time .

"John, said NelsonRees as he moved rom his seatp towards the ront o the room, "'m going to inish

this .He went on to explain that as a reviewer o the man-script sbmitted to the cancer ornal, he had lookedover all the photographic evidence the athors sed toprove their case. He said he discovered they had "ishedabot in several dierent cells rom this breast tmor toind their so called HeLa chromosomes, a highly irreg-lar procedre.

"We have carelly stdied many diferent cell linesand observed a good nmber of marker chromosomes,bt we 've never had to create a collage sch as has beendone here in order to sensationalize a point.

The adience was aghast at sch a lagrant breach oetiqette. One simply ddn't se sch langage. Perhaps



1 1 6 A Conspracy of Cls

a point would need to be confirmed; maybe there was a

chance for an alteative interpretation But publicy accusing learned colleagues of fishing about for data andsensationalizing their resultsNelsonRees might justas well have been spoonlaunching mashe potatoes at aformal dinner

"As a matte of fact, NelsonRees proclaimed,"without stating so and without giving credit to the pub-ished work, the authors lifted ea marker chromosomes from the work of eneen which best matchedtheir altered chromosomes and presented them in themanuscript apparently as their own observations eheld up the Swedish journa Heredtas that contained thereport he claimed they had "lifted from and added thatdespite such pilferage, the chromosomes they presentedare not convincing matches

There was a sudden disturbance in the audienceRelda Cailleau was becoming agitated, muttering oudlyto the people around her, but NelsonRees pressed on

"Aside from the abovementioned irregularity n scientific procedure, it appears that some normal chromo-somes were eroneously classified as markers and viceversa, and at least in one instance a chromosome's imagewas used twice, abeit after reversal of the negative

NelsonRees explained that he had sent photographsof the "socalled characteristic ea markers toavappa for a second opinion and quoted avappa's writ-ten reply: " There is no trace of the four distinct eamarkers, which are well characterzed and have appearedin many publicatons' And then it wa time for the fi-nale, the part that he had typed out in captal letters

" I suggest you s tick to pleural effusions, he said to a

dumbstruck Pathak at the podium, "and leave the easto us A momentary silencePathak broke the trance and added a touch of absur-

dity to the scene by thanking NelsonRees profuselyNelsonees dropped 50 copies o his statement in a pile



1 1 6 A Conspracy of Cls

a point would need to be confirmed; maybe there was a

chance for an alteative interpretation But publicy accusing learned colleagues of fishing about for data andsensationalizing their resultsNelsonRees might justas well have been spoonlaunching mashe potatoes at aformal dinner

"As a matte of fact, NelsonRees proclaimed,"without stating so and without giving credit to the pub-ished work, the authors lifted ea marker chromosomes from the work of eneen which best matchedtheir altered chromosomes and presented them in themanuscript apparently as their own observations eheld up the Swedish journa Heredtas that contained thereport he claimed they had "lifted from and added thatdespite such pilferage, the chromosomes they presentedare not convincing matches

There was a sudden disturbance in the audienceRelda Cailleau was becoming agitated, muttering oudlyto the people around her, but NelsonRees pressed on

"Aside from the abovementioned irregularity n scientific procedure, it appears that some normal chromo-somes were eroneously classified as markers and viceversa, and at least in one instance a chromosome's imagewas used twice, abeit after reversal of the negative

NelsonRees explained that he had sent photographsof the "socalled characteristic ea markers toavappa for a second opinion and quoted avappa's writ-ten reply: " There is no trace of the four distinct eamarkers, which are well characterzed and have appearedin many publicatons' And then it wa time for the fi-nale, the part that he had typed out in captal letters

" I suggest you s tick to pleural effusions, he said to a

dumbstruck Pathak at the podium, "and leave the easto us A momentary silencePathak broke the trance and added a touch of absur-

dity to the scene by thanking NelsonRees profuselyNelsonees dropped 50 copies o his statement in a pile





Showdown 1 1 9

That night Bob Stevenson took NelsonRees ot for adrink and a little lectre. t was another version of thefriendly advice Stevenson had reglarly offered: Diplomacy gets yo farther. When yo do something, yo do itproperly, or yo risk losing cedibility.

On the other hand, Stevenson added, he was only tooglad somebody was stirring things p. He grinned hismischievos grin and said, ts always nice to drop atrd in the pnchbow once in a while .

Then came the letters. n a few weeks Keith Porter,the president of the association, was hip deep in testimonials of otrage, shock, and dismay:

a writing to express concern about the incident thattook pace in Denver NelsonRees has abused hisprivilege as a reviewer and ipugned the integrit of

Drs Pathak et al hope the Executive Board wiltret this atter with the uost seriousness, because beieve the credibilit of the Board, as well as thegood reputations of Drs Pathak, Siciiano, and Caileauare at stake

a but one of an who was shocked and offended bthe serious and unethical acivities of Water NesonRees .

Dr NelsonRees behaved ungentlean and indiscreel

He appeared to lack the obectivit and openindedness of character iportant fo a good scientist

Leibovitzs resoltion also arrived, for pages docmenting NelsonReess crimes. It is immaterial whetherhis findings are right or wrong, the statement read andrged that he be censred, stripped of his vicepresidency, and banned from reviewing manscripts for the

association.t was all very well, all this righteos wrath, bt asfar as Porter cold see, there was no way to satisfy it.NelsonRees was gilty of no malfeasance, and even if hewere, he was not in office when he so distressed everyone; that was the day before he was officially installed.




When the officers, incuding NesonRees, met a fewmonths ater, NesonRees agreed to apoogize to Pathakin writing, but ony for the manner in whch he "dis-agreed wit Pathak's report The president hoped hatwoud satisfy the offended.

It didn't come cose to satisfying Reda Caieau,who wrote the president four months after the incident

Dear Dr Porter,f he [NelsonRees] and other ebers of the Council

consider that his apolog for having "offended DrPathak is enough to close the subect, the ae istakenHis nehcal conduct is not entioned and it is theonl subect of iportance for the TC A and for an reputable scientist If he cannot be reoved fo officeor forced to resign because the TC A constitution has noprovision for such a contingenc, he ust at least beade to acknowledge his unethical conduct which inci

dentl is no l iited to this occurrence ) He shouldno longer be allowed to review articles without soe safeguard to the people whose reputations he tries to destroThe onl wa this can be done is to infor the ebership as well as the editors of the various ournals in whichhis coents have appeared

Porter answered

Dear Relda: Unofficiall, I would urge ou to forget the incident Ihave heard soe ver abusive attacks of one scientiston another at scientific eetings and the did not becoethe business of the societ or institution sponsoringthe eeting to settle The TCA cannot undertake to censure, punish or even repriand its ebers for "unethical behavior As I have said before, Walter was dulelected and cannot be reoved fro office without

going back to the ebership of the Association I do notthink that ou could influence the required pluralit

What amazed NesonRees was tat nowhere amidthe outcry over his Denver recita was there any discus-sion of the merits of his argument, no effor made to de



Shoo 1 2 1

termine whether the results reporte by Pathak an com-

pany were trumped up as NelsonRees ha chargeThey ha claime that his methos for fingering a cellline as Hea were in oubt an by extension his hit istsand othe reports were wrong We NesonReescouln't san being to he was wrong And it incensehim that no one care to consider the substance of hisrebuttal

After he Denver meeing he sent off a stinging cri-tique to Bailar at the Joual of the National Cancer Institute restating an amplifying his argument ThePathak repot he wrote shoul not be pubishe unessits "entire concept is atere He questione its " sincer-ity an merit an accuse the authors o resorting to"photographic ticery in thei presentation of the chro-mosome evience As fo the enzyme ata he wrote it

may we be true that thirteen out of fifeen enzymesteste were the same as Hea's ; bu two of them the twomost useful for ientifying Hea cels were differentHence the system hols up No one wou mistake hesecels for ea as Pathak an Cailleau's gang haclaime

ike hs speech in Denver however these criticismswere ignore The paper barely revise from the original

version was publishe in Febuary 979

When they wee aske about i years ater the An-erson researchers insiste they ha never set out to iscreit NelsonRees's years of crusaing as he ha some-how imagine It ha al begun as a simple stuy ofchromosomes in fresh tissue samples Pathak wante tofin out if he efects obseve in chromosomes of cul-

ture cells esulte somehow from extene growth in alaboratory ish Or i cancer cells taken fresh from a pa-tient show abnormal chromosomes as well ? Cailleau habeen supplying him with fresh pleural effusions An oneay they simply stumble across this unusua bunch ofcells containing chromosomes similar to Hea markers



122 A Consiracy o Cells

T.. Hs the senior ytogenetst in the lab

thoght the inding raised an important point in the r-rent limate o HeLaphobia . In most ases said Hs perhaps 98 perent o them a ell that has HeLa markers isprobably HeLa. Bt thse markers may not be niqe toHeLa; they may be rated by som gneral mishap oaner. So thr may be a ew ases in whih a ell arriesHeLalike hromosomes and yet is something qite dierent.

