Radiolab - Famous Tumors

Episode Date: May 17, 2010

In this hour of Radiolab: an unflinching look at the good, bad, and ugly side of tumors.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. C. C.

Yeah. And NPR. Hey. How are you? I'm fine. How are you, Robert? Nice to speak to you after all these years. Yes, it's been quite a few years.

I should let you know that Jad Blumon has just wandered in. Hello. Hi. And Jad, this is Adrienne Noi. Last name is N-O-E, and I'm director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. So, you know why we're calling you, right? Yes. Okay, so let's just spring it on the audience.

I don't remember how I happened to bump into you. I don't even know how this came up. I think you and I had been co-presenters at a TED conference. Maybe that's what it was. Probably a decade ago. We may have been talking about important events in New York or civic architecture, but I do remember perking up at the phrase Grant's tomb. So Robert said something to you about Grant's tomb?

Yes. And then you turn to me and say it again? Well, you may know who's buried in Grant's tomb, but I know what's buried in Grant's tumor. The tumor, Grant's tomb. Yeah. You see, it turns out that at the museum she works at, there is. A tumor that had been excised from the throat of President Grant in the 1880.

these. Actual tissue from Grant's tumor? Yes, that's right. Oops. Yes, here we are. We're outside the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Big way to film. It is kept behind several locked doors. So you guys don't have an inkling of what you're about to see if we go in there. No. But it's a, you know, privileged area. This is Brian Spatola. He's the collections manager, and he led us down a long hallway. Do some doors into a back room? Holy moly. Oh my god, there's like, they're twin babies in formaldehyde. Look, grains, heads, torsos, and majority of them.

You had even gotten to the tumors. So he led us out of that room and into another one. And they're sitting on a table and waiting for us. Is this the thing about which we spoke? It is. Was President Ulysses Simpson-Grant's tumor. Oh, wow. It was resting in a box that looked as it happens exactly like a...

cigar box. Oh, which is a little ironic. This was a guy who never ever stopped having a cigar in his mouth. He never stopped having cigars. He smoked as many as 12 cigars a day. Wow.

So it was probably the cigars that made the tumor. February of 1885, tissue was removed, examined, and his physicians concluded that he had a squamous cell carcinoma. And ultimately, he was treated for pain and died in July of 1885 that same year. Wow, that's pretty fast. So that's what killed President Grant then? It was a tumor, yes. I didn't know that.

So you see the staining that they used to bring out the details in the cells. Yeah. Is the darkness the tumor? The darkness is the tumor. Wow. The very stuff that even though President Grant got through Vicksburg, And even though he came east and they tried to kill him here, they tried to kill him there, they tried to, because then he goes and becomes president. This is what actually killed him.

This is what killed him. Can I touch it? No. We may not be able to touch the actual tumor of the president of the United States, but we can touch on this subject. We can grasp this subject. We can examine this subject. Coming up on Radio Lab for the next hour, it's totally tumors. Oh, come on, don't call that.

Because really what we're going to talk about are not just any tumors, but famous tumors. Immortal tumors. Devil tumors. Contagious tumors. And tumors that speak in the voice of I'm Robert Crilwich. I'm not to be confused with the big one. And I'm Chad Abumrod. This is Radio Lab.

Stay with us. All right. To get things rolling, this first story is about something that we thought was not possible, that we hoped was not possible. We learned it from... I'll make it work. From this guy. David Quaman, I'm a science journalist. He is, I think, my favorite, in my generation, I think he is the best writer that writes about science.

I specialize in evolutionary biology and travel on assignment to faraway places and interesting situations. So first of all, where are you going to take us to what part of the world? I'm going to take you to Tasmania, which is the island state off the south coast of Australia. You know, you go to Australia and you think of rock and deserts and red, dirt. and heat, but you keep going south all the way off the south coast. Suddenly you have these rolling green countryside, lots of wallabies, one of the species of kangaroo that are abundant. Like England countryside with wallabies? Exactly, with small kangaroos hopping around.

But our story does not actually begin in Tasmania. Nope, it starts in Holland. With a gentleman by the name of... Christo, Barth. Is that Bar as in B-A-A-R? Bars. with an Hess. Christo Bars is a wonderfully independent-spirited plumber.

A plumber? Yes. Plumbing I do to make a living and photographing is for me a big hobby. We don't know just how great a plumber he is, but he's a very good wildlife photographer, and he looks for interesting animals to shoot, with the camera I mean. So over the years, very often he puts down his range and he travels. Yeah, well, we don't have that many animals here in Holland.

A little bit of roe deer and sometimes a fox. And in the early 90s, he goes to take his latest photography sabbatical in Tasmania. I went to Tasmania on my boat. And were you there to take pictures of wallabies or kangaroos? No, no, no, no. He was there this time to photograph... Devils. Tasmanian Devils.

