First Immortal Cell Line

[rayilynlee <rayilynlee@xxxxxxx>]

There have been posts from Diane documenting the fact that the enivronment
of the cell is all important.  My former student who was doing PD research
at U. of Pittsburg told me Fred Gage at Scripps, La Jolla, claimed this
several years ago. See last paragraph:

By Terry Sharrer
the First Immortal Cell Line

COURTESY OF TERRY SHARRER (FLASK), GRETCHEN DARLINGTON (INSET)

Growing cells outside the body began in 1907 with the work of Ross Harrison
at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and continued in the hands of
Alexis Carrel and Montrose Burrows at the Rockefeller Institute. These
investigators figured out the nutrient solutions that kept cells alive for
extended periods of time and allowed them to make discoveries that
revolutionized cell biology, genetics, biochemistry and immunology.


Soon after the National Cancer Institute was established in 1937, Wilton
Earle began experiments in tissue culture there. Earle, along with
colleagues Katherine Sanford and G.D. Likely, reported in 1948 that they had
established "clone cultures" from single cells. Several years later, Earle
received immortal "HeLa" cells, taken from the tumor of Henrietta Lacks (see
p. 22 ), from George Gey at Johns Hopkins. The tissue culture flask pictured
here, containing HeLa cells, dates from 1955; the inset of the cells under a
light microscope dates from 1997.


Earle and colleagues would go on to use the HeLa cells in studies of how
heterogeneous cells descend from an original malignant cell. Earle's most
important work focused on chemical carcinogenesis in vitro, establishing
among other things that malignancies usually did not occur suddenly, but
rather evolved in different environments and at different rates.
tsharrer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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