"The indings so shoked NelsonRees he thoght itroked the ondations o all his work xplained Hs."Bt it didn't really rok his ondations .

"We were simply rging ation when diagnosingels as HeLa added Pathak "not disagreeing with allhis reslts

Still in their pblished report and in ollowp arti-

les and letters to ertain olleages Hs Pathak andaillea repeatedly waed against relying on hromo-somes alone rerring to NelsonRees by name and sggesting that h had oolishly done jst thatwhen henever had.

As or their need to reate a olage breaking withthe traditional means o omparing hromosomes in elllines they explained that resh tisse sampes are always

a mess arrying all kinds o bodily byprodts that areeventally iltered ot o a longterm ell ltre . So in aresh pleral eson it is diilt to take lear photo-graphs o all the marker hromosomes within a singleell.

"The omposite was prepared in order to show an ex-ample that was leart to the ntrained eye said ail-lea.

As Flandermeyer oten pointed ot thogh theidentiiation o hromosomes entails a great dea ojdgment. "There's an art to it and i yo're not arelyo an inorporate yor bias he one said thinkng othe Denver aair. "Yo an make things onorm towhat yo expet espeially i yo pik arond hoosing



Showdow 23

one chromosome from one cell and another rom thenext.

The presence of specific enzymes inside a cell ismch ess amigos, and therefore far more resistant, toan investigator's bias. On the other hand, the choice ofwhich enzymes to look for and the order in which theyare checked can create certain impressions.

Stephen O'Brien, an enzymologist at the NationalCancer Institte and an aly of NelsonRees, was pzzledby the Anderson grop's need to check fifteen enzymesin their breast cells before finding two that differed fromHeLa's. Had he been doing the experiment, O'Brien saidafter reading the report, he would have analyzed perhapssix, and the two mismatches wold have been among thefirst.

Bt according to Siciiano, the enzyme expert who

collaborated with Hs, Pathak, and Cailea, the fifteenenzymes they checked were the standards, the ones theychecked rotiney. It jst so happened the two thattrned ot to be different from eLa's were tested last.

Like his colleages, Siciliano insisted the report wasnot intended to discredit NelsonRees or to knock thefondation ot from nder his pblished findings. "Idon't think there was any stf in his pblished papers

that's reftable, he said.Why, then, the comment that NelsonRees's se ofonly three enzymes is overly simplistic?

"Mo st of the cells on his lists came from white donors, explained Siciliano, "so testing for ony one enzyme, G6PD, was enogh. Bt I was concerned for the ftre as more lacks donate tisse cltres, as they'redoing in instittions like ors .

Motives, aas, are sippery fsh. It is difficut for anyone to know what the Denver blowp was reay aabot. Anyone bt NesonRees, that is, to whom thetrth was obvios.

"This grop of people was trying to destroy years of



124 A Conspracy of Clls

carefu work and promotion of the se of good ce ines, 1 1

he said after the incident It was just a case of this beingput together to cause embarrassment to me

"You know, I didn't impugn their reputations,' assome said of my rebutta at Denver I caed them abso-ute shits They were the ones who were unscientificad unethica, not me 1 1



1 3

Even the Best of Labs

Oe o e oebk o NeoRee e , , bu e Lhee oy the eo e y e oeue lye e oy eou o x u e eo hoe of u wo ko we'e o, h que eev

I obe 9 8, Jo k, eveoe o e k o-o ve, fou eo of e k Iue

wee oe eee pe pooy e eee t Jo k ee fo oe e exeo e e be ko e eh tke ove oe of his e e

k h uy ee of eL keove yeee, bu ' poke of puby u h o-be u ee of eve hue e boo ve expe e ke Loe Ne

Yok The ee D k w eb ee of expee e h oute o e e e e ae 950 Te e w o y o e e ' ue ye o ob oe by e- e jeo of foe e Te foee e o e of okey e ue, e e




line that supplied the cultures in which he had grown polio viruses to develop his faous vaccine Salk believedthese onkey cells had certain anigens, certain bioceical identification tags, in coon with cancercells He hoped that by activating the patients' imunesystes against the onkey cells, he ight trigger an at-tack against the cancer as well

Strangely enough, Salk told his attentive audience,where he injected the cells, soe of his patients developed tuors The distinguished scientiststatesanflashed a few slides of human ars carrying pea andalmondsized abcesses, and he said cally that in retrospec he believed those cels ay ot have been hisharless onkey heart cells at all, but HeLa cells

Well, a nervous urur filled the auditoriu andthere were a couple of gasps as Salk's colleagues tried to

envision hi aking the rounds wih Henrietta Lackshiding in his hypoderic, a deterined Jonas Salk shooting up dying patients with an extra dose of overactivecancer cells

Salk added quickly that the ugly little nots dissi-pated in no tie, ost of the in three weeks, never toreturn Apparently he hadn't helped ost of the patientswith these ijectionsalthough one an did undergo a

rearkable reissio and live another eighteen yearsbut neither had he given the any ore cancer than theyalready had And that was the whole point of his talk toreport that even when injected directly into huan beings, HeLa cells do not cause cancer

A rather bizarre conclusion to present, perhaps, ex-cept that this was a conference about the aking of vaccines In particular it was about the use of cells in aking

vaccines For the last few decades, there had been a run-ning arguent in this crowd over whether socalled con-tiuous cell lines that is, esablished cultures that con-tinue to reproduce theselves apparently wthout end are safe " substrates, safe soil, so to speak, in which togrow viruses to be use in vaccines Or was there a





1 28 A Conspracy of Cells

scrbed m, coud be trpped up by HeLa tarnsed te

mage consderaby On e oter and, ere was a perfect demonstraton of wat Nesonees ad beenpreacng a aong Wtout eterna vgance, HeLa candrop n on even te best of abs and te bggest of names

esonees, of course, ad to be sure Sak ad sadony tat other scentsts ad reported hs "monkeyces to be HeLa; Sak ad never cecked tem msefSo when t came tme for questons, Nesonees stoodup and, as a few n the audence groaned and sook terheads, ofered s servces If Sak st ad sampes of tetwentyyearod cutures, Nesonees sad, tey coudbe ceary dentfed

Sak gracousy accepted Nesonees's very pubcoffer

e foowng week Nesonees dropped n on Sakat s nsttute n La oa a sprawng sxstory concreteabyrnt but around a courtyard, a of t set upon ghcffs oveookng te Pacfc He was shown nto Sak'soffce, a woodpaneed sanctum on te fft foor Gusad anggders rode te couds ust outsde te wndowNesonees catted brefy wt Sak, pcked up severasampes of the ce ne CH, cynomoogous eart, ad eftfor Oakad

So, t does appen even to te frst strng, tougtNesonees two months ater, even to te ttans of scence Sak's monkey ces sowed no sgns of monkeycromosomes But, as Nesonees sad n a etter toSak, tey dd contan fve of HeLa's "wepubczedmarker cromosomes as we as the type A G6PD en-zyme

Sak wrote back tankng esonees for s work

He added tat e ooked forward to foowup dscus-sons

But te foowup dscussons never took paceSak's reacton, n fact, wasn't very dfferent from many



Evn th Bst of Lbs 1 29

of eLa's less lustrious victis Not that he foughtNelsonRees's conclusion in the scientific press or evenargued with hi personally But deep down, he justcouldn't buy it

"I t ay wel l be the whole thing is due to containa-tion, but it bugs e everytie I think about it in our ownlab, 1 1 he said a few years ater "Of course, no one is i-une yet how it got here and how it could have hap-pened is very ysterious to e 1

This was not Relda Cailleau pounding a fist on thetable As he reinisced, he was relaed, in control,speaking with the quiet ntensity of a deep thinker

"If t is due to containation, then I ask yself,Why hasn't it been observed for other cels that are noteLa? Why don't other cells crisscross? Why onyeLa? ' 11

These are the sae questions NelsonRees had beenasked a hundred ties by scientsts hoping to elude thestiga of a eLa iup So any reseachers were un-der the ipression that only eLa preepted its fellowcell lines Their arguet went "It just doesn't akesense that no other cel ine would isbehave this way,and therefore it ust not be happening 11

But other cell lines do trespass on their neighbors

All the tie Besides his eLa studies, NelsonRees hadpublished reports listing dozens of noneLa iups hehad uncovered Rat cells had overtaken a huan breastculture, huan cells had infiltrated a gibbon line, ha-ster cells were in where te arosets were supposed tobe, and dog cells were running wild aong the inksSure, as an individual containator, eLa had no equal By no eans, however, was it the only cell line that

sneaked in where it didn't belongBut Salk had another theory to offer Isn't it possibethat all cells in longter culture take on certain co-on characteristics? We ay think of these as eLa'straits, but aybe they are the universa traits toward




which all cel ls drft. If human beings emerged from mon-keys and apes picking up new traits as they evolved whycouldn't the same thing happen to cells in culture?