Yeah. I quite like the animals. What does... I mean, I know the cartoon, but what does a real Tasmanian devil actually look like? Well, they're about as big as a little pit bull. But look a little bit more like a bear cub. White yolk on its chest Big set of formidable teeth

They'll eat almost anything Anything, anything they can find Platapush Kelp maggots and fish Snakes Garbage cans The occasional rubber boot You name it

Anyway, when Christo gets to Tasmania He drives up the coast He finds dead animals on the road You know roadkill Or roadkill from the road To use his bait What sort of roadkill? A little devil can eat a kangaroo

Oh yeah When there are three, four or five together They eat a big kangaroo in an hour is gone. Wow. So he takes the dead kangaroo, drags it to a clearing in the forest, sets up his photography equipment very close, and then what happens? Well, you just wait. So he waits. And as the night falls, little black shapes begin to creep out of the woods. You can hear them sniffing and they'll find a roadkill. And then they just start eating and fighting with each other. This is quite scary. If you don't know,

with what you're hitting. As they eat, Kristno, standing at a safe distance in the shadows, takes their pictures. Over the years, he's done this over and over and over, and he always sees lots of devils. Devils in front of his lenses. Sometimes 20 devils running around.

Devils in his kitchen. They'll come into your tent. Devils everywhere. But after a bunch of trips, something happened. It was Easter, 1996, he was in the park watching a dead kangaroo and waiting for the devils to show. But the only thing I saw was one devil. Just one?

Yeah. So I thought, I'll try another spot. They had another spot. Try the dead. Two devils. They're not gone entirely, but they're scarce. And he notices something strange about one or two of the devils. There was something on the faces.

The face and on the back on. on their mouth. Something that looked like a growth. A large, ugly growth. I thought, oh, well, maybe they've been bitten on fighting with each other, a bit swollen up, but it was really big, you know, and blood coming out.

This was the first alarm bell. So, Christo, you were the first to see it. Yes. And this was just the beginning. Like a plague out of hell, a dark death is sweeping Tasmania. Television reporters got the story. and began reporting that more and more Tasmanian devils had these lumps on their faces.

They fill the eye sockets. They puff out the lips. They infect the gums. It's really sad and hideous. And whatever they were, they turned out to be lethal. To jump ahead a little bit, the effect that it's had in the population. In some cases, devil populations collapsed by 90%. Very quickly, scientists looked at the disease and determined that it was some kind of tumor. Cancerous tumor. And then the question was, what's called?

causing them. So what did they think? Well, a toxic chemical was guess number one. Some poison or pesticide from the environment. Guess number two was a virus. So they tested in places where the devils live, looking for something toxic or some virus, and they found nothing. And then along comes a woman named Anne-Marie Pierce. She looked at some tumors, close up, very close up, from 11 different devils. So she's looking at the first tomb.

And she found that the chromosomes were sort of mangled. Which isn't really that strange because that's what cancer is. It's like your genetic stuff gone screwy. Right. But then she looked at the tumor from the next devil. And she found not just also mangled chromosomes, but chromosomes that were mangled in exactly the same way as they had been in the first devils. So now she looks at a third.

Identical. And then a fourth. Identical. And then a fifth. Identical. Oh, 11? Exactly the same pattern in each. Dun, dun, dun, dam.

Does that, I feel the sensation of awe, but I don't quite have these understanding attached. Does that mean that these tumors are all brothers? What that meant was that these tumors were all genetically identical. What? They were all the same tumor. How can they all be the same tumor? Well, they can't because that would mean that these Tasmanian devils caught the cancer from some other Tasmanian devil. Exactly.

Wait, what do you mean exactly? You can't catch cancer. This epidemic of cancer in Tasmanian Devils was a crazy, impossible tumor that was jumping. It was leaping from one devil to another. A leaping tumor? Yeah, a leaping tumor. And this is the point in this tale where we really have to question everything that we thought we knew about cancer. Now, most people think of cancer as, like, a...

The situation in which one of your cells starts replicating and doesn't stop. It replicates uncontrollably until it destroys you. Okay, so that's like the one-cell theory, which is frankly how I thought cancer worked. Oh, Peter, we have to go ahead to start? But then we spoke with this fellow. His name's Carlo Maley. Cancer biologist at the Wistar Institute. You told us, if you really want to understand what's happening with the devils,

you've got to toss out the one cell theory. Because cancer is not just... It's not just a cell going haywire. No, it's actually many cells competing. Competing for space, competing for resources. And in the process, driving each other haywire. Like, if you were to somehow go into a tumor, he says, what you would find... Is between a billion and a trillion cells in there.

These are different cells. This huge clump of cells, and they're all fighting it out. Because, you know, space is tight, food is scarce. And what'll happen is in the middle of this melee, you know, as the cells are competing, each individual cell is trying to copy itself. Copy, copy, copy, copy. And somewhere along the way you get, eventually, a copying error. And every so often, says Carla, one of these mistakes will give the new cell

a new talent. And in the case of cancer, it usually starts with something pretty simple, like the ability to slurp up food faster. Nutrients, like oxygen and glucose. And now, with this advantage? That mutant and all of its progeny will take over that area of the tissue. But not for long. Because now you've got all these mutants, and they start to find it.

Until randomly again, you get another copying mistake. And maybe this second copying mistake gives the cell the ability to divide faster. Right. So there it is. Proliferating faster than its neighbors. And it takes over. Growing and displacing the other cells. But, yeah, it just keeps getting worse.

