Biology's Huge, Microscopic Problem
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
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Petri dishes contaminated with the wrong cell lines have compromised thousands of studies, leaving us with questionable treatments for a variety of diseases. How do we solve this enormous, microscopic problem?
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Sources:
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I know it probably felt uncomfortable or clumbsy to point out, but it is very important to point out that Henrietta Lacks was a Black Woman Hank. It's pretty clear that if she had not been Black, HeLa cells would not have existed in the way we know.
@@ybemad What does this have to do with Linode?
I can always count on scihow to bring me the latest existential crisis
I'm not panicking you're panicking DO I SOUND LIKE I'M PANICKING
you might like exurb1a :)
Welcome to life.
Are your cells even your cells?
Better to know than not 🤷♂️
In a sense, the HeLa cell line has become so good at infecting other cell lines that it should almost be thought of as an independent organism unto itself. It would be fascinating to compare these current cells to frozen samples of the original cell line from all those decades ago, because they’ve probably undergone at least some level of natural selection to evolve better ways of contaminating and taking over other petri dishes. This would certainly make it the most interesting species of hominid on record.
I vote we name the organism Henrietta Lacks
Like that dog that only exist as cancer in other dogs now
Well there is a cancer in dogs that is transmitted sexually, originating in a dog some thousands of years ago and adapting to infect others. So HeLa could eventually do the same thing.
@@SupahGeck Tasmanian Devils also have something quite like this happening to them, in the form of tumours. Devil facial tumour disease.
@@3OHT. Currently we know of “Canine transmissible venereal sarcoma” in dogs, “Contagious reticulum cell sarcoma” in Syrian hamsters, “Devil facial tumor disease” in Tasmanian devils, and there are several contagious cancers among various bivalves and some of these can even infect multiple species.
worked for a few weeks in a 'clean' lab with lots of protocols, boss of the lab used to swan in and out without following any of the protocols, even came in with an executive group all holding coffee mugs and he was eating a sandwich. Wonder how clean labs become contaminated?
That's crazy. I work in a lab right now, and surprisingly, everyone seems to follow protocol. Makes sense, though. Our swipes come up contaminated with tuberculosis or Zika, HSV, and others every now and then. Def don't want to eat a sandwich around that!
Swan?
Ngl, I would have lasted maybe a week before attempting to physically remove him from the lab
@@koharumi1 to walk in a carefree fashion, kinda like traipse or jaunt
@@PretendingToBeAHuman i was 'MIFE' (Micro Electrode Ion Flux estimation),ing cells as a side project, to see what the K+ Ca+, Na+ response was to a new drug, just doing the journey work, so (hate to say it) not my problem, mentioned it, no response.
I tried to grow monkey kidney cells for my students for a lab course. I gained a new found respect and hatred for yeast. No matter how hard we tried aseptic techniques, the yeast would take over in about 4 days. This was at a community college in the United States so we didn't have the best lab layout or equipment. Luckily the yeast were morphologically different enough that we could tell the difference.
sounds like it wasn't done in a cleanroom lab? there's just way too many yeast spores in unfiltered air.
@@ryaneylee Correct. Very far from a clean room. The college had turned a storage room into a general purpose lab. We didn't even have positive pressure hoods. All were negative pressure. Luckily most experiments took less than 48 hours.
At least you could make monkey sourdough
@@fluffysheap 😂 Mmmhh..tasty!
@@jakesmerth1919 i see, you come from an area where community colleges are high schools that cannot afford simple modular cleanroom labs/booths (not that surprising, given what I heard of education funding in the US; i'm not from the US). or afford teachers who can teach basic civility and decency. poor you.
I just never heard of attempting cell culture outside of cleanrooms, and I don't even major in the life sciences, thus my surprise at OP's attempt to do cell culture outside of one.
The other thing people often forget is that cells mutate and change over time. We recently did a bunch of testing to find out what the problem was with our cell line - our first thought was contamination by another very similar cell line we also worked with, but it turned out to be a different spontaneous mutation in the gene we were looking at, that made the cells grow faster than the original cells, and outcompete those without the mutation. We ended up having to order a new batch of the cells we needed and re-run some experiments.
Yeah, at a talk with a cancer specialist she said that one line after a certain amount of time would just create crazier and crazier mutations, while another just... gave up at some point, slowing in division. Cell lines are neat.