"Perhaps something fundamental occurs that ex-presses genes of evolutionary siificance. This wouldnot be a trivial observation he said. He talked of silentgenes gaining voice "just an intuitive notion you understand "still in the form of an hypothesis. And yetmaybe the apparent prolieration of HeLa cells is some-thing far more significant. Maybe there's an alteativeinterpretation to these observations something monumental said Salklike Flemings recognition of whatthe penicllin mold was doing to his staphylococcus bac-teria!

This was nothing more than a warmedover versiono the argument Stan arer got when he unveiled the

very first HeLa list in 1966. Wasn't it possible that somecells simply changed their 6PD enzyme from type B toA? arer and a Canadian researcher named NellieAuersperg answered that question by growing one hu-man cell ine for three full years monitoring three of itsenzymes closely and finding no such "evolution. Nochange even after they subjected the cultures to suchtriggers of evolutionary change as hormones bacteria vi-

ruses and X rays . Cyril Stulberg and Ward Peterson at theChild Research Center in Detroit performed a related experiment a few years later following the progress of athroat cancer line for two years with no sign of a changein its 6PD.

Similarly in more than five years spent carefully examining human cell lines NelsonRees never once saw aculture gradually develop HeLa marker chromosomes as

if it were evolving into some universal HeLalike beast.When a HeLa takeover happened it was always jst asyou'd expect in a cellular coup quick and compete. Suddenly a culture had HeLa chromosomes not just one buta whole family of markers and they were accompaniedby HeLa enzymes and other genetic markers that hadn't



Een the Best of Labs 13

been there before; an acrosstheboard changeover

scarcely the kind of gradal metamorphosis that evo-tion wold bring abot .

Despite the evidence against it this evoltionarytheory of a niversa drift toward HeLa had a loyal fol-lowing.

I dont dobt for a moment what elsonRees ob-served in the monkey cells bt its all a qestion of interpretation said Salk. I still dont want to throw ot thenotion that it may be de to evoltionary change.

I m trying to extract meaning ot of these observations. Is this an example of evoltion in the lab or is itcontamination

A thoghtfl pase .I ll entertain al the possible explanations ntil we

know. Im enogh of a scientist to entertain both expla-

nations.





1 4

The Lite Dutch Boy

wn own ouWasnton an no ona Canc Instu su-dny shft con n a 7s Pat of was acan n t poca cma Fank Rausc snas cto of nsu, an Jmmy Ca nsaAu Upton as s pacmnt Fom co of Bookavn atona Laoaoy, Upon a on nnst n a azas of aaon o t was

ony natua a un s uanc, nsut woucom mo concn wh soca nvonmn-a causs o canc an t was un xon's man Rau-sc, wo was so oouy a voos vn a avus nam aft m

Bu t was mo on on an a smp cannof h cfs

By a '7s, qust fo va caus of can-

c smpy n' av muc o sow T w a ot ofamazn fns a sc ouns of asc ooyan w an o h nc nnn vouon oft '8s But a n poss n unn upth caus an th cu at vyon s ou o fn wnt Natona Canc Ac was pass n 7 I was now



1 3 A Consrcy of Cells

clear that cancer was a complex family of diseases with

many possible causes The unsung scientists who hadbeen studying nonviral agents figured it was about timethey were handed a larger hunk of the pie

Meanwhile Americans were eginning to lean justhow poisonous a and they lived in In 1 9 76, the institutepublished terrifying colorcoded maps showing that spe-cific cancers were native to certain parts of the countryThe Northeast specialized in lung cancer, the Carolinasoffered nose and throat cancer, and much of the Mdwestand Texas featured leukemia. Suddenly that chemicalstench along the northern end of the New Jersey Tu-pike took on a horrible new significance, as did the hazeover the refineries of the Gulf Coast and, later, those bur-ied drums that turned up in the quiet community of LoveCanal, New York. In the public mind, cancer was nolonger the work of some mysterious microscopic bug, butsomething from the "environment, which is to say fromthe neighborhoodsomething you could actually see,smell, and tasteand that made it all the more terrifying.

n late 1978 the Carter administration pushedthrough a new law requiring federal researchers to testthe carcinogenic powers of chemicals and lowlevel radi

ation. It called for lists to be published every year describing known or suspected cancer agents And it mandatedthat the institute expand its study of cancer prevention,including such strategies as proper nutrition and limitson the spread of hazardous industrial materials and envi-ronmenta pollutants But because the institute's budgetwas to grow only slightly, something had to give to makeway for the new priorities Ad the most vulnerable part

of the program was the vral cancer effortThe resulting slowdown in viral cancer researchcould easily have threatened the Oakland lab, since celllines had always been the raw material for viral work.Strangely enough, there were no signs of trouble duringthe late '70s. Oh, every now and then Jim Duff or some



The ttle Duth oy 35

oher visiing oicil wold sk elsonees coldnhe Oklnd operion be done on smller scle? Orcoldn hey move i o Behesd o be consolidedwih some o he insies oher lborories ? B elsonees convinced h he lbs prowess semmed direcly rom is lvish endowmenin good s in qliy eqipmen in pleny o ime o be pinskinglycrelwold lwys rge lodly gins i. Solodly in c h even hrough closed oice doorsers cold her him "Js leve s lone so h wecn do or obs properly nd well! elsonees knewoo h ny operion ensconced in Behesd wold hvenone o he reedom h mde Oklnd so eecive. Henever rised his poin hogh. Mosly he rned bohow perecion reqires resources nd hey lwysdropped i.

o he chnging winds hd no ye reched Oklnd. In c he rn o he decde ws looking like boomime or elsoneess crsde. He nd Sevenson illyconvinced he edior o he Tisse Clre Associionsjornl In Vito, o reqire ll cconing o cell linessed in pblished sdies. ow n hor hd o speciyhe spplier o the cel ls he sdied nd he vrios esshe sed o conirm he presmed chrcerisics o he

cells inclding species sex rce nd ge o he donor. Ihe perormed no sch ess he hd o own p o h inhe repor. esonees nd Sevenson considered i smll b signicn vicory.

Wh s more Sevenson le he insie s FrederickCncer Cener in 1979 o ke over s direcor o heAmericn Type Clre Collecion. Ever since he erly60s when he ws he insie rying o mke he col

lecion he nions cenrl cell reposiory he el ihdn lived p o is irsclss poenil. As le s 1 979he plce ws sill pssing o some o he HeLconmined clres o he 60s nder heir originl nmes ndwiho clerlyworded wrnings. The collecon lsohd bonil spply o genine cell l ines h mos re




searchers didn't seem to know about As its new director,

Stevenson aimed to clean the place up and then promotethe hell out of it With him at the collection and Nelson-Rees at Oakland, two of the world's most valuable bio-logical stockpiles were being cared for by the two mostdevoted brothers of the Order of the Unspoied Cell

As it happened, the tu of the decade was an exce-lent season for HeLa hunting too NelsonRees, Flandermeyer, and a recently hired technician named DavidDaniels uncovered HeLa cells masquerading as a liverculture in West Germany hey found eLa lurking inthree supposedly different cell lines from China, whichthey dubbed, "the gang of three But o all the investigations that NelsonRees and the troops launched inthis boom time, he case involving the cells of the littleDutch boy was the most mpressive

In October 9 79 reserchers at Penn Sate Universitypublished a report in Science supporting a controversialclaim that tiny amounts of radiaton can kill cells causegenetic damage, and trigger cncer hey exposed humankidney cells known as to various levels of gamma radiation and found that some were killed even by extremely low doses NelsonRees had never heard of the

cell line, and he was puzzled by a statement in the re-port suggesting the culture was more than twenty yearsold If, as the report impled, hese cells were normthat is, noncancerousthey would probably have gonethrough their allotted fifty to sixty doublings and died offlong ago

When he called Paul odd, one of the authors, andidentified himself, odd said, "I had a feeling I would be

hearing from you one of these days NelsonRees couldscarcely believe it when odd explained that three yearsearlier he and his coworkers tried to submit their cellline to the American ype Culture Collection but wereturned down because K. S Lavappa, the collection 's chromosome expert, found HeLa markers in it





13 A onra of el l

in som o h clars, mos conincing mgshos hlab ad r prodcd hy also rpord h lack o anyY chromosoms, dspi h ac ha h dono was aboy. All nin HLA anigns sd in hs " kidny clls machd hos o HLa, as did all igh nym ariansh odds o hs biochmical ingrprins bing idnicalprly by chanc wr lss han on in a million .

was an airigh cas agains h Pnn Sa clr .aing dg hrogh h lirar, hogh, lsonRsralid ha Unisiy Park, Pnnsylania, was onlyon o many sops h T1 cl lin had mad Orwny yars arios srains o T1 had bcom h aois o radiaion halh rsarchrs all arond hworld. To lsonRs i lookd as i a T1 maia hadqily gaind conro o h nir ild. Mch o whawas known abo h harm inlicd on hman clls by

radiaion, and mch o wha inlncd say sandardsand gidlins o radiaion xposr, was apparnlybasd on xprimns wih T1. H dcidd h cascold no b closd nil h had rondd p h nirgang.

