Henrietta Lacks studies multiply like cells through S.D. County

By Donald H. Harrison

EL CAJON, California – Imagine that you learned one day that the mother who died during your childhood was, in a sense, still alive; that without your knowledge, or that of any member of your family, cancerous cells from your mother’s cervix had been taken by her gynecologist, cultured in a laboratory, and developed into an endless array of self-replicating human cellular material. Imagine further that the cells had been used by medical researchers all over the world, and that, in a very real sense, parts of your mother had been instrumental in the battles against polio, AIDs, and a myriad of other diseases, including cancer itself.

Imagine also that your family was financially impoverished, even unable to pay for health care; that you were of African-American heritage; and that pharmaceutical companies, operated by white executives, had grown wealthy on the products developed from using your mother’s cell line.

How would you feel?

This is a question that science historian and journalist Rebecca Skloot explores in incredible depth in her acclaimed and award-winning work of non-fiction, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book that is now central to academic inquiries and collaborations across San Diego County. In recounting the role HeLa (an abbreviation for Henrietta Lacks) cells have played in global medical research – they have been used in more than 60,000 published studies around the world — Skloot also probed the family side of the story, particularly the emotions of Lacks’ daughter, Deborah, as she assimilated the news and partnered with Skloot in their own research about Lacks’ life, death, and afterlife.

The Henrietta Lacks collaboration among higher education institutions throughout San Diego County grew, in part, out of a program between the nursing and English programs at Grossmont Community College, here in El Cajon.

When Grossmont’s nursing program wanted its students to improve their reading and writing skills, they turned to the English Department, which developed English 110R, a course in reading and composition taught by Joan Ahrens, an assistant professor. Before Skloot’s book became as well known as it is today, Ahrens read it and considered it an appropriate vehicle with which to teach the nursing students. She asked Allison Shearer, a biology instructor, to help develop materials that would help the students understand the scientific aspects of the book.

Before long Ahrens, Shearer and Jensen suggested that the book—and the many questions it raised—might be suitable for a campus-wide collaboration, an idea that quickly drew support from English department faculty colleague Tate Hurvitz and other faculty members through a wide range of disciplines.

“I think it is important on a number of levels,” said Jensen, who last academic year was designated by Grossmont College as its Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year. “As a teacher, I like to help students see the connections between the different disciplines that they take – that they are not completely unrelated,” she said. “History is relevant to Sociology, Sciences are relevant to Math; there are those relationships. Maybe even more importantly, I’ve been teaching almost 40 years. I like to think that I give students something more, to understand each other, and to understand our common humanity.”

Jensen and Mary Donnelly were co-founders of Grossmont College’s Project Success program in which students take linked courses in which they learn subject matter in one course, and write about that subject matter in another course. The theory is that learning deepens when students have to explain the concepts. The Henrietta Lacks collaboration is an outgrowth of this program.

Besides being an assistant English professor at Grossmont, Hurvitz is a member of the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology, an organization based at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego’s Balboa Park. That organization adopted the idea of an inter-disciplinarian collaboration involving representatives from six institutions of higher learning in San Diego in addition to the Science Center and CONNECT, the latter of which describes itself as a “public benefits organization fostering entrepreneurship in the San Diego region by assisting new business formation of technology and life sciences companies.”

Hurvitz will be delivering the fifth of nine monthly lectures scheduled this academic year by the Ethics Center – his topic on January 4, 2012, being “Science Literacy and Underserved Populations.” He explains in the series prospectus that “one lesson from the Henrietta Lacks story is the importance of effective teaching of scientific literacy through both science content and strategies for understanding complex information.”

Author Skloot, herself, will be the third speaker in the series, with her Ethics Center lecture scheduled at 6 p.m., Wednesday, November 2. Plans are being made to have a live feed of her presentation for students at the various cooperating institutions to enjoy.

Besides Grossmont College (the only community college participating), others colleges involved in the county-wide study are San Diego State University, University of California at San Diego, University of San Diego, Point Loma Nazarene College and California State University at San Marcos.

