How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #7
Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil. It wasn't something to be celebrated. (62)
This was the legacy of Alexis Carrel and his "immortal chicken heart." Carrel did contribute a great deal to the practice of surgery. But his association with Hitler and the fact that his "immortal" chicken cell line was really contaminated with other cells didn't help the scientific community's credibility when it introduced HeLa to the rest of the world. Like we said, scientific progress never occurs in a vacuum. There's always a historical and cultural context.
Quote #8
If researchers wanted to figure out how cells behaved in a certain environment, or reacted to a specific chemical, or produced a certain protein, they turned to Henrietta's cells. They did that because, despite being cancerous, HeLa still shared many basic characteristics with normal cells […]. (97)
This is key thing for us to understand about HeLa cells: they succeeded in culture precisely because they are cancer cells, which have no limit to how many times they can divide and multiply. And yet they're still useful because they're human cells. This is a hard truth for Deborah and Zakariyya to accept when they first see the HeLa cells in Lengauer's lab, since they expected the cells to have been a "normal" part of their mother.
Quote #9
In the early fifties, scientists were just beginning to understand viruses, so as Henrietta's cells arrived in labs around the country, researchers began exposing them to viruses of all kinds—herpes, measles, mumps, fowl pox, equine encephalitis--to study how each one entered cells, reproduced, and spread. (98)
Skloot wants us to understand the serendipity of George Gey's cultivation of HeLa cells at just this moment in medical research history: the knowledge of viral mechanisms was just emerging, but there was so much more to learn. It was hugely helpful that HeLa cells were so easy to grow in culture when there was such an enormous demand for them.