Because now you've got these double mutes. They can eat fast, they can divide quickly, and they start to fight until you get a third mutation. Then a fourth. And you just keep ratcheting it up. And eventually, roughly five to 20 mutations. You end up with a cell that is so gnarled, so much. mutated and so powerful that it can literally spit a kind of acid. Called a matrix metalloprotease that allows it to rip through the membrane barriers.

And this is when you're really in trouble because now the cell can roam. And so the cells leave the primary tumor. They've got to dissolve their way into a blood vessel. That's a mutation. Then they've got to survive in the blood. Another mutation. Then they've got to stick somewhere else. Yet another.

Then they've got to dissolve back through the arterial lining. And another. Yeah. So it sounds like cancer is always evolving to be more cancerous. It totally is. This also explains why we haven't been able to cure it. Why, when a person takes chemotherapy drugs, the cancer will go away for a while. But then it'll come back, stronger.

Because the cells have evolved a resistance to those drugs. When I first got into work on cancer, I was impressed at how malevolent the disease seems, as if it's being designed to kill us. So here's my question. This leaping tumor in the devils, is this a case where the tumor is actually evolving into a new form? Like after, say, the 50th mutation or whatever? Like, now it doesn't just have the ability to travel in a body, but it can somehow leap out of a body through the air and into another body. Sure. I mean, that's really scary.

Yes, it is pretty scary, but this is amazingly rare. And according to Carlo, demands some pretty special circumstances. How would in a Tasmanian devil, would some tumor get from one individual to another? How would that happen? Tasmanian devils, God bless him, bite one another in the face a lot. They're scrambling over carcasses or they're fighting. and biting and swallowing and crunching. And the males also bite females during the mating period.

He's a little bit of a rough lover. So you have the male and the female biting each other in the face. So a devil with a tumor on its face, let's say it's mating with another devil, and it bites that second devil in the face. What exactly happens at that point? Is it just rubbing its tumor against... Okay. When you think of these...

Big, ugly tumors. Think of feta cheese. Ew. And when one devil bites another, there's a tendency for the tumor to crumble and to shed tumor cells that then fall into the wounds on the second devil. But there's something here I don't understand. Why wouldn't the immune system of the devils kill those cells, prevent those cells from taking root? Yeah, because that's what immune systems do. And the latest answer is that, well, Tasmanian devils don't have as much genetic diversity as you would expect. What that means, David, explained to us, is that the Tasmanian devil population has gotten so inbred.

They're so alike at a genetic level that their immune systems are now confused. They don't know the difference between their own cells and invading cells coming in from other devils. Exactly. Which doesn't actually sound like the tumor is all that powerful. So I asked Carlomeli. Is this really the story of a tumor evolving? Or is it just the story of a tumor getting lucky? I think those are the same story.

How do you mean? I mean, evolution is all about dumb luck. The way he explained it, it's dumb luck that the tumor was on the outside of the face. It's dumb luck that they bite each other a lot, that a cell could come along that could shed and fall into a wound. It's all dumb luck. But that, he says, is what makes evolution happen. That's natural selection right there.

And when you step back, sometimes the results are just nuts. Yeah. Just nuts. And this is the point where we need to talk about a transmissible tumor in dogs. K-9 transmissible venereal tumor. This is a tumor, he says, that's evolved way beyond the one in the devils and way longer. How long has that been going on? Well, it's been going on for somewhere between 200 and 2,500 years.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa, between 200 and 2,500 years? Yeah. Yes. Over two millennia? Exactly. And if that's the case, then it's the oldest continuous animal cell line in existence on planet Earth.

You might need to say that again. Okay. Because that is just too strange. It is. It is. Even stranger, says David Kouman. When a tumor lives this long, propagates itself for this long, You can only really call it one thing.

This tumor is essentially an animal. A parasite. Not a species of parasite, but one individual parasite. That may never die. David Quarman is the author of Song of the Dodo and Natural Acts. This is David Quamman calling from Tropical Bozeman. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The National Science Foundation.

Radio Lab is produced. By WNYC and distributed by N. NPR. End of message. Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crillwich. The topic is totally tumor, of course.

That's my line, by the way. Oh. No, no. We've been talking about tumors this hour, famous tumors, and thus far, they've been really bad. Terrible tumors. Really bad. Scary, horrible tumors.

But... Because we are fair-minded about everything... Even tumors. Let us consider the possibility that sometimes tumors can be rich, beautiful, and desirable. For example, George Malley is an ordinary man who is about to become extraordinary. You name as many mammals as you can in 60 seconds. How about alphabetical?

Arbock, Bat, Boon, Caraboo, Dauphinio, hip, is... What is going on, George? In this 1996 movie, John Travolta plays a guy who gets a brain tumor, and the tumor makes him into a genius. You learned the Portuguese language in 20 minutes? Not all of it. Phenomenon. He didn't learn the accent, though.

The tumor doesn't give accents. But it does raise a real question, which is, like, is it possible for a tumor to create it? Something good? Yeah. Hello, Jack. Nice to meet you. So we paid a visit to a guy, a doctor named Orrin Davinsky. I'm a neurologist at NYU Langone School of Medicine. And Dr. Davinsky has had a lifelong interest in the beneficial effects of certain kinds of brain conditions.