Love this video!! I work in an undergrad cancer research lab and I noticed earlier this year while looking through a cell database (shout-out to cellosaurus) that one of the cancer cell lines we were using was actually not cancerous at all! My professor didn't even know and I had to send him a couple of papers to prove it to him and show him that we needed a different approach!
so this other cell line mutated and out-reproduced your cancer cell line? does that make it cancer-cancer?
As a cancer survivor, thank you for your diligence 🙏
From someone who's lost the most important person in my life to cancer (and most women on both sides of my biological family died from some kind of cancer - ergo; I'm basically counting on getting some sort one day) - THANK YOU for what you're doing and your sharp eyes and mind, thank your professor from me for listening to you, and I wish you very good luck in life, wherever it may take you.
See: Lymphoma Factsbook (yes, one word, it was originally published in German) for some crazy "all these cell lines are actually the same cell line" discoveries.
Also, working with lines needs to implement a mycoplasma testing habit
You might have inadvertently saved lives... Good job
In my lab we verify our cell lines with STR testing. We have caught so many contaminants that way, and it allows the researcher to have more confidence in the cell line they're using if the frozen stocks have been verified!
Fun fact. There is more of Henrieta cells alive today than when she was alive.
They couldn't keep her cancer under control. Now she takes cell line research out of control.
It is estimated that total weight of all the Henrietta cells ever grown exceeds 50 million metric tons. This makes her fattest human in history of mankind.
@WholeWheat KittyFeet
No just you.
@WholeWheat KittyFeet dude wtf
@@ivanborsuk1110 Yo mama so fat, her cells spread across the entire earth
My PhD project was impacted by this. My cells were supposed to be neck cancer...nope HeLa. Fortunately it was early enough in the project that I didnt lose much time changing to a different model. This was around 2010. The 'HeLa bomb' was just starting to be talked about then.
I remember when I learned the history of HeLa cells. I’d already been a researcher using them for at least five years when an older (male) post doc mentioned it. The story is certainly not universally known, but it does get shared informally as ethically important context for us to know. I’m grateful for that conversation.
I'm kind of horrified it wasn't mentioned in your curriculum.
I can't believe this is still being talked about & isn't widely known.
This has been a known problem since the 1970s & was written about in Science Magazine in 1982.
Yep. Just look at all the people commenting who didn’t know. 🤷🏼♀️
This is another reason that reproducibility should be demonstrated for these studies by outside labs. Reproducibility is one of the core tenets of the scientific method.
It's less likely that the same rogue cells would take over for different studies in different labs by different researchers.
Yeah but they may not reach the reproducibility stage since their research is likely to fail with containmented cells. medical research is expensive and other companies/labs aren't likely to attempt to replicate failed attempts
They are taking over where the cells are being manufactured. If you have a cell line you are getting it from the same place every time.
I wouldn't be surprised if the labs s were using the exact same cell lines
@@melody3741 yikes, I missed that.
when you reproduce an experiment with cell lines, you take your sample, split it into multiple samples, freeze some and split others and do experiments on those. when you have finished your experiments (which have a control and replicates from the second split) and you want to reproduce them, you take some of the frozen ones and you redo the experiment. if your starting sample is contaminated, then "reproducing" will not help you.
This actually makes a lot of sense to me, as basically a professional patient for the last 20yrs. I've seen so many "promising, well researched" new treatments at best fail to do anything and at worst make my friends worse. There are of course many other problems with the development of medicine, especially for chronic health conditions, but I'm not in the least bit surprised. We need to change how we do the research but also in how we reward the work done too. As it is now, even with all the best guidelines and regulations, there's still a strong incentive to publish "positive" results and punishment for not doing so quickly and cheaply enough and we need to move to a system that rewards accuracy over anything else.
The biography of Henrietta Lacks is very sad and will make you angry and disgusted.
The larger issues that were very wrong wouldn't happen today, but the lesser issues still can occur.
It's good to be aware so you can guard against them in your own life and family - even if you aren't poor and black.
I highly recommend reading the book.
What so sad and angering about it? People die of cancer every day, they just don't have books written about them.
@@andan2293
Go read the book and then comment.
It amazes me no company has done a public charity or outreach fund to help her family whos living in poverty to this day. That'd be good PR
@@andan2293 The wild disrespect the medical establishment had for a woman of color in the late 40s and early 50s, paired with nobody asking her, her estate, or even notifying her estate a generation later, was grossly improper, and should never happen again if we all can avoid it.
