Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by John S. Nelson

Quote by John S. Nelson

Work

Defenses Against the Dark Arts: The Political Education of Harry Potter and His Friends

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

John S. Nelson

Browse famous quotes and profile details for John S. Nelson. more

You May Also Like

“I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.”

HelaHenrietta LacksHuman CellsMedical Advancement
Book:The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Create image

“Nelson-Rees had since been hired by the National Cancer Institute to help stop the contamination problem. He would become known as a vigilante who published “HeLa Hit Lists” in Science, listing any contaminated lines he found, along with the names of researchers who’d given him the cells. He didn’t warn researchers when he found that their cells had been contaminated with HeLa; he just published their names, the equivalent of having a scarlet H pasted on your lab door.”

Medical ResearchHelaHenrietta LacksCulture ContaminationHela Hit ListNelson Rees
Book:The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Create image

“The American Type Culture Collection—a nonprofit whose funds go mainly toward maintaining and providing pure cultures for science—has been selling HeLa since the sixties. When this book went to press, their price per vial was $256. The ATCC won’t reveal how much money it brings in from HeLa sales each year, but since HeLa is one of the most popular cell lines in the world, that number is surely significant.”

Medical ResearchHelaHenrietta LacksHuman CellsAtccCell Cultures
Book:The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Create image

“Day wouldn’t have understood the concept of immortal cells or HLA markers coming from anyone, accent or not—he’d only gone to school for four years of his life, and he’d never studied science. The only kind of cell he’d heard of was the kind Zakariyya was living in out at Hagerstown. So he did what he’d always done when he didn’t understand something a doctor said: he nodded and said yes.”

EducationHelaHenrietta LacksHuman CellsDay LacksMedical Disclosure
Book:The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Create image

“Everyone in the audience knew what that meant. On top of saying they’d possibly wasted more than a decade and millions of research dollars, Gartler was also suggesting that spontaneous transformation—one of the most celebrated prospects for finding a cure for cancer—might not exist. Normal cells didn’t spontaneously become cancerous, he said; they were simply taken over by HeLa.”

HelaHenrietta LacksHuman CellsAtccCulture ContaminationGenetic MarkerStanley Gartler
Book:The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Create image

“Ultimately the judge threw Moore’s suit out of court, saying he had no case. Ironically, in his decision, the judge cited the HeLa cell line as a precedent for what happened with the Mo cell line. The fact that no one had sued over the growth or ownership of the HeLa cell line, he said, illustrated that patients didn’t mind when doctors took their cells and turned them into commercial products. The judge believed Moore was unusual in his objections. But in fact, he was simply the first to realize there was something potentially objectionable going on.”

PatentsMedical ResearchSpleenHelaHenrietta LacksHuman CellsCell LinesJohn MooreCell DonorsDavid Golde
Author:Rebecca Skloot
Create image

“Soon after Harris’s HeLa-chicken study, a pair of researchers at New York University discovered that human-mouse hybrids lost their human chromosomes over time, leaving only the mouse chromosomes. This allowed scientists to begin mapping human genes to specific chromosomes by tracking the order in which genetic traits vanished. If a chromosome disappeared and production of a certain enzyme stopped, researchers knew the gene for that enzyme must be on the most recently vanished chromosome. Scientists in laboratories throughout North America and Europe began fusing cells and using them to map genetic traits to specific chromosomes, creating a precursor to the human genome map we have today.”

GeneticsMedical ResearchChromosomesHelaHenrietta LacksHuman Genome
Book:The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Create image

“Also a fan of being inscrutable, Franco once said, 'You are a the slave of what you say and the master of what you don't say.' He might have added that that approach isn't always guaranteed to work. If you attempt, for example, to be sphinx-like, mysterious and enigmatic when you get to the front of a long queue at the chip shop, you do risk being punched quite hard in the back of the head.”

EnigmaFrancoChip Shop
Book:Stalin Ate My Homework
Create image