Right. I'll just tell you, I think, one of the most fascinating cases in neurology very quickly. And this one, we were not prepared for. A gentleman was described who ever since he was a child would look at safety pins and have an orgasm. At safety pins? At safety pins. The more shiny and the more numerous the safety pin, the stronger the sexual experience. And this happened from his pubescent period?

He just safety pins turned them on right at the beginning. In puberty, he made this association when he looked at a safety pin. he had an orgasm. He got to have been embarrassed by this. This is worse than being... Yeah, so he would go into private. He realized this is not something most people do. He never talked about it.

And he did it in private. And then he got married after the war. He was honorably discharged and got married and then started having less sex with his wife because the safety pins were much more enjoyable. Sometimes he just had to think about a safety pin, not even hold it up. So are we seriously making the case

that this guy is getting a benefit Not seriously. Pin obsession? But I think actually you could say that the experiences that this guy was having with those safety pins gave him a kind of pleasure that maybe is unavailable to the rest of us.

From an odd source, but you know, pleasure's pleasure. Until, says Davinsky, this fellow began to have seizures. He got admitted to a psychiatric hospital in London, the Maudsley, one of the big psychiatric units. They actually got an EEG, and to make a long story short,

there was a benign tumor. Right in the part that's called the temporal lobe, sort of in the middle of your head, right behind your eyes. But they took it out. They took it out. They took it out. And they cured him of his wonderful experience. So he never was able to, he could look at safety bins all day long, but he would never again enjoy them the way he had for his whole life.

How did he feel about that? I think it was a mixed blessing, as you would imagine. And this idea that from a tumor, you can get something not so good, but also something good. This is an idea that has, well, there's been a novel written on this theme. The title of the book is Lying Awake. My name is Mark Salzman. Mark is a writer who lives out in California, and he thought, I'm going to imagine a nun.

Our main character is Sister John of the Cross. This is a woman who had joined a nunnery because she felt just lonely for a relationship with God. Yes. It's just not enough for her to tell herself, yes, God is there. What she longs for is a tangible sense of God's presence, a sense that she can really feel God's presence in her life. And she begins having what she thinks are migraine headaches. The regular doctor that the sisters see tells her that she seems to be having migraine headaches. They're coming more and more frequently.

And there comes a point when one of these. headaches changes dramatically and then everything is different. Everything is different. What's different? What happens? Shall I read? Yeah, go ahead. You kind of have to imagine this scene taking place in an environment of profound silence. She's in the cloister, she and one other sister. They're working on a sewing project. They're sewing an altar cloth. One of the pins slipped out of her hand, ringing like a miniature

triangle as it bounced off the floor. She looked down to the floor and saw it that it looked impossibly distant. When she reached down for the pin, her hand looked strangest of all, as if it belonged to someone else. The silence in the room came alive, like the words left out of a poem. Something buried so deep inside her that she'd forgotten it was there rose to the surface. Sister, are you not feeling well? God was present in Sister Anne's voice. He was present in her face. Nothing was changed, yet everything was changed. God is here, she answered.

You were here all along. Well, this is a field goal, isn't it? For someone who was seeking a spiritual connection, she has one. That's right. This is the moment she's been waiting for all her life. But there is a problem, because when these feelings come... I'm sorry.

She has a tumor. Let's just get the non-surprise out of the way. The show is, called totally tumor. All right. I'm just saying it. First of all, it's famous tumors, okay? Yes.

She has a meningoma, a benign tumor, small about the size of a raisin, in the temporal lobe area of her brain. Right in the same spot where the safety pin fellow had his tumor. So the problem for her is, should I have the tumor removed, give up the most satisfying and fulfilling experience of my whole life, or should I sacrifice my health in order to share with others the experiences that I'm having. So we thought, well, Orrin Davinsky, the doctor we spoke with first. I think every case is unique and individual. He does see patients like this. This is what he does for this. So we took the case to him. Now here's the question. If a person comes and says, I'm having what I want,

and you are suspicious that what she also is having is a disease, what do you do about the patient? If I knew for sure that the tumor, let's say, was benign and would never grow, and the only thing that person experienced was this religious feeling that they found extremely enjoyable, I would say let's do nothing but do serial scans to make sure nothing grows and that you're safe. But in the book, as it happens, the nun got a little worse. She had a few more headaches, the more severe, and they took the tumor out. The seizure activity stops. These experiences stop coming. And she does feel afterwards a sense of blah.

She feels as if she sort of tumbled out of a Himalayan mountain into a muddy village. This is common, apparently, in patients after they've been treated. Right. So my last question then is really about the, it seems to me the deepest question of all in this case, is that if someone has a very important and meaningful experience, and you have a sense, it may be a abnormality, a physical abnormality that is triggering that. Do you regard them as delusional? Like, there's just the possibility here that maybe these people are having an actual conversation.

So, yeah, there's no question. Or you not even consider that. No, I mean, so science, I think the question you ask and I think you're getting at is, could it truly be that this is God's avenue to speak to us? and people in late 1800s thought it was through the right hemisphere, and that's often where these cases occur in the right hemisphere. So it may be that that's right. It's the more emotional hemisphere, and when things are in a perturbed state, you may be more

receptive to experiencing spiritual things. And I think there probably is some physiologic basis that allows you to tune into a broader world, and maybe some states of neurologic dysfunction, allow you to, you to, you to, you to harmonize or tune in or receive those messages, so to speak. In which case, then, your tumor or your epilepsy would be the window or the conduit, right? I do feel like I need to place an asterisk right here. We are talking about a tumor in the end. Well, but understand that every feeling, every thought you have comes from cells in your brain.

