The Immortal Woman Who Saved Millions Of Lives | Answers With Joe

this video is brought to you by audible sometime in the 1880s a woman's body was pulled from the river sand in paris she was young 16 maybe and she had no physical trauma on her so the authorities just assumed that she probably drowned herself as was the custom at the time her body was put on display at the paris morgue so that somebody could possibly come by and identify her the viewing room of the morgue is where you would go if you were missing a family member but it was also kind of a morbid attraction for people of the day and apparently this woman was so beautiful that words spread and drew crowds but her identity remained unknown and she took on the name long canoe de la son or the unknown woman of the song she was eventually given a popper's burial in a city cemetery then i'm mark gray but before they did that one of the morticians because of her popularity made a face mask of her and capture her likeness forever and this half-smiling serene mona lisa-like face kinda became a hot item copies were made and sold all over europe artists would use it as a reference for their art poets made poems about it it was the hot home accessory for the victorian age already a weird kind of afterlife but it gets weirder because several decades later in the 1940s a norwegian toy manufacturer named osman laerdal had recently had a huge success with a doll named anne that was made with a new type of material one that was much more lifelike than wood or porcelain dolls plastic soon after this a group of doctors approached asthma with an idea they were working on a new type of resuscitations that something they called cpr and they were looking for somebody to build a life-size mannequin that they could then take around and show people how to do the procedure and he decided to take it on because he had almost lost his own son a few years earlier to drowning so he wanted to help make sure others wouldn't suffer the same fate so he and his team set to work on a mannequin and when it came time to pick a face for this mannequin he remembered this antique face mask that his in-laws had up in their home it was the face of long canoe he named it resusci anne after his popular doll in the united states it went by the name cpr annie and in cpr classes one of the first things they tell you to do is to assess the person's status and so for decades in cpr classes trainees were taught to ask annie are you okay before delivering cpr and yes that is exactly where michael jackson got it from and to this day long canoes face grace's cpr dolls all around the world the face of this sad possibly lonely girl who took her own life 150 years ago is now the most kissed face of all time and though she was not able to save her own life she has helped save lives of countless others this is an amazing story although it is debated some people think that it was probably just an artist model who posed for this face mask and that whole backstory of long canoe was just made up to help sell trinkets but either way that was someone's face and that someone has achieved a sort of immortality there is a similar story of a woman who died way too soon but unknowingly saved the lives of millions of people and she too was somewhat immortal and we know exactly who she is [Music] just recently i did a video on the worst human experiments of all time and while those were mostly related to wartime atrocities the fact of the matter is human experimentation is kind of necessary i mean you can test on rats all day long but eventually you've got to put that into a human the question is which humans historically prisoners were experimented on a lot because i mean let's face it there's only so much room in that dungeon and we were probably going to cut out their heads anyway but in later years when involuntary disembowelment became you know frowned upon researchers had to turn volunteers but even that was problematic because you either wound up with young people who kind of needed the money and thought they were still physically invulnerable or terminally ill people who were grasping at straws and would do anything they could to save their own lives so two extreme ends of the spectrum there what researchers really needed was a standard to work on you know something that would be the same for every experiment so you could get an apples and apples comparison the best way to do that maybe the only way to do that is to have human cells that were grown in a lab specifically from the same cell line if possible but the problem with that is that human tissue tends to want to be inside the human body it just doesn't really do very well outside of the human body so they don't last very long in a lab and this was a major challenge during the first half of the 20th century to find a cell line that could live outside the body and be replicated and reproduced and used over and over again in a lab this was something of a holy grail that researchers have been searching for for decades enter henrietta lacks henrietta lacks was born henrietta pleasant on august 1st 1920 and she grew up working from an early age in the tobacco fields of virginia and by an early age i mean like 10 years old later in life she married a man named david lax and they moved to baltimore to raise a family during her last pregnancy she complained of a knot feeling in her stomach and after giving birth she suffered a severe hemorrhage which got her doctor's attention and they sent her to johns hopkins johns hopkins at the time was one of the only hospitals in baltimore that would treat black people so she went there they did a biopsy of her cervix and it turned out she had cervical cancer the leading treatment for cervical cancer at the time was radium tube inserts also known as brachytherapy that sounds dangerous yes but in 1951 this is one of the most effective treatments they had but unfortunately it wasn't effective enough and henrietta succumbed to her cancer on october 4th 1951 she was only 31 years old and for most people that would be the end of the story a young life cut short a family in mourning children without a mother not much is really known about henrietta but her friends and family described her as vivacious and sharp tongued and that she always kept her fingernails painted bright red probably would have been a great person to know but though her life ended her legacy was just beginning because that biopsy that was taken over wound up in the hands of cancer researcher dr george guy dr guy discovered that these cells were unique they didn't die in fact they thrived and continued to multiply and double once every 20 to 24 hours now in case you're wondering this wasn't just like a big lump of cells on a desk somewhere this was because they were constantly being rotated in a drum and fed and from this dr guy was able to keep these cells alive and establish a cell line a cell line is a general term that applies to a defined population of cells that can be maintained in culture for an extended period of time retaining the stability of certain phenotypes and functions and cell lines bear the first two letters of the first and last name of the patient they came from so in henrietta lacks case they were called hela cells and the rest is history except wait why henrietta what made her cell so special the average human cell can divide about 50 times before it triggers its own cell death something called apoptosis but henrietta's cells didn't do that they just kept going which is how they got the name the immortal cell line but why she's some kind of superhero or something the answer is we we don't we don't know it's still a bit of a mystery actually the leading theory comes from a german virologist harold zerhausen he discovered the cells contain multiple copies of human papillomavirus 18. this is known as one of the deadlier hpv viruses because it often leaves a cervical cancer which is exactly what killed henrietta lacks but it might also be what makes our cells immortal just like all viruses and inserts itself into a cell's dna and then