Th Pnn Sa clls wr ancsors o a sampl oT 1 ha Todd had obaind rom sarchrs a LawrncBrky Laboraory n Caliornia, who had also sn

som o colags a h Los Alamos Sciniic aboaor in w Mxico. Th Bkly sciniss go hirsrom a Dch rsachr namd G.W. Barndsn, who gohis rom an dr n himsl sonRs racd hrail, asking or samps rom ry lab along h way hn go an dr n o snd a cur rom a ronsock o y aly inag. n Ags o 1980, Sciecepbishd his rconsrcion o h who aair. was

an invsigaiv or d orc Fi srains o T1 clsrom aboraoris as ar apar as Brkly and Urchshowd prcisly h sam incriminaing characrisicso HLa

Sciece also ran a nws analysis lik h o ha accompanid lsonRs s is hi is. Tid "Th Cas



The Lttle Dutch Bo 13

of the Unmentioned Malignancy, the article made hay

of the Penn State researchers' decision not to report theHeLa contamination of their cell ine. NelsonRees triedto be tactl when asked for his comment. He noted theattempts by Todd's grop to present the inormation inother, earlier reports. "I don't think that they swalowedthe whistle, he was qoted as saying. "Bt they cer-tainly didn't blow it. A cople of newspapers and maga-zines played the incident like a minor scandal.

The qestion o what HeLa's latest charade reallymeant or radiation research and existing standards, nortnately, was never settled. Todd and associatesclaimed that even i T were a HeLa cltre, it woldn'tchange their rests. There was no evidence that a cancercell wod respond to radiation any dierently from anormal cell, they said. One biophysicist at the Argonne

National Laboratory, however, had observed that tmorcells srvive some types of radiation signiicantly betterthan normal cells. She wrote an angry letter to ciencecomplaining abot the Penn State stdy. Bob Stevensonjoined the ray too, writing to Todd's grop that it was"pretty shoddy to se eLacontaminated cells in anexperiment withot revealing it. He was so angry, n act,he also wrote to the institte's grant oicers who were

ndng the Penn State team to make sre they knewabot it.All in all, it was a highly visible demonstration o

the Oakland team's powers of investigation and prosec-tion. In celebration, Daniels and a ew o the other labworkers presented NelsonRees with a small gardeningtool labeed " oical mck rake

st abot that time, an ominos bnch of letters

went ot rom the institte's biological carcinogenesisbranch, the direct descendant o the old viral cancer ofice. In light o "possible bdget redctions, the letterssaid, the institte was polling people who recenly hadobtained cells from NelsonRees or had asked his lab toidentify nknown cltres. How heavily did these people





1 5

Battle Fatigue

I euay o 98, oademeye atteded a coeece a acsco ogeetc egeeg, wc, uke most scetc co-eeces ademeye ad ee to, was cawg wtcopoate eseaces Te mapuao o gees was e-comg g usess

ademeye wet to a tak aout teeo, a atu-a pote tat sowed some aty to gt o vuses

ad coto te spead o ceta caces ecety ea-tued o te cove o Tim teeo was ow egsyteszed y may o te ew ms, wose dectosoped to cas o ts wodedug poteta ade-meye ead a eow om Geetec, one o the gatsn te ed, desce ow tey tested te potecy o teteeo ey teated sevea cutues o ces wt d-eet doses o te chemca, te ated ow we tose

ces wtstood assauts y oste vuses Te ce eouey used o te test, sad te ma om Geetec,was a cutue o oma uma amo tssue caedWI

ademeye tougt I souded ama, uteoe sayng aytg e teepoed te a



12 A onspracy of ells

"WISH, of course! bellowed NelsonRees. "WistarInstitute Susan Hayflick. That was the amniotic sac inwhich Leonard Hayflick's daughter was delivered. Hemade a big oke about it when Stan Gartler claimed itwas HeLa in 1 966

Flandermeyer said he'd better go tell the genetic en-gineer.

Over the next few weeks, NelsonRees thought a lotabout that simple phone conversation. It occurred to himthat the current boom in bioengineering was very differ-ent from the biomedical boom in the 70s. The motivation then was "The War. The glorious dream of conquering cancer had pumped billions of dollars intoresearch and attracted hundreds of eager recruits. Nowthe motivation was profit. These outfits were businesses,and the pressure to be the first with a new product

stemmed from commercial competition. Furthermore,proprieary information and corporate secrets were thestandard rules by which these new people played. Busi-nessmen don't openly share the details of their manufacturing processes, even if their factories are living cellsand bacteria, their foremen molecular biologists .

Not that there was anythig wrong with Genentech's using HeLa cells to test interferon. Since the cells

were serving strictly as targets for viruses, the potencyratings were probably valid as long as the company al-ways used the same cel line. What bothered NelsonRees was that the people at Genentech were calling thesecells human amnion. Te didn 't kn ow They mightnever have known if Bob Flandermeyer hadn't wanderedin and told them. And if they didn't know in this case,they might not know in cases where it really matters.

Ater all, these researchers were playing around withgenes, snipping a few out of one cell and splicing them inamong those of another. Well, scientists knew enough tosay that genes control everything but they had barely aclue about which of the thousands of individual genes directed this function or determined that characteristic.



Btte Ftgue 143

Cancer researchers, for instance, had just lately found outabout the oncogenes, a mysterious bunch of genetic ele-ments that usually sit dormant upon the human chromo-some but that may under certain conditions n certaincells " turn on and trigger cancer Which only meant toelsonRees that as these bioengineers are cutting andpasting up genes to create hormones and drugs and otherthings intended to go into human bodies, they'd better bedamned sure they know what cells they're finagling

That one short phone call from Flandermeyer madeelsonRees realize this was probably one of the worsttimes to abandon the crusade, and yet that' s exactly whathe was considering dong It had been frustrating for himthese last few months: trying to run the cell culture labat less than full strength and at the same time keep thecrusade going Everyone was putting in extra hours Still

he knew the cutbacks had only begun, and any addedload would be too much to handle if they were to keep upthe quality of work that the labthat hehad alwaysbeen known for David Daniels said the place was start-ing to take on the look of "a maandpa operation Thatphrase stuck with elsonRees, grating on his perfection-ism like a burr in his boot

The funding cutback was really the last of a series of

frustrations Although he rarely showed it and never dis-cussed i t even with close friends, elsonRees was wearyof the battle e was in a business that generated ene-mies, not allies Even the Tissue Culture Association,the scientific group that ought to have been cheerleadinghim on, only tolerated him after the blowup in Denverseveral years earlier The latest order from the instituteto defend the lab 's existence in spite of what he felt was a

glorious record reminded him once again that not every-one thought hs contribution was so vital

"I don't think Walter felt anyone fully appreciatedthe value of the work he had done, Jim Duff once ob-served "You know, they don't award Nobel Prizes forfinding out that things are wrong




So in Mch NlsonRs clld th st toth

nd gv subdud littl spch bout th cutbcks, ps-nt nd utu, sying in shot tht you cn't iht cu-sd without undin Diicult s it would b, h sid, hwould b quitting towd th nd o th y Not justquitting th lb nd moving on, but lving sch n-tily H plnnd to dvot his tim to th smll t l-lry h nd rind hd n oprting out of his homth pst w yrs