Her cancer cells were cared for while they *refused to ethically treat* her cervical cancer. They let her die. They kept what was killing her alive for 70+ years to come.
@@andan2293 hopefully you'll be one of them
If I became a scientist and made a known and preventable mistake on a highly cited piece of research I did... I'd feel humiliated.
It's difficult for me to understand why labs aren't taking every precaution _because_ their research is so expensive. If it goes wrong, all that funding could be wasted.
And if nothing else, I would expect any biology publisher to require such vital verification. They have a reputation to uphold, too.
Because it literally doesn't matter? Like half of the population vehemently believes that Pfizer and the other major drug companies are selling snake oil for covid vaccines and it hasn't hurt their income at all. Why would they do more than they need to to stay profitable?
Because it's expensive, and funding may be great for some labs, but doing this kind of tests may be easy, but not cheap. And with many countries lowering science funding due to pandemic related economic reasons, it's harder every day. You do what you can with what you have.
Research is seen as expensive, but scientists constantly need to cut corners so they can stay afloat. If you want to blame anyone about that, probably blame politicians and their voters that think of scientists as pompous elites overflowing with money, which couldn't be further from the truth for the majority of us.
because money. literally just money.
because scientists are no different than politicians. its all about money
Thank you for doing a show on WSU-CLL Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. I have this kind of cancer and receive IV-IG infusions once a month. Plus, I have a CT scan every six months. About 50% of the time, the infusions have adverse effects, which last for a couple of days. Almost all of the time, I take mild pain medication along with Tylenol and Imbruvica. Thanks again for taking the time and effort to put together this show.
What about the lost opportunity cost when studying the wrong cell lines? Avenues that might have panned out are excluded and never checked again.
although, that happens under the best of circumstances. It happens when studying the "right" cell lines, too. Don't go to far down the rabbit hole unless you have some specific solutions!
I know, I was thinking about that. I suppose really when it's discovered that a cell line has been contaminated, they should redo all the studies that used it. However, obviously that would be a lot easier said than done.
Finally, a SciShow video on this topic. It's good to see up to date information on the actual numbers of suspected contaminated samples. I've also never really understood how cell samples got contaminated - when I first learnt about the issue, it implied that even the cells inside a person's body could be infected by this miasma of lab cells. Horrible to contemplate - and not exactly scientifically sound. This was a quick, simple and great explanation of how cell line contamination happens.
That's like an engineer trying to test lithium batteries but working from a box that someone mixed nickel cadmium batteries into and they're all unlabeled AA sized cells. Just dumb. Your work is meaningless if you're not even checking your materials.
When I saw the title, I thought this was going to be about mycoplasma. That's another thing you have to check frequently!
Came up lots in commentary between the team. 😊
What's that about?
@@conlon4332 It’s a bacteria that’s a very, very common contaminant of cell cultures. It basically renders the information you get from the cultures useless - it can change cell metabolism, screw up chromosomes… mycoplasmas are almost unlimited in possible effects. And the bacteria is trending towards very antibiotic resistant, making it hard to fix a contamination problem.
@@conlon4332 mycoplasma contamination is frequently found in cell culture, it's a type of bacteria that doesn't have a rigid cell wall and is difficult to detect via microscopy. it's so ubiquitous that even if you order cells from trusted/tried and true/official companies, there's a chance that the stock that they dilute from is contaminated itself because of how widespread it is. it can also come from poor aseptic technique. when your cells are infected with mycoplasma, they grow more slowly and can exhibit unpredictable behavior.
That's actually crazy! I work in a molecular lab, and I'd have thought that cell culture labs are just as cautious to contaminants as we are!
One thing that could motivate scientists to take all those precautions is random testing for cell contamination by outside observers. Also those submitting papers citing studies invalidated due to cell contamination could have their papers refused publication by the editors/reviewers until the invalidated cites are removed or replaced with citations not on the banlist.
Great video :-) For those curious: HeLa cells weren't just taken without permission, Henrietta Lack's cells made people extravagantly rich while they left her family in poverty. That company still owns the rights to another person's DNA. This is not the worst of what the medical industry has done to black people, but it demonstrates how they view black people as deserving no consideration, of being usable as assets.
They don't see black people as people, even.
