I have no idea how human cells are propagated, but I really hope they haven’t been continuously passaged for 60 years. Don’t labs and companies use frozen stocks for starting large scale cultures? In any case, I agree that there have probably been very interesting adaptive changes in the cells since they were originally collected.

Here’s hoping that the living Lacks family members allow researchers to sequence their genomes (with proper privacy and security control), and that they (and cervical cancer patients) can get some health benefits from the resulting data!

Actually I hadn’t see the original press release, but found a link to a copy now. Just answering ‘No’ is indeed making it very (too!) simple. But the reasons they give seem valid to me: “Without any genetic information from the original tumour or from Henrietta Lacks, it is impossible to distinguish which parts of the genome sequenced here originate from Mrs. Lacks, her tumour, or laboratory adaptation.”

Security: I don’t work with HeLa cells but with large sample collections where we have SNP information (not complete genomes). They are stored at the European Genome-Phenome Archive (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ega/) behind a ‘firewall’. You need to write an application and specify why you need this information for your project to get the genetic data. How secure that is in practice, I don’t know.

Florian

As you’ve probably seen, the original press release was the most egregious example of ‘dumbing down’, implying that absolutely nothing could be inferred about current Lacks family members.

Any thoughts on how sequence data like this could be distributed to labs that pledge to keep them secure private? It’s way too late for anonymity, but it seems like security is a higher priority here than open science. Especially if someone attempts to current Lacks family members for comparison…