How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #4
Finding the perfect medium was an ongoing experiment, but the biggest problem facing cell culture was contamination. Bacteria and a host of other microorganisms could find their way into cultures from people's unwashed hands, their breath, and dust particles floating through the air, and destroy them. (36)
George and Margaret Gey knew what they wanted to achieve: an immortal cell line that could be constantly replenished in the lab for research purposes. But getting to that point required a lot of hoop-jumping and a fair amount of improvisation. Both George and Margaret had to adapt their lab techniques based on what they knew from surgical procedures and from the mistakes that they inevitably made in the lab. That said, it's kind of a miracle things worked out at all.
Quote #5
[…] Henrietta's cells weren't merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intensity. By the next morning they'd doubled. Mary divided the contents of each tube into two, giving them room to grow, and within twenty-four hours, they'd doubled again. Soon she was dividing them into four tubes, then six. (40)
Mary Kubicek, Gey's lab assistant, was perfectly ready for Henrietta's cancer cells to die in culture as all other cells before them. But at this moment, she was beginning to realize that they had a winner; Henrietta's cancer was wicked strong. Mary doesn't realize it, but the person who those cancer cells had come from was about to suffer one of the most aggressive cases of cervical cancer anyone at Hopkins had ever seen.
Quote #6
The reason Henrietta's cells were so precious was because they allowed scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. They cut HeLa cells apart and exposed them to endless toxins, radiation, and infection. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. (58)
Skloot is really careful to explain to us—more than once—why HeLa cells are da bomb. For one thing, they were plentiful: HeLa cells grew like "crabgrass." And this meant that scientists all over the world had a never-ending supply on which to conduct experiments. By doing all this crazy stuff to HeLa, research didn't have to be conducted on humans.