Quitting, just lik tht

NlsonRs iud scldown cll cultu lbwould continu t Oklnd But t his signtion thburucts nnouncd tht th fcility would b shutdown compltly by th nd o th nxt yr It lookd si h hd plyd ight into thi hnds hy sid thy

would ng to hv th 2000 cll cultus tnsdto th zs o th Amicn Typ Cultur Collction,lthough thy could povid no unds o th mint-nnc nd distibution o th clls As o th Oklndlb's srvic o chcking th idntity o cultus, thywn't stting up ny substitut o tht Wd Ptrsonin Dtoit could do th nzym tstin h hd lwysdon s wll s som o th simpl chomsoml

chcks But schrs would hv to py o th nlysis"I'll hv to think vy cully now bo snding

som cultur out to b chckd/' sid on cndid scin-tist whn kd bout th loss of th Oklnd lb "Whnit ws ll , w snt things out ll th tim It ws tmndous hlp But now, t tw o th hundd dollrs shot

Evn mo thn th loss o th svic, though, sommound h loss o th cusd himsl Ptrson wotto NlsonRs, "As th most ticult mongst smllgoup tht hs pomulgtd th uls, you ol s thpoint mn will gtly b missd Tht ws th lwory o th w cnc schs nd cll biologists



Bl u 145

who had appreciated elsonRees Who was to carry onPeterson was concerned aout cell line screwups, ut hewas no zealot Stevenson would contnue his issionarwork, of course, in a tactful and politicall senstive waBut challenging colleagues at pulic eetings naignaes in journals, aking an occasioal sceethatjus t wasn't their stle

There were a few protests to the insttute ne scie-tist called elsonRees a natonal resource/ and estiated that spotting suspicious cell lines he ad pro-al prevented the waste of tens of illions, if nothundreds of illions of research dollars he institutewas unipressed The feeling, at least aong certain of-ficials, was that these worries were held over fro theold das, the unenlightened das when cell cultureneeded to e activel policed

NelsonRees a have ee eactl the rght per-son for that tie, eplained one ureaucrat A oresutle and conciliato stle ight ot hae spreadknowledge of the extet of Hea contaiation through-out the world ack then Toda, however, I would hopethat there is sufficient awareness and sufficient epertisethat a of these potential thngs would e avoided orcaugh quickl

With elsonRees off the scene, that was aout allthe could do hope that nothing went wrong





1 6

eacy

n a rampd and lttrdoffi at Montfior Hospital in th Bronx, thr stands akind of monmnt to lsonRs and his rsad.Takd onto th door fram is a slightly yllowd opy ofhis third and final hit list, pblishd in April 1 98 1 , jst afw wks aftr h annond h was qitting.

This s th offi of Frtz Hrz, hif of th tiss l

tr stion in th hospital 's pathology dpartmnt. Fivtims a yar, Hrz holds a sminar in th art of ltringlls. H starts with a dmonstration of th basis, r-minding his stdnts nvr to fd diffrnt lls fromth sam piptt "Look, h tlls thm, " I'm throwingth piptt away and nds with th story abot Hnritta Laks, Waltr lsonRs, and th list.

Things ar not always what thy sm, Hrz x

plains, pointing to th thr fll pags that fatr sholdis as WISH and Rlda Cailla's MAC21 plstwntytwo nw Laontaminatd ltrs novrdby lsonRs, Flandrmyr, and Danils in th lastopl of yars thy workd togthr. inty ll linsin all. Bob Stvnson gssd that was abot a third of



4 A Conspcy of Cs

he ore popuar ce es used cacer ad reaed re-

search : oe ou of every hree ce es was a posor"I ' s very pora ha you kow wha your ces

ae, ha you kow hey are o ea, ez es he res-des, he europahoogss, ad he oher youg scess who coe hrough hs lab " If you're soppy ad youdo' care ad you're o coed o perfeco, you'lsoo fd your ow work pred o a s ke hs

Tha was how NesoRees ef hs ark fewoya fas, a couple of dscples who preached herow sa parshes e had uagled ch of he o-rass creaed by erea acks 's raway ces, bu ocehe ef hs pos, here was o guaraee ha hgs wouldsay uaged The bureaucras were hopg h hecoecve coscousess of edca reserch had beepropped up o were o oge eeded o be agged

bou soppy echque ad wasefu xps Bu f everhere was a persuasve age agas ha kd ofhking, hs s was Jus becuse NesoRees hadgo ou of he busess, s ey eres seeed o say,ha dd' ea he ghos of eea acks was rer-g

Whch proved o be absoely correcMcroboogca ssocaes, for exape, he co

pay ha creaed he eacoaaed cuure caedM 60 hree years before he pubcaio of hs ass, had chaged s ae o M Boproducs bu adeno chage s caaogue descrpo of M60 A-hough NesoRees ad hafadoze depede sceiss had cocuded by he d '70s ha he cuure wasohg b cervica cacer ces fro a back woa,he copay coued seg i hrough 98 as "pros

ae, beig, hua adu I he fal of ha sae year, as NesoRees wasceang ou hs fe cabes Oakad, a ew sudy oprosae cacer was pubshed I was based o experes wh M 60 ad s deica, eacoaaedw EB33, he cuure NelsoRees had codeed



Lacy 149

1976 The olowng year, there appeared another sudybased n part on these two aduteratd cultures

n January 1 983 a team o Dutch, nnsh, and Amer-can researchers announced ther dscovery that the Uce lne, presumed to be a cuture o amnon ces tkenfrom a Dutch woman n 197, was actually ea

And n the sprng, NesonRees spoke wth a youngSan Dego researcher named Mark Bogart, who had re-cently checked thrty derent ce nes rom varous sc -entsts and ound that half were not what these scenstshad thought Bogart's methods were unsophstctedcompared to the technques NesonRees had used kethe eary tssue cutursts n the 1 90s , he could ony tespeces apart e knew that two mouse nes had eenjumped by a cuture o human ces, or exampe, but hecoudn't say whch human cuture that ws e knew

tha ten o the supposedy human cutures he anayzedwere ndeed human, but he had no dea whether heyhed the right human ces orwo knows ? perhapsthe ces o certan ady rom Batmore





1

Ep oue

Walter NelsonRees s nolonger chasng enretta Lacks but he keeps n touchwith a few colleagues and peruses the journals regularlyenough to know that she stll haunts the bomedcal labs .And sitting n hs home in Oakland, next to a wall flledwith impressionst pantngs, he s happy to delver a pr-vate sermon when asked why she endures .

There's more to the problem than a tenacious and

hardy cell culture, he says. eLa cells persist becausethey have always been helped along by a certain humanelement in science, an element connected to emotions,egos, a reluctance to admt mstakes, and many of theother things he used to lecture about .

"It's all humanan unwillingness to throw awayhours and hours of what was thought to be good research,worres about jeopardzng another grant that' s being ap-

plied for, the hurrying to come out wth a paper frst . Andit isn't limited to bology and cancer research. Scentstsin many endeavors all make mstakes, and they all havethe same problems.

Wade Parks, the vrologist who in 1972 exposed thefamous Russian cells as worthless carrers of a monkey





Acknowledgments

Th writin of this bookdpended upon the h of scors of peop ach ofwhom spent hours with me rcain events motionsevn convrsations that ook pac as on ao as twntyyears or thir wiinnss to rive thos times and tobe candid about hem I am vry ratfu My thanks asoto Robrt Stevnson of the merican Typ Cuture Co-

ection for aowin m accss to the fies of the formrBrky Ce Cutur Laboratory of which h is now thecustodian I am ratfu too to th peop at Science maazine for aowin m a brief ave of absnc to tstarted on this book and for puttin up with m after I r-turned to work and continud writin it in my "spartime Many thanks to Jack Goder who caoed m intoundrtakin this proct in th first pac and to Susan

Zckenorf who shard hr knowd o pubishin andher ra nthusasm

My spcia ratitud os to two peop who servdas unoficia itors and tirss cheradrs SusanWst and Eric Schrir Their detaid critiqus and sustions raty improvd evry draft chaptr nd with





ources

he following references offersoe historical perspective to the events described, as well asgreater technical depth for those who are interested t is b noans coprehensive

Chapter Special Delivery

"soation and Cultur of a Virus fro Huan Cancer Tis sue cence Nes 10 u 197 1 , p 2 1

"Race for Hua Cancer Vius Odds against Houstonea Lengthen cence 24 Septeber 19 7 1 , p 220.