If any of those cells can produce a glorious experience, then the experience stands on its own. And sometimes in very well-documented cases, these are extraordinarily profound, desirable things. They're often hard to put into words. Have you tried? I mean, when you... Yeah, I mean, people... You know, Desteroyevsky's probably the most articulate person with epilepsy

who's had a religious experience and who wrote down what he experienced. I don't have the quote in front of me, but it's, you know, this felicity, this feeling I get. For several moments, he was... quoted to say. I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world,

and this feeling was so strong and sweet, that for a few seconds of such bliss, I would give 10 or more years of my life, even my whole life. Perhaps. Hi, this is Emily Culling from Rainy, Vancouver, Washington. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. www. www.combe-Rodd. I'm Robert Krelwich.

This is Radio Lab, and our topic today is... Totally tumors. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, you call it what you want. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the topic is tumors. Famous tumors. Our next and final tumor-related tale is one I've been wanting to do this particular tumor story for forever, forever. Like two years ago, I think. Oh, long than that. Yeah.

It's a story that comes from a friend of mine, Rebecca Sklut. You mean to talk? Make noise? That's her. We can move me closer from. She's a journalist. Is that better? And she has been wanting to tell the story.

Even longer. Since she was in the womb. You know what I mean, she's been researching the story for 10 years. Hello, hello. And she just wrote a book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. And the story is about a tomb. that expands and never stops. Begins in 1950, a black woman in Baltimore is in her bathroom,

and she discovers pretty much all on her own that she has cancer. It's a little bit of a mystery how she initially knew this, but she knew it was there. A knot, she called it. She had told her cousins for a while that she thought there was something wrong with her womb. And she climbed into her bathtub, and she slid her fingers up in the side of herself and found this lump. Chapter 1.

First she went into her local doctor. By chance, I happened to be an attending at that time. The guy she eventually ended up seeing at Johns Hopkins University was this fellow, Dr. Howard Jones. I'm 98. Next month, I'll be 99. Wow. So when she came in to see you, can you tell me anything about what she was like? Well, she was a... You don't remember anything?

No, I really don't. But you remember her tumor, right? Oh, absolutely. I never saw anything like it before or after. And this didn't look like a normal tumor. It was deep purple and... About as big as a quarter. Sort of shiny.

Very soft. That was another thing about it on examination. Slightly raised. When you touched it, you might think it was red jello. There was something very strange about the way it looked. There was something worried about it. So? Doctors took a sample.

Yeah, so they would cut off these little teeny tiny pieces. Really small. A bite or two. They would take a piece. Put it in a tube. And one would go to the lab for diagnosis. And in this case, since it was Hopkins, they would take an extra piece and give it to a man named George Guy.

Two. So George Guy was a researcher who worked at Hopkins. He had a deal with the clinic that any time they got a patient with cervical cancer, they'd give him a tiny piece of the tumor. What he really wanted to do, his main mission, actually not just, his scientists everywhere were trying to do this. They wanted to find a way to grow human cells outside of a human being. In a dish. In a dish. George Guy had been trying to do this, working on this for decades. And why exactly? It's sort of like, it's sort of like having a little

tiny bit of a person in a lab that's detached from them so that you can do whatever you want with them. You know, you can't bombard some person with a bunch of drugs and just wait to see how much they can tolerate before their cells all explode. But you can. But you can, you can, You can do that in cell culture. Oh, so this is like, this is like the basic thing you need to study human biology. Mm-hmm. You need cells in a dish. Yes.

Problem was, any time they tried to grow human cells in a dish. They would die. Yeah, they died. This is George Guy's former lab assistant. Can you just tell me your name? You know, my name is so-and-so. My name is Mary. I'll put my maiden name in there.

Oh, sure. Toy. Kubichak. Mary lives just outside of Baltimore, about an hour. from where she used to work with George Guy. This is it. This is Dr. Guy. And she showed me some pictures.

And he's sitting at a microscope. Look at him. He looks, he seems like a really big guy, like a really tall guy. He was a big guy. At least 6'5, judging from the picture. Yeah, he was. And in every slide that she showed me,

he had kind of a crazy smile on his face. Like he's got a, like he's having a good time. It was like a big bear of a man, is what I always thought of. Oh, yeah. In any case, Mary says they were completely stumped at why the human cells always died. He was. But they just did.

Yeah. on the day that George Guy walked in, handed Mary a tube with a little chunk of a nameless woman's cervical cancer inside. I knew nothing about her. No one expected anything. No, he was doing that. Well, he probably, you know, it's ever hopeful. But, you know, I was eating lunch and I thought, oh, the heck with it. You know, it's not going to grow.

I'm going to finish a sandwich. And that's what I did. Three. And then I went in and... She gave the cells some food. Did my usual. Turned on all the machines and left. Came back the next day.

they hadn't died. So she came back the next day. And they were growing. And then the next day, still growing. They just kept plugging along. They grew a lot. Rebecca says they doubled in size. Every 24 hours.

