Vial of Immortality

In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

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I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in , thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector.

He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn't understand, like "MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations. I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler's class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around.

I was completely lost. Yes, Defler said, we had to memorize the diagrams, and yes, they'd be on the test, but that didn't matter right then.

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What he wanted us to understand was that cells are amazing things: There are about one hundred trillion of them in our bodies, each so small that several thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. They make up all our tissues — muscle, bone, blood — which in turn make up our organs.

Under the microscope, a cell looks a lot like a fried egg: It has a white the cytoplasm that's full of water and proteins to keep it fed, and a yolk the nucleus that holds all the genetic information that makes you you. The cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street.

The Limits of Immortality

It's crammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part of the cell to another, pumping water, nutrients, and oxygen in and out of the cell. The nucleus is the brains of the operation; inside every nucleus within each cell in your body, there's an identical copy of your entire genome. That genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure they do their jobs, whether that's controlling your heartbeat or helping your brain understand the words on this page.

Defler paced the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis — the process of cell division — makes it possible for embryos to grow into babies, and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or replenishing blood we've lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a perfectly choreographed dance. All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control, he told us.

Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.

Vial of Immortality - Rog Philips - Google Книги

He grinned and spun to face the board, where he wrote two words in enormous print: Henrietta died in from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we'd probably find millions — if not billions — of Henrietta's cells in small vials on ice. Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease; and they've been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers.

Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta's cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse. Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, "She was a black woman. As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That's it? That's all we get? There has to be more to the story. Did she have any children?

After class, I ran home and threw myself onto my bed with my biology textbook. I looked up "cell culture" in the index, and there she was, a small parenthetical:.

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Become a Redditor and subscribe to one of thousands of communities. Want to add to the discussion? Dont give it to someone pure. They get to be locked up forever in a tiny cell. Elfo never quite fit into Elfwood, and eventually, it's revealed why: This becomes apparent when his blood doesn't work with the Vial of Immortality, and is confirmed by his father upon return home.

However, before he can reveal the identity and species of Elfo's mother, they're frustratingly interrupted by a Dreamland assault and the paper is lost. The question here is likely less who Elfo's mother is unless there's a strange familial twist down the line and more what species she is. That's what ultimately makes him who he is and will shape his importance going forward. The most obvious suggestion is that he's half-human, making the will-they-won't-they relationship between him and Princess Bean a little less weird.

However, the truth may be even stranger. During Episode 4, Elfo was walking through the castle halls and a warped mirror showed him as a smaller creature. Could this be a clue towards Elfo's lineage revealed via magic?

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Nibbler in Futurama showed that Matt Groening isn't above major visual clues hidden in early episodes. His hidden third eye, conniving voice and mild distaste for Zog all come together to create a sense he's not fully on board with the King he advises. As the series goes on, this becomes increasingly apparent. Then, in the finale, there's a string of strange moves.