"USA and USSR Counication in Cancer Research, boseph F Sauders, oscences Concatons 2, volue2, ( 976 ) p 98

Chapter The Seed hat Took

"Soe Aspects of the Constitution and Behavior of Noral and aignant Cells aintained in Continuous Culture, b George Ge, The avey Lec tes ees L (1 954- 1 955)Acadeic Press nc, New York, NY , p 1 54



15 A Cnsprcy f Cels

"George Oo Ge Te HeLa Cell and a Reappraisal of is

Origin, b Howard Jones Jr, Vicor A Mckusick, Peer S Harper, and Kuang-Dong Wuu, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Deceber 19 1 p 95

"Hisor of Tissue Culure a Jons Hopkins, b Frederick B Bang, Bulletin of the History of Medicine volue 51 19 p 5 16

Chaper 3. Heagram

"S udies on e Propagaion in Vio of Polioelius Viruses, b Will ia F Scerer, Jeroe Sveron, and George Ge, Joual of Experimental Medicine, volue 9 1953 p695

"Coninuous subculivaion of epielial-ike cells fonoral uan issues, b RS Cang, Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, volue 8

195 p 0"Te origin of alered cel l lines fro ouse, onke, and

an, as indicaed b croosoe and ransplanaion sudies, b KH Rofels, AA Axerad, L Siinovic, EAcCulloc, and RC Parker, Proceedings of the Third Canadian Cancer Conference, 1 959 p 1 89

"Te esablisen of a line WSH) of uan anioncells in coninuous cuivaion, b Leonard Haflick, Experimental Cell Research, volue 3 1961 p 1

"Resuls o f ess for e species of origin o f cell lines beans of e ixed aggluinaion reacion, b D Franks,B W Gurner, R R A Coobs, and R Sevenson, xperimentalCell Research, volue 8 1 96 p 608

" Collecion, Presevaion, Caracerizaion, and Disribuion of Cell Culures, b Rober E Sevenson, Proceedings ofthe Symposium on the Characterization and Uses of HumanDiploid Cell Strains, Opaia, Yugoslavia, 1963 p 1

"Geneic Markers as Tracers in Cel Culure, b Sanle

Garler, National Cancer Institute Monograph No. 6: Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and OrganCulture, 196 p 16

"Apparen HeLa Cell Conainaion of Human Heeroploid Cell Lines, b Sanle M Garler, Nature, Februar 1968 p 50



Sources 157

"Cell Culture Colection Committee in the United

States, by Robert E Stevenson, Cancer Cells in Culture edited by H Katsuta, University of Tokyo Press, 1 968, p 8 5

"Extrinsic Cell Contamination of Tissue Cultures, byCyril S Stulberg, Contamination in Tissue Culture editedby Jorgen Fog, Academic Pess, New York and London, 1 9 7,p 1

Chapter 4 . Out of Th n Ar

"Oncogenesis in Vitro, by Leonard Hayflick, NationalCancer Institute Monograph No. 6: Second Decennal Revew Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture 1967, p55

"Nutritional eeds of Mammaan Cells in Tissue Cultue, by Harr Eage, Science September 16, 1 955, p 51

"Common Antigens in Tissue Cultue Cell Lines, byLewis L Coriel, Milton G Tal, and Helen Gaskill, ScienceJly 25, 1958, p 198

"Detection and Elimination of Contaminating Organisms, by L Coriell, National Canc er Ins tit ut e Monograph No, April 1 962, p

"Glucose-6-phosphate Dehydrogenase Isoenzymes in Human Cell Cultures Determined by Sucrose-Aga Gel and Cellulose Acetate Zymogras, by W Peterson J, CS Stulbeg,

NK Swanborg, and AR Robinson, roceedings of the Societyof Experimental iology and Medicine volume 128, 1968, p772

"The Animal Cell Culture Collection, by CS Stulberg,L L Coriel, A J Kniazeff, and JE Shannon, In Vitro volume 5,19 7, p 1

"Oncornaviruslike particles in He La Cells, by H Bauer,JH Daams, KF Watson, K Moing, H Gelderbom, andW Schafer, Inteational oua of Cancer volume 1, 1974,

p 254"A Quest fo the Mechanism of 'Spontaneous MalgnantTransformation in Culture with Associated Advances in Culture Technology, by Katherine K Sanford and Virgnia JEvans, oua of the National Cancer Ins titu te June 1982, p895



18 A Consracy of Cels

Chapter 5. In The Pu rple Palace

solation o Oncornairuses ro Continuous HuanCell Cultures, Victor M Zhano, Valentine D Soloie,agir A Beeteiro, onstantin V lin, Alert Bos,iolai Mazureno, osi S rlin, an elix ersho, ntevology olue , 97, 9

Masonizer irus characterization : A siilar irus in ahuan aniotic cell line, W ars, RV Gilen, A

Bos et al, Joal of Voloy olue 2, 97, 540HeLaLie Marer Chroosoes an eA VariantGlucose6hoshate Dehrogenase soenze n HuanCell Cultures roucing Masonizer Mone VirusLie articles, WA elsonRees, V M Zhano, Hathorne,an RR lanereer, Joal of the Natonal ance nsttte Seteer 974, p 75

Chapter 7 Mug Shots

Quinacrine luorescent arotes o huan iloi anheteroloi lines, O J Miller, D A Miller, W Allerice,VG De, an M S Greal, ytogenetcs olue 0, 97, 8

solation o a Continuous Eithelio Cell Line, HB,ro a Huan Breast Carcinoa, Roert H Bassin, ErnestJ lata, Brena Gerin, Carl Mattern, Daniel Haaala,

an Elizaeth W Chu, oceengs of the ocety fo xeental ology an ecne oeer 972, 67

An Estalishe Cell Line (HB9 ro Huan BreastCarcinoa, Ernest J lata, aao Ao, Diane D Roertson, Elizaeth W Chu, an Brena Gern, Joal of theNatonal ance ns ttte Aril 97, 849

Bane Marer Chroosoes as nicators o ntrasecies Cellular Containation, Walter A elsonRees,Roert R lanereer, an aula Hathoe, cence

June 7, 974, p 09HeLa Cells Containating Cltures aroun the Worl Barara J Culliton, cence June 7, 9 74, 059

Huan Breast uor Cell Lines entit Ealuation Ultrastructure, Gertrue C Buehring an Aeline J Hacett, Joal of the Natonal ance nsttte Seteer 974, 62



Chapter 8 Spreadig the Word

Sources 15

"The estalishet o a Cell Strain (AC2 1 ) ro a ucoid Adeocarcioa o the Hua Lug y Relda Cail leauane esea, July 1960 p 87

"To Cell Lies (SH2 and SH) Deried ro Huareast Cacer y G. Sea S J Huter ad L Dochosieedins e A eian Ass ia in an e esea,oue 16 arch 1975 p 59

Chapter 9 Damage Repo

"Detectio ad solatio o a Ne DNA olyerase froHua reast Tuor Cel Lie HT y (d) 1 2 1 8 CeluloseChroatography y reda Geri ad Roert H assieedins e ainal Aadey Sienes, August

1 9 7 p 245"reset Status o A160 Cel Lie rostatic Epthelieu or HeLa Cells ? y uta Weer aul K Horaad Thoas R ouldi Invesiaive Uly, olue 141 977 p 5

Chapter 0 Proveace

"Spotaeous i itro Neoplastic Trasoratio o AdultHua rostatic Eptheliu y Eli E raley SideyEcer ad oroe Vicet Siene, Octoer 0 1970 p5 4 1

"Huan rostatic Carcioa i Cell Culture: reliiary Report o the Deelopet ad Characteriatio o aEpithelial Cell Lie (E ) y K Oada ad H Schroederlial esea, olue 2 1974 p 1 1 1

"Huan reast Cacer Cells i Cotiuous Cultiaiosed to Deterie Cheotherapy Sensitiity o the atietro Who They Are Deried y Rolad A attilo adAC Rucert eedins e Aeian Assiain ane esea, olue 16 arch 1975 p 145

"HeLa Cultures Deied y Walter A NesoRees adRoert R ladereyer Siene, Jauary 9 1976 p 96





Souces 1 6 1

Shannon, and Mitchell H Gail, In Vitro volume 1, 180, p

1 1

hapter 13 . Een the Best of Labs

"Some Characteristics of a Continuously Propagating CelDerived from Monkey Heart Tissue, by Joas E Salk and Esie Ward, Science December 2, 1 5, p 1 38

"Immunological Paradoxes : Theoretical Considerations in

the Rejection or Retention of Grafts, umors, and Normal Tissue, by Jonas Salk, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences October 14, 1, p 35

"Isozyme sability in human eteroploid cell lies, b y NAuersperg and SM Gartler, Experimental Cell Research volume , 1 0, p 45

"A Permanent Heteroploid Human Cell Line with Type BGlucosephosphate Dehydrogenase, by W Peterson Jr,C S Stulberg, and WF Simpson, Proceedings of the Society forExperimental Biology and Medicine April 1 1 , p 1 1 8