Yeah. They just grew. All of a sudden, you know, I kept transferring them and making more tubes and transferring them, making more tubes and transferring. They were very reliable and stronger. They just kept plugging along. Meanwhile, the woman who had spawned all these cells died. Officially, she died of uremia, which is like toxicity of the blood

because she wasn't able to get rid of the toxic waste that usually goes out in your urine. But not herself. And to tell us this story is a privilege to introduce Dr. George Guy. Wasn't long after that George Guy appeared on TV, holding in his hand a little bottle. Now let me show you a bottle in which we have grown massive furniture. of cancer cells. So did you want to look at the photos? Yeah, okay.

You can't really get a sense of how aggressive this tumor was until you go to the Hopkins archives and look at George Guy's pictures and videos. Okay, this is the film can here, the Heel Cell film. Then it hits you. These are enlarged 10,000 times. Oh, my God. Swirling hurricanes of cells.

Just like thousands of little pots. Some small and some very large. Swamped together. Kept transferring them and making more tubes. See them under the matures. microphone. Looks like something has just exploded. Like an arm.

They're going to Vigel. That's amazing. And they just can't. It keeps getting bigger and bigger. Strong. It's indestructible. It's indescribable. Nothing can stop it.

Why hers just sort of took off and grew and the other ones that they had tried before didn't is just a little bit of a mystery. Nobody really knows. Four. Nonetheless, George Guy knew what he had. This new cell line was what they'd all been waiting for. So early on, right after this woman died, George Guy sent Mary back down to get more cancer cells from the corpse. Oh, he sent me down to the morgue, yeah.

Really? Oh, yeah. So I went down there, and the coroner, I don't know who he was. Dr. God was there, too, and they were standing down at her feet, sort of. Meanwhile, she's like what? She's lying out there. She's already open. I got some samples.

The coroner would take them out. giving to me. What'd she look like? I couldn't look at her face. I couldn't look at her. The only thing I looked at were her toes and they had chipped nail polish on them and that was really like, oh, this is a real person. What was it about the nail polish that hit you?

Oh, because it was chipped. Because you know that she hadn't been able to take care of her nails for a long time if they got chipped like that. And it showed that she was proud of herself. Not everyone wears nail polish on their teeth. toes. Yeah. Yeah.

Over the next several months, while this woman's body lay decomposing in the ground, George Guy and Mary produced hundreds of thousands of her cells, her tumor cells. And he named them the heila strain. Heela? Like Heela, H-E-L-A. No one would actually know why he had named them that for about two decades. But what he did with these cells would be unusual nowadays. Like if somebody now found a cell that was special, they'd run off to the patent office

and then sell it to Merck for a billion bucks. But George Guy? He just passed him out freely. Didn't try and make any money off. Because it was a nice, nice new thing that could help science. Mary says that George Guy began to send Hila all over the world. Yeah. And pretty soon she was in hundreds of labs.

And, you know, this was in the midst of the polio epidemic. This is the season when polio is at its worst. We're talking early 50s, right? Yeah, so there's 1951, 52. You know, schools are being closed. Kids are being kept inside. To this cruel disease, medical science still has no complete answer. There was this enormous effort to develop polio vaccine.

The problem was, in order to develop a vaccine, you had to have enough polio virus, enough quantity to be able to study it in a lab. And they had no way of making enough. So what do you do? Well, one of the guys that guy, one of the guys that guy had sent the cells to. This collaborator friend of guys. Discovered something kind of amazing, which was that polio loved the hela cell. Put polio inside a heli cell, Hila would copy, and in the process, make more polio.

So it's the super Xerox cell, no matter what you want to. Make a copy, make a copy, make a copy. Yeah, so now they had a way of making polio. Gila could just be a polio factory. And so, the government made a factory. But the Tuskegee Institute. A real one. Literally a factory, so they had these big, you know, stainless steel vats of culture medium

that were sort of rotated constantly. Autoclaves for sterilizing all their equipment. a row with, you know, four or five microscopes crazy, Frankenstein-ish gizmos. They had this machine that was like an automatic cell dispenser, and it had this sort of long mechanical arm. It squirt a certain amount of this culture medium filled with helicels into a tube. Wow, this is like the beauty of industry right here. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. The cells that were produced at this factory, she says, were used to test the polio vaccine. The potent vaccine to prevent the dreaded disease. The tests that they would do were in Norris. It was the largest

field trial ever done. At its peak, the Teskegee HILA Production Center was producing about six trillion cells a week. Wow. Which is kind of inconceivable. But that was actually only the beginning, says Rebecca, because this factory led to an even bigger one that was for profit. Right. And that second factory was the first time any human biological material was commercialized. So this was the first biotech company? Yeah, basically. Okay, but when they first started mass-producing HILA. What sorts of things were done to these cells? What sorts of problems were investigated?

Like anything you can imagine. So they infected HALA cells with every kind of virus. Hepatitis, equine, encephalitis, virus. Yellow fever. Herpes. Neasles, mumps. Rhabis, whatever. Like, you just, any vaccine.

