![]() ![]() He'd given away all of his initial cultures without reserving any for himself. Unfortunately, George Gey was no help in finding an original sample of the HeLa cells.They decided to establish this cell bank at the ATCC, which already kept tabs on the purity of other microbiologic substances.To stem the tide of total Cell-pocalypse, the NIH established a "cell reference collection": pure samples of current cell lines that could be used as reference to check the purity of cultures in other labs.The cell cultures needed to be carefully guarded from contamination or the results of the research would be meaningless. Cell-specific research required meticulous labeling.They really needed a better bookkeeping system. Part of the problem was that scientists had gotten sloppy about keeping their cell cultures organized.Bacteria or viruses floating around in the lab? It soon became clear that the cell cultures were contaminated with something but scientists didn't know with what or how serious it was.Other scientists reported that all their cell cultures were behaving the same as each other, despite producing different byproducts before they got together.That volunteer grew cancer on his arm and freaked Hyatt out.Then, by accident, a Navy doctor named Hyatt gave a volunteer subject's arm a schmear of what he thought were human skin cells (he was trying to develop a treatment for burns). ![]() Back on earth: cells in culture in labs were either dying or immediately becoming cancerous.It was discovered that normal cells continued to divide normally, but that HeLa became even stronger. The point of these travels? To determine what happened to human cells in space.Skloot tells us about some of the most exotic things that HeLa cells did in this time period: they rode into space in the Discoverer XVIII satellite and hitched a ride with the first humans in orbit.
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