"Inter and Intraspecies Contamination of Human BreastTumor Cell Lines HBC and BrCa5 and Other Cel Cltures, byWalter A elsonRees and Robert R Fladermeyer, ScienceMarch 25, 1, p 1343

"The Identification and Monitoring of Cell Line Specificity, by Walter A elsonRees, he Origin and Natural History of Cell Lines edited by Claudio Barigozzi, Alan R Liss,Inc, ew York, 1 8, p 2 5

"The Spector of Malignancy and Criteria for Cell Lines as

Substrates for accines," by Jonas Salk, Cell Substrates andTheir Use in the Production of Vaccines and Other Biologicals edited by ohn C Petricciani, Hope E Hopps, and PaulChapple, Plenum Press, ew York and London, 1, p 10

"Characteristics o f HeLa strains : Permanent vs variabefeatures, by WA elsonRees, L Hunter, GJ Darlington,and SJ OBrien, Cytogenetics and Cell enetics volume 2,1 80, p 21

hapter 14. The Lile Dutch Bo

Atlas of Cancer Mortality for US Counties: 5 - 6by Thomas J Mason, Frank W McKay, Robert Hoover, Wi



16 A Consracy of Ces

a J Blot, an Joseph F Frauen Jr, S Departent o

Health, Euaton, an Welare ulaton o (H) 75 780 "E stablshent o o Huan Cell Strans ro Kne

an Retulosaroa o Lung, J an er Veen, L Bots, anA es, Arh ur e Gesate Vusorshung, oue 8,1958, p 20

" Coparson of the Efets o Varous ClotronroueFast eutrons on the Reproute Capat o Culture Hua Kne ( 1 ) Cells, aul o, Joseph Gera, au SFurntt, Ranal Ross, Funor age, Rhar B

heus, an Carter B Shro, In eaona Joua o adaon Oncoogy oogy yc olue 4, 19 78, p 1 0 15

"he Efets of Caffene on the Expresson of otentallLethal and Sulethal Daage n Gaarraate Cultureaalan Cell , Carter B Shro an aul o, adaon eeac oue 78, 19 79, p 12

"nataton o Huan Kne Cells HghEnergonoenerget Heaon Beas, Eleanor A Bae,Coeus A oas, ra CH ang, Karen C Sth, an

John Lan, adaon eeac olue 80, 1979, p 122" Ga Ras urther Eene or La o a hreshoDose for Lethalt to Hua Cells, aul S Furntt anaul o, cence toer 26, 1979, p 475

"1 Cells Are HeLa an ot o ora Huan Knergn, Walter A elsonRees, Roert R Flanereer,an Da W Danels, cence August 8, 1980, p 719

"Henr or Henretta? Te cono oeber 15,1 980, p 104

"he Case o th e nentone agnan, WllaJ Broa, cence Deeer 12, 1980, p 1229

Chapter egacy

"CrossContanaton o Cells n Culture, WA

elsonRees, DW Danels, an RR Flanereer, cenceAprl 24, 1 98 1 , p 446"he Surae Charater o Separate rostat Cels an

Culture Frolasts o rostat ssue as Deterne ConanaalnA Heasorpton, K sh, JC Ron,an F H Shroeer, Te oae olue 2, 1 98 1 , p 1 1

"onolonl Antoes to Huan rostate an Blaer



Sources 163

uorocite Antien Je J Strlin Sun

Sie r Becett ul Schellher eopolo E. n Geore riht Jr Cance eseac Auut1 982, p 084

" cell contin continnt illi C rihtSr e Chritin Holin ri Cntell Jco G pener n urt Hirchhorn Natue Jnur 27, 198, p279





Index

Abelson Philip 67 76Adle Rose 31Akeson Richad 1034 105

106Ameican ype Cultue Collec

tion 26 30 33 50 76 10013536 144

Amnion cell cultues 25 2914 1 14 9

M D Andeson Hospital andumo Institute 82 95 9699 105 108

issue Cultue Depatment10 8

Andromeda Strain, The 64Animal cells in cultue 1 7 25

35Animal iuses and cance 45

1 0 1 1

Antigens 96 100 1034 126description 103Agonne National Laboatoy

139Auespeg Nellie 130Auslandsdeutscher 4 7 5 1Autopsy tissue collection du

ing 2021

aila John C III 1 05 1 06 1 2 1"anded Make Chromosomes

as Indicatos of ItaspeciesCellula Contamination 71

aendsen W. 13 8assin Robet 64 65 66 67 68

82 8890 97eef embyo extact n ti ssue cul

tue 16 22

ioengineering See eneticengineeing

lood cell cultue 5lood supply of ceical tumos

1 4ogat Mak 149east tumo cell cultues

6163 6465 66678283 8889 95971 0 7 8 1 1 1 1 1 4 1 5

ezhne Leonid 3ookhaen Na tional Laboatoy133

own Spence 50ueing udy 61 6

Cadaeous cells in tssue cultue 2 1 22



1 66 A Conspiracy of Cel ls

Cailleau, Relda, 8082, 8586,

0 , 0 5 7, 0 8 , 13 1 , 6 , 17 , 2 0 2 , 2 2 2 3

Califoia State Health Department, 6

Cancercell characteristics of, 35environmental causes of, 33,

3epidermoid, 3 7immature glandular cel ls, 3 7

regional types of, 3viral causes of, 333 Seealso Viruses and cancer

Cancer, 96Cancer research and Hea con

tamination, 338Cancer researchers

attitudes of, 1 5 52Hea, use of, 2

Carcinogens, tests of, 3

Carter, Jimmy, 33Carter administration, 3"Case of th e Unmentioned Ma-

liancy, The, 3839 Cell banks, 2, 67, 2 6 , 3 6 , 5 ,

7678cleanliness requirements of,

23, 6, 556Cell Culture aboratory See un -

der University of Californiaat Berkeley

Cell culturesairline shipment of, 2care of, 55, 7"evolutionay change in,

3 0 3 spontaneous transformation

of, 335See also Tissue culture

Cell line contamination, 8, 29causes of, 775

researcher attitudes re, 775, 2 9 3 1 , 5 5 2

See also Hea contaminationCell lines

descriptions of in publishedstudies, 78, 35

mutations of, 29Se e also specific cell lines

Cell lines, identification of, 7 8

chromosome analysis, 78,423, 5660. See alsoMarker chromosomes forHeLa identification

chromosome banding , 2 ,43, 58, 83

conventiona karyology, 5 7 5 8cost of, isoenzyme assay, 2728, 109,

problems with, 2527See also G6PD enzyme assayCell markers for cell line identifi -

cation, 2627, 59, 60Center for Disease Control, 6Cervical cell culture, 8Cervical tumor cell culture,

7 8cadaverous cells, 21 22See also Hea cell line

Cervical tumorsdescription of, 1, 2treatment of, , 920

CH (cynomologous heart) cellline, 28

Chang, Robert, 30Chicken plasma in tissue cul

ture, 6, 8, 22Child Research Center of Michi

gan, 7, 3 6, 76 , 3 0 Chinese cell cultures, 36Chromosome analysis and cell

line identification, 78,423, 5660

in fresh tissue samples, 2Chromosome banding, 2,

3, 58, 83Chromosome research, 9 50Chromosomes, preparation for

examination, 5759Colchicine, 57

Coriell, ewis, 3, 76, 83, 8Culliton, Barbara, 72

Daniels, David, 3 6, 3 7 38 ,3, 7

Discoverer XVII satel lite, 2Down's Syndome, 58



Duff Jim 3 67 9 5 78 80

00 34 40 43Dugway Poing ound 49

B33 ell line 99 48 49lCo ell line 9697myoni ki dney cell ultue

25 6 62moy Uniesity 49nionmental auses of ane

33 34

nzymes an d ell line identifiation 36 05 23S alo Isoenzymes and ell

line identifiationnzymes in omosome

anding 58nzymes of iuses 8 8 89pidemoid ane 3 7

Flandemeye Bo 5658

6063 65 84 95 97 98 0 2 2 23 3 63 8 4 4 3 4 7

485t U S Amy Medial Colleting Company 49

Fedeik Cane Resea Cente S und National Cane Institute

" Fes Pleual ffusion fom aPatient wit Beast CaneSowing CaateistiHeLa makes 4 5

amma adiation effet of onell ultues 36

atle Stanley (Stan) 27336 5 72 74 76 98 0030 42

enente 442eneti engineeing 443"eneti Makes as aes in

Cell Cultue 28ewin Benda 8890ey eoge 4 9 20 2

2324 97ey Magaet 56 8 97iemsa stain 57 58luose metaolizing enzymes

S 6PD enyme assay

Indx 17

6PD enzyme assay 89

2 7 2 8 29 42 6 5 6 7 8 3 8 5 98 00 04 05 0 2330

Hackett Adeline 6 62Hate Bet 94Haad Uniesity 30Hayflik Leonad 2930 42Hayflik Susan 29HB3 ell l ine 6 62 63 65 67