And this was just a revolution for scientists. There was research on chemotherapy drugs. Heelot cells went up in some of the first space missions. Really? Yeah, so they were... Heela went into space? Hila went into space. Every time I hear about, I think he was like,

Hella in space! Why? I mean, just because? The premise was to see what happens to human cells in zero gravity. You know, if we're going to be sending people up into space, what's going to happen to them up there? So Hila went up before any humans did. And then she eventually went up, she, the cells, there was actually...

That was an interesting little slip up there. Yeah, I know. Okay, so let's actually... actually skip forward in the story to the point where that slip-up you just heard, that pronoun confusion gets personal, you know? Well, what happens? Okay, it's the late 60s. And Heela has led to a revolution in science.

And now there are hundreds of cell lines, not just Heela, but hundreds. And somewhere along the way, scientists discover that Heela is so aggressive that she's actually been contaminating and taking over all of these other cell lines. You just said she, but I get your point. And she does it in the way. It does it in the strangest way. Heelous cells can, you know, they can float on dust particles. They can ride on you. They can what?

They can float on dust particles? Yeah, so they can. You mean they can hop out of a dish and just get on a particle and just float? Mm-hmm. Out the door. Up stairs. Down the hall. One helicel.

Into a lab. Rops into a dish. cell culture where there's other cells growing. And because heal cells are sort of powerful cells, they take over. So on the heels of this catastrophe, someone at Hopkins decides to make a test. Let's make a test that will allow us to genetically determine if a cell is heila or if it isn't. And to make a long story short, this desire for a genetic test led scientists and then journalists to ask a question which amazingly for 25 years had not been asked.

asked, who was this woman? And that's when we found out her name. Henrietta Lacks. This is the sound of Rebecca reading Henrietta's medical records for the first time. This is a 30-year-old colored woman. She's sitting with Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah. This is 2nd November, so this is again when she was pregnant with you. Henrietta had five kids when she died at the age of 31. Most have no memory of her because they were two. young. That's especially true of Deborah. I was only 15 months old and I don't remember anything about my mother.

Yeah, so she, you know, she had spent her entire life just sort of longing to know who her mother was and did she like dancing. You know, I always wanted to know what she liked to do, what she went, where she liked to eat. Did she breastfeed? Deborah, she was really sort of almost fixated on that idea. She wanted to know if she was breastfed. Oh, I don't know, you know, I don't know what I would give up. Just to have her hair, I tell you, just to see her and hold her.

So in 1973, when a scientist calls the Lax family and Deborah hears that little bits of the mother that she never knew are still alive? And, oh, by the way, can we take a blood test from you and your family because we're having some contamination problem? We need these genetic markers, blah, blah, blah. Well, as you could imagine. Took me by surprise. It really did. It was really confusing. I mean, how much of our cells is out there, you know? Eventually, she went online, did some searches, and found thousands and thousands of hits.

Like, for instance, on Gila clones. And Deborah had heard, you know, various journalists in the past had come to her and mentioned, you know, Dolly the cloned sheep and said, you know, your mom, they did this with your mom too, meaning that's actually where the technology started. The first cells ever cloned were Gila cells. But that was just cloning a cell, not cloning an entire being. But that distinction is very complicated, particularly for somebody who doesn't know what a cell is. Yeah. So Deborah, between what journalists had told her and Googling Henrietta lax and clone, thought there were thousands of clones of her mother around.

Really? You mean like a bunch of Henrietta's? Thousands. Walking the streets? Walking around. And Rebecca says that one of Deborah's biggest fears was bumping into one of these clones. She said, you know, she would say I would have to go talk to her, and she wouldn't know that I was her daughter.

And I don't know that I could handle that. Wow. It sounds so fantastical. How could someone believe that there are copies of her mother walking around? But at one point, 25 years after their mother died, someone called and said, hey, part of her is still alive. And, you know, we've grown enough of her so that it could wrap around the earth several times. At that point, all bets are off. Yeah, right.

Exactly. Not to mention that it's actually not that crazy. Because your DNA is in your cells. So if your cells are taken out of you and they still grow, well, isn't that still you? Alive? It's of you, but it's clearly not you, and then it's going on and on. That's, um, it's a funny middle space, that's for sure. Yeah.

So here's what happened. As Rebecca went off in search of Henrietta Lacks, every so often Deborah would come along and sit with her as they interviewed, you know, anyone they could find, friends, family, and eventually over many, many years, a picture does emerge of who this woman was. She was born in Roanoke 1920, Virginia And I think she was the 10th of the 11 children

But apparently she was the one that stood out Everybody talked about her as just being You know, she was the catch Oh my goodness, I don't think I could top her This is Sadie Sturdivin, Henrietta's cousin Hennie was a beautiful girl I was beautiful myself But Hennie was very pretty

brown eyes Long hair And this is Henrietta's sister, Gladys Natanz. Natanz completion Everyone that they spoke with zeroed in on the same few points. Like first? She was really meticulous about her nails.

Always painted him red. This very deep red. And second, Henrietta just had this... She was very... Strength. Forthright. Very sassy. Like herself.

Now, the unfortunate thing is that when it comes to her life, you know, how she lived, there's not a ton of detail. Right, October. So this is when she first went in with her cancer. But in that hotel room, when the two of them were flipping through the medical records, they did start to get some detail. Okay.