Each of these colleges is contributing to the Ethics Center’s series, starting at 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 7 with Laura Rivard, an adjunct professor of biology at the University of San Diego, examining some “enduring questions” about the HeLa cells. Henrietta Lacks’ story “still resonates with ethical issues related to informed consent.”

Jamie Gates, director of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation at Point Loma Nazarene University, speaks Wednesday, October 5, on “the Politics of Race, Class, Gender and HIV/AIDS in South Africa.” In the prospectus, Gates said “the HIV-AIDS crisis in South Africa, like the Henrietta Lacks story, is a controversial chapter in modern health care that raises ethical questions about science, race, gender and inequality.”

On December 7, between the lectures by Skloot and Hurvitz, Georgia Sadler, a clinical professor of surgery at UC San Diego will discuss “What the Public Needs to Know About Clinical Trials.” According to the prospectus, “Clinical trials are indispensable to advances in medical treatment, but their value depends on recruiting participants who are diverse in race, ethnicity and age.”

Titles have yet to be chosen for speeches to be made on February 1 and March 7 respectively by Katherine Kantardjieff, dean of the college of science and mathematics at Cal State San Marcos, and Stanley Maloy, dean of the college of sciences at San Diego State University.

Then, on April 4, at 5:30 p.m. comes a religious discussion: “Is Henrietta Lacks really immortal. Panel participants will include Michael Lodahl, professor of theology and world religions, Point Loma University; Khaleel Mohammed, associate professor of religion at San Diego State University, and Karma Lekshe Tsomo, associate professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego.

Still to be announced is the title and speaker for a concluding event on Wednesday, May 2.

As varied is the series at the Ethics Center, so too are the ways in which Grossmont College faculty and students are tackling the Henrietta Lacks project.

The Grossmont College campus website lists these formal events:

Monday, October 24, 2 p.m., Room 220, Faculty Panel: “Race, Class, Gender and the History of Medical Access”

Tuesday, October 25,, 6 p.m., Room 220, Grossmont College Student Debate: Grossmont’s debate team hosts a student debate with live audience feedback and post-commentary from an interdisciplinary panel of judges.

Wednesday, October 26, 2 p.m., Room 220, Interdisciplinary Presentation: Faculty offer insight into their discipline’s perspectives on the book. Students share the results of a campus-wide ethics survey.

Thursday, October 27, 7 p.m., Room 220 “Page To Stage” Performance: Local theater group offers a dramatic performance of excerpted material from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Monday, Ocober 31, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., Campus Open House (Library, Biology, Art, Nursing, etc.): Each participating department will have a discipline-specific booth set up with experts prepared to field questions and facilitate discussion.

Tuesday, November 1, 6:30 p.m., Room 220, Film Screening + Guest Speaker/Discussion: Miss Evers’ Boys + “The Ethics of Human Subject Research”

Wednesday, November 2, 2 p.m., and 5:30 p.m., SDSU, Fleet Center, Guest Lecture: Rebecca Skloot, Author of the book will be speaking to students at both locations. Grossmont Students and Faculty are invited to attend (for free), and there will be a live feed.

Other related events also are crowding onto Grossmont’s calendar, or are filling classtime, Hurvitz said.

These include such efforts as one class designing a statistical study relating to HeLa, with another class working on how to present those results in a comprehensible way. Students in yet another class are writing poetry about Henrietta Lacks, while still others are working on art projects to express the Lacks’ experience in non-verbal fashion. The culinary arts class is designing a menu of “southern comfort foods” to be served on campus Nov. 10. Students on the Grossmont College Summit, published by the Media Communications Department, are parceling out assignment to cover the Henrietta Lacks Project in its many aspects.

There are many other projects, with more springing to life all the time. It’s quite clear that like HeLa cells themselves, HeLa projects keep multiplying and multiplying both at Grossmont College and at nearby institutions of higher learning. A class that lacks Henrietta may feel itself out of the educational mainstream.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com