68 75 8283 8890 97oigins 64HB39B ell line 63 66 67 75

8283 87Heat ell ultue 25 12527HK ell line 6 62 63 67 75HeLa ell line

ailine sipment of 1 2Euopean stain 3 7 38gowt ate of 8 24 33 34

63isoenzymes of 2 7 S aloIsoenzymes and ell lineidentification

mail deliey of 2324make omosomes of 43

6 67 97 00 05 09 0 4 5 6 2 2 2 3 3 0 3 3 73 8

oigins 8 3637tumos aused y injetions of

2 6 2 7HeLa ontamination 2730 33

4244 6269 84859 5 0 0 0 4 7 2 63 3638 4849

ane esea and 3438ontoesy e 0 8

2 9 3 ost of 879 00 45puliity e 6769 773

7 5 7 6 0 6 7HeLagam 2325Heneen W. K 6Hdta 6Hez Fitz 4748HLA antigens 00 37 38Hoofand mout disease 0 43Hsu S 089 2223




Institute for Medical Research,

34, 76, 83Interferon, 141, 142International Genetics Federa

tion, 50In Vito 78, 135Isoenzymes and cell line identifi

cation, 27 28 , 1 09, 1 1 4

Johns Hopkins Hospital, 14, 16,20, 3 7

foal o the National CaneInstitte, The 46, 103, 105,1 0 6 , 0 8 , 1 1 , 1 1 5 , 1 1 8 , 1 2 1

foal o Viology The, 4546fngvolk 4748

Karyology, conventional, 5758Karyotypes, 60

See also Chromosome analysisand cell line identification

Kidney cell cultures, 25, 61, 62,

136Kubicek, Mary 1 7 1 8, 20 21 ,

24, 9 7

Laboratory environments ' effectson cell cultures, 35, 30

Lacks, Henrietta, 1 2, 1 3 1 4,1 9 2

Larynx tumor cell culture, 25Lavappa, K S , 1 08, 1 1 6, 136 37Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory,

13 8Leiboitz, Albert, 1 1 7 1 8, 1 1 9Liposarcoma cell culture, 67Litton Bionetics, Inc, 104, 106Liver cell culture, 25, 30, 91, 136Los Alamos Scientific Laora-

tory, 138Los Angeles Heald Examine 7 1Love Canal, N Y, 134Lung cell culture, 80

Lung tumor cell culture, 1 03 7

M A Bioproducts, 1 48MA21 cell line, 80, 82, 85,

1047, 147MA 1 60 cell line, 97 99, 148 49

cell culture contamination,cost of, 9091

Marker chromosomes for HeLa

identification, 43, 61, 67, 97,10 0, 10 5 , 10 9, 1 0 1 1 , 1 14 ,1 1 5 , 1 1 6 , 1 2 2 2 3 , 1 3 0 3 1 ,1 3 7 3 8

Medical College of Wisconsin, 9 6Memorial SloanKettering Can

cer Center, 96Miami Heald 7 1Microbiological Associates, Ic ,

9798, 148

Miller, Bob, 84Moloney, John, 40 4 1 , 42, 43 44Montefiore Hospital, 147

National Cancer Act of 1971, 133National Cancer Institute, 1 2,

4, 26, 3945, 5960, 7677,87, 123, 133

budget reductions, 13940143

Emergency Virus Isolation Facility, building 41, 64, 66

Frederick Cancer ResearchCenter, 78

Naval Medical Center, 77NelsonRees, Walter Anthony

Army career, 4950Cell Culture Laboratory career,

56, 57, 60, 6369, 144childhood, 4 7 48

college career, 49, 50disciplinary action of Tissue

Culture Association, 1 1 8 20

disputes with fellow researchers, 8 0 82, 1 09 1 1 , 1 1 4 1 7,12324

elected vicepresident of Tissue Culture Association, 1 1 3

funding cuts, fights against,

13435, 13940"hit list publication, 6769,

100, 14748lectures on cell culture con

tamination, 7476, 7980newspaper articles re, 7173personality traits, 23, 51,

7980, 9395



publishing difficulties, 45 - 46,

7576Russian cell culture identifica

tion, 5-12, 946Nixon, Richard, 2, , 4, 9

Oakland Calif., 5, 9-94O'Brien, Stephen, 12, 17Oncogenes, 14

Parks, Wade, 1 0 1 1 , 1 2, 45, 5 1 ,

1 5 1 5 2Pathak, Sen, 105, 1 08, 1 1 1 ,

1 1 4 1 5 , 1 1 6 1 7 , 1 20, 1 2 1 ,1222

Pattillo, Roland, 96Penn State University, 16, 18,

1 9Peterson, Ward, 7-8, 76, 98, 100,

10, 144Pfizer Laboratories, 66

PGM/PGM3 is oenzyme assay,27, 100, 1 1 0Placental blood in tissue culture,

16, 22Plata, Ernest, 66, 82, 8788Pleasant, Eliza, 1Pleasant, John, 1Pleural effusions, 1 1 4 1 6,

1 2 1 - 22Polio vaccine development, 24Porter, Keith, 1 1 9, 20Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences, 89Prostate cell culture, 67, 97-98,

99, 148Provenance, 9495Purple Palace, The, 4 1 - 42

See also National CancerInstitute

Quarantine procedres for for

eign cell cultures, 10

Radiation, effect on cell cultures,1 6, 19

Radiation Oncology, 1 7Radiation therapy for cervical tu

mors, 14, 19Rauscher, Frank, 40, 42, 1

Index 1 69

Researcher attitudes re cell line

contamination, 7475,1 29 1 , 1 5 1 - 5 2

Reverse transcriptase, 8889Roller tubes, 18, 21

description, 15Russian cell cultures, , 5 - 6, 8

940, 67, 75analysis of , 7 -9, 1 0- 1 2, 61contamination, cost of, 90, 91

Salk, Jonas, 125-1Salk Institute, 125, 128San Francisco Chronicle, 72Schroeder, Frederick, 99Science, 67-69, 71, 72 74,

75 76, 90, 9 1 , 98, 1 6-7,1 8- 9

Science News, 1 0 1Scott and White Clinic, 1 1 7Scripps Research Institute, 1 7

Seman, Gabriel, 8, 84-85,95-96Se chromosomes and cell line

identification, 7-8See also Y chromosomes

SH2 cell line 82-84, 85SH cell line, 8 2- 84, 85, 95 96Sicliano, Michael , 105 108, 1 14,

12SovietAmerican relations, 4,

5 , 40Spontaneous transformation,

4-5, 98Stevenson, Robert (Bob, 76-79,

9 1 , 1 14 , 1 9, 1 5- 6, 1 9,147-48

Stulberg, Cyrl, 6, 76, 10

TCA See Tissue CultureAssociation

Time, 1 4 1

Tissue cultureo cadaveros cells, 2 1 - 22methods of, 1 5 - 1 9tissue collection for, 17See also Cell cultures

Tissue Culture Association, 29,0, 69, 78, 80, 81 , 1 07, 1 1 ,1 1 8 2 0 14



70 Conspiacy of Cells

ssu Cutu Ass c (Cont . )

Ctt f Stnztn,Cctn, n Dstbutnf Cls n ssus, 78

, Pul, 67, 9 c n, 69sn, 8us, tu, 76 c n, 04, 06

U c n, 49

Uctn f cc tus, 4Utt gt, 6U S Dtnt f Agcutu,

0U S U S S Jnt Subcmmt

t n sc n OncgcDss, 40 44

Unsty f Cf t Bky, SO

C Cutu Lbty,

6, 76, 4Sc f Pubc Ht, 6, SO,76

Unsty f Cfn t L sgs c sc, 0

Unsty f C, 9Unsty f Inn, 8Unsty f Mnnst,

Unsty f Wsngtn n

Stt, 0Utn, Atu, U, 90

ccns, nt f,7

n n, J, 7, 8ncnt, Mn Mnty), 9798gsts' us f L, 4uss n cnc, 4 6, 0 ,

8889, 90, 4sc csts, 4

n Cnc, , , , 0,77, 4

Wbb, Mukt, 9 , 9 9WSH c n, 9, 9, 44,

4 7Wst Insttut, 9

Xy ty f cc tus, 9

Y csms, 8, 4, 9,9899, 0, 8

Zn, ct, 40, 4, 444







Documents

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