Now here's her autopsies. Right. About how she died. Was she in a lot of pain when she died? Yeah, this was the hardest thing. She was eventually in an pretty unbelievable amount of pain. She complained of pain in the right lower quadrant. Whaling and crying and, you know, moaning for the Lord to help her.

According to the records, doctors tried everything. Morphine, they injected 100% alcohol straight into her spine. wine. Wow. She would have these fits of pain. There were spasms where the waves of pain would hit her, and she would rise up out of the bed and thrash around. So they strapped her to the bed,

and her sister, along with one of her friends, you know, one of them would tighten the straps, and the other one would put a pillow in her mouth so that she wouldn't bite her tongue. Just to say if I, only... only just had the chance to take care of her. Now, dealing with how her mother died was one thing. But the cells made it more complicated.

For Deborah, her mother was alive in these cells somehow. So if that's true, that left very big questions. And the first of them for Deborah was, how can Henrietta rest in peace if part of her, with part of her soul is being shot up to the moon and injected with all these chemicals and irradiated and bombarded? It was just so painful. Knowing, you know, they had her cells on the back of a donkey, going to turkey, you know, in the airplanes, just going all over the world.

I just don't know. She worried about them. She worried that it hurt her mother. Really? When you infect the cells with Ebola, does somehow her mother feel the pain that comes with Ebola? And had a scientist ever, like, sat down with her? No. No.

Like this is... No, never. Nothing. Because it just strikes me that it wouldn't be that hard to explain that like when you take cells out of a body, it's kind of like when you cut your fingernail off.

It just doesn't... But your fingernail doesn't keep growing and living after you cut it off. It's really hard. There is no other example of some way that you can take something from someone's body and have it keep living

and not have a person feel it. And all these worries, says Rebecca, began to build in Deborah's mind and build and build. There came at this point so we were at her cousin's house. This is her cousin Gary.

She was broken out in hives and she was telling him all the stuff that she'd recently learned. You can almost hear it on the tape. She says to him, she can't carry the burden of these cells anymore. She can't do it.

I can't burn it. I don't want to try to down. And I had been sort of trying to talk her down and he was trying to talk her down. And then just out of nowhere. where he just started singing. And know the Lord been good y'all. I know the love been good.

He put food on my table. I know the love been to leave, please. And he started preaching. There are some things that doctors cannot do. He held her head in his hands. head and his hands. And we come to you tonight the author and the finisher of our faith. And we thank you for being a waymaker.

You make a path in the mighty waters. You call the mountains that skip like rams and the little heels like land. We thank you tonight. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for that. Thank you, Lord. Thank you. Thank you, Lord.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Amen. Amen. Amen.

Thank you. Amen. Thank you. And she just relaxed. I feel like, amen. I feel like. I feel like. She didn't realize it then.

But that night, Deborah was on the verge of a stroke. Want to walk up and see the building? Do you want to walk? Okay. One of the most striking moments of the story is when the two of them visit Hopkins. How do you feel? Fine. Yeah?

So far so good. And Deborah meets her mother's cells for the first time. I'll show you that room and I can show you the cells. Because the scientist had finally contacted her. Christoph Lingauer, the scientist who invited us into his lab to see the cells, he had projected them onto a screen. Don't be confused. They look green here, okay? They're so neon green in the screen.

particular case because of the way they were stained and projected. So they're very ethereal looking. They're very sort of, they glow, you know? I mean, when you think about angels, right, you think of something glowing. Christoff turned on this screen and she just, you know, I mean, Deborah just gasped. She just, oh. Oh, my God. This is about 200 times bigger than what they really are.

A swirling hurricane of cells. Did you say, oh, that's my mother? Yeah. Pretty good for you. It's just hot leaf. Yeah. Yeah. Christoph gave, he gave her a vial of these cells that she could hold in her hand.

And they came out of a freezer, so they were very cold, and she sort of, you know, rubbed her hands together with the vial in her hands to sort of warm them up and sort of blew on them to keep them warm. And then she just sort of whispered to the cells. It was sort of incredible. She just raised them up to her lips, and she said, you're famous. But nobody knows it. Just a week before Rebecca and I spoke in the studio, she got a call that Deborah had died. She had a heart attack and died in her sleep.

Before we close, I want to thank Rebecca Scleut for giving us her raw tapes. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is truly spellbinding. Everything that we just did is a very, very condensed version of what's in that book. You can get more information at radialab.org. Sign up for our podcast there, radiolab.org. Before we go, we just want to give a nod to our producer Lulu Miller. We want to give a wave to her because she's heading off. She's heading off.

She's leaving us after four and a half years to go and be a writer at grad school. She writes a pretty good radio piece. And we're going to miss her for it and also for her great awesomeness all around. So Lulu, we love you and good luck. Yeah. I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Crilwich. Thanks for listening.

Hello, this is Rebecca Scloot. Radio Lab is produced by Chad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Michael Raphael, Zorin Wheeler, Lulu Miller, Tim Howard, and Pat Walters. With help from Adi Narayan, Erin Sand, and Sharon Shattuck. Special thanks to Tim Clark and Timothy Wiseniewski. With a name like Scluder, I'm allowed to stumble on people's last names.