Henrietta Lacks, HeLa cells, and cell culture contamination.

Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 of an aggressive adenocarcinoma of the cervix. A tissue biopsy obtained for diagnostic evaluation yielded additional tissue for Dr George O. Gey's tissue culture laboratory at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, Maryland).

Responsibility for truth in research.

For over half a century, cell cultures derived from animals and humans have served researchers in various fields. To this day, cross-contamination of cultures has plagued many researchers, often leading to mistaken results, retractions of results, cover-ups and some out-and-out falsification of data and results following inadvertent use of the wrong cells. Also, during years of examining cultures for purity we learned that many virologists were not too concerned about the specificity of the cultures they used to propagate the particular virus under study as long as the substrate (whatever it might have been) gave optimal virus yield.

Biological characteristics and viral susceptibility of a stable dog kidney cell line.

A cell line derived in 1956 from normal dog kidney is described. The cells are epithelial, contact-inhibited, and can be maintained in the same culture vessels for period of more than 2.5 yr.

Specific chromosome loss associated with the expression of tumorigenicity in human cell hybrids.

Four related nontumorigenic and tumorigenic HeLa x fibroblast intraspecific human hybrid cell lines were analyzed to determine whether specific chromosome(s) are associated with the control of tumorigenic expression. The loss of one copy each of both chromosome 11 and chromosome 14 were associated, with a high degree of statistical significance, with the expression of tumorigenicity in two segregants derived from the original nontumorigenic hybrid population. Although the parental origin of the chromosomes could not be established in this study, our preliminary results suggest that complex, genetically determined, regulatory interactions may operate in the control of neoplastic expression.