instructs it to make copies of itself and it's thought that in henrietta's case the hpv inserted itself next to the gene that triggers cell death which basically turned off that trigger of course that's exactly what cancer cells are they're just cells that continue multiplying out of control so in a way hela cells are human cells behaving like cancer cells that's the theory anyway and not everybody's on board with it but regardless dr guy realized the importance of what was sitting in front of him this was that holy grail that they've been searching for for all that time so we immediately began to cultivate this cell line and send it out to colleges all around the world cell line factories began pumping out nearly 6 trillion hela cells every week and the research being done on those cells began to show benefits almost immediately in 1952 literally one year after her death her cells were being used by dr jonas salk as he was researching polio on april 12 1955 he announced his vaccine to the world polio had been a scourge going back all the way to ancient egypt it has crippled and killed millions of people around the world and four years after henrietta's cells were discovered we had a cure and today it's almost been completely eliminated from the western world that is how significant her cells are polio is just the beginning though hela cells help discover vaccines and treatments to measles mumps ebola and hiv they are the first cells to be cloned they help us to discover the number of chromosomes in the body scientists discovered telomerase the enzyme that helps keep chromosomes from degrading with helot cells they've been to outer space the human genome project the first sequence of human genome that was a helo genome hela cells even help scientists discover that hpv can cause cervical cancer and help them to develop a vaccine to prevent it the very thing that killed henrietta lacks is now saving millions of people around the world this is an amazing legacy it's also where things get a little icky because along with all these medical breakthroughs came billions of dollars in profit and the lacks family saw none of that in fact they didn't even know that these cells existed until the 1970s literally 20 years after they were harvested and harvested without henrietta's permission or her family's consent now part of this is just because medical ethics have progressed quite a ways since then but also keep in mind back then women were not allowed to have bank accounts they weren't allowed to divorce except in extreme cases it was also considered weird for you to drive yourself around if you're a woman and that's all women henrietta was a woman of color at a time when race relations were different the optics of a black woman's body being used involuntarily to make a whole bunch of people crazy rich while her family gets no restitution whatsoever is not great and when you factor on top of that the fact that henrietta was a descendant of slaves working the very same fields that her ancestors did and growing up in a home that was a slave quarters not only 70 years prior to that it just feels like a continuation of some very ugly elements from our history the last family fought for years to get some kind of control or at least recognition for henrietta but with very little resources and fairly shaky legal ground that never really went anywhere until the human genome project this is when the family finally got to step in and have a little bit of a say because they share a lot of this genome and making it public constituted a violation of their privacy since then scientists have started actually getting permission from the family to do research with hela cells and there have been some steps toward compensation as well the henrietta lacks foundation was established in 2010 to advocate for people whose contributions to the medical field were done without their knowledge or consent because it turns out that uh yeah this has happened a lot the foundation supports the lacks family as well as many others and it provides grants to kids who want to go into the medical fields from underserved communities it's been funded a lot by private donations but also johns hopkins university has stepped up in the recent years to pay tribute to her legacy the howard hughes institute has contributed to it and the national institutes of health much like long canoe henrietta lacks lived a short unremarkable life but she had an afterlife that was as remarkable as they come her cell line continues to advance medical technology and save lives all around the world and the story of her cell line continues to bring up questions of what makes us who we are how do we control what we're made of and how do we face the ugliest parts of our history make amends apologize and make it right also much like long canoe henrietta lacks final resting places somewhat unknown she was buried kind of unceremoniously in an unmarked grave her family believes that she's buried right next to her mother eliza but her exact location is still a bit of a mystery despite that in 2010 a man named roland patillo who worked with dr george guy but was also friends of the wax family donated a headstone for henrietta the epitaph reads in loving memory of a phenomenal woman wife and mother who touched the lives of many here lies henrietta lacks her immortal selves will continue to help mankind forever eternal love and admiration from your family and i think it's safe to say the same is true for all of us good show henrietta good show henry the story was barely even known outside of medical circles until 2010 when her story was captured in the book the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot which you can listen to for free on audible this book is a quintessential telling of henrietta's story it follows her life from the tobacco fields of virginia to the doctor's offices of johns hopkins to her family in east baltimore today who didn't learn about herself more than 20 years after her death and the debate around the prophet's bioethics and the question over whether we get to control the stuff we're made of it's an excellent book and if you find this video even a little bit interesting it's definitely worth a lesson audible is of course the leading provider of audio books featuring everything from new releases to science fiction non-fiction suspense thrillers you know all that but it's also got original content from celebrity creators and podcasts as well audible members get a credit every month that's good for any title in their premium section but you also get full access to their plus catalog that includes guided fitness and meditation ad free versions of shows and exclusive series and lots more pretty much anything you'd ever want to listen to all in one app and if you want to give audible a try you can get 30 days for free if you go to audible.com joe scott or text joe scott to 500-500 link down the description big thanks to audible for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are supporting this channel and you know just having awesome conversations being a really cool community i got to shout out some names real quick we've got kelly smith jenna wilson molly matthew uh carlos ramojo scrotie balsack you thought i wouldn't say it there you go sandra and george robinson stiggles uh christian carbonero joseph waters newt eric berg hanson greg fontes and spencer owens thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos also exclusive live streams and other cool stuff you can go to patreon.com please like and share this video if you liked it if this is your first time here maybe check out this video google thinks you'll like that one or any of the others in the face on them down below and if you enjoy them i do invite you to subscribe i come 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 252,165

Rating: 4.9521689 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, Henrietta lacks, Immortal cell line, Medical breakthroughs, CPR Annie, L’Inconnoe, Human experimentation

Id: xHIooZqKesM

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021