Don't you mean that in past tense? The world has changed if you haven't noticed. But I guess the mindset hasn't.
@@LordZordid no, the present tense is definitely still correct. There have been improvements to be sure, but there's loads of research showing that medical treatment and outcomes are still significantly worse for black people and other minorities than they are for white people, and that the right to bodily autonomy is unequally applied between said groups as well. On top of that there are many other ways that people of color receive worse treatment from the medical community than whites. If you don't believe me, well, it isn't very hard to find examples of this research.
Before HIPPA in the early 2000’s there was no consent needed to study cells removed from your body. Patients never asked after their removed cancer cells in the hope of getting rich off them, they just wanted them gone. No ethical guidelines were crossed when HeLa cells were collected and cultured. This was especially true 70 years ago. H. Lacks had the terrible fortune to have such a bad cancer that the cells truly seem to be immortal. It has nothing with screwing members of a minority race. America has a bad history, no doubt, but in this case racism had nothing to do with it. No one of any race owned or maintained control over their cells once they were removed.
@@LordZordid not really changed a lot, you sound like a white,male APOLOGIST
Possibly stupid, beginner question: I thought when cells divide they could possibly change (kind of like evolution--i think they can even become cancerous), so even if we're sure it's the correct cell line, how can we be sure they're "normal" cells?
We don't always know that. To be perfectly sure, a lab might genotype their cells both before and after an experiential just to confirm. (I work with viruses, and sometimes we do this to make sure something hasn't mutated halfway through in a way we weren't expecting.)
This is actually a commonly addressed problem in cell bio research. These cell lines generally only have so many cycles of division in them before they go senescent or accumulate too many genetic mutations. Therefore, labs will have a large stock of cells in liquid nitrogen at what we call a low “passage number” - basically ones that haven’t divided much. Then you track how many divisions the culture you’re working with has gone through, and throw them out when they come to your limit and start fresh with a new tube. Actually not a stupid question at all!
@@therongjr Thank you. As a former accountant, I understand that that might require extra expense, but it sounds important. Hopefully, any such changes will be discovered by further testing, but I guess those studies could still be cited.
You also keep track of how long a cell line is in use by passage numbers (how many times the cells were transferred into new plates). In order to reduce variability for e.g. genetically changed cell lines, you may also generate isogenic cell lines (which are cell lines derived from the original cell line where every cell shows the same genetic makeup) so that genetic drift becomes less pronounced
Cosmic rays can "bit flip" the dna of a cell, causing it to potentially change it's behaviour unless it is repaired.
I imagine HeLa contamination as the perfect revenge of Henrietta for the things the scientists did to her.
Me too, if I didn't know it to be true, it sounds like some sort of weird but extremely cool sci-fi revenge - where the person harmed gets even after death by never *truly* dying.
On one hand, all of modern science depends on her. On the other hand, the family never got one cut of what she was used for so 🤷♀️
The scientists were trying to cure her cancer, dude.
And you're blaming them for using her biopsy samples in research that could eventually prevent other women from meeting the same fate as Mrs Lacks?
Those are some pretty twisted priorities.
What did they do to her?
They treated her for cancer unsuccessfully. The taking of the cells didn’t damage her at all.
Contamination of cells lines by other cells lines can be minimised by growing the latest batch the lab received and then storing aliquots in liquid nitrogen. Then if contamination is suspected you can start again, or you can do this regularly whether you suspect the cell line is contaminated or not.
Of course this doesn't help if you are supplied with contaminated cell lines to start with.
When I worked in Virology from 1973-2011 we mainly used primary monkey kidney cells, MRC5 (a semicontinuous line from human embryo lung) and one or two others. We didn't use HeLa much due to the contamination problem.
Where I worked in an NHS diagnostic lab during the latter years, cell culture was largely (and by now totally) replaced by PCR methods for virus identification, which is not only quicker and more accurate but also removes any ethical problems in working with human and animal derived tissue.
can you say what "PCR" stands for, so we don't have to do a websearch?
in my lab, we use cell culture but just for plaque assays and sometimes to extract rna post infection for some transcriptomics work. if we are collecting samples and just looking to detect natural infection, we normally use qRT-PCR (since my lab works with rna viruses) and we are looking into setting up a contract so we can get some equipment to do ddPCR instead, which is so exciting lol
@@squirlmy Polymerase chain-reaction. That is the amplification of a short section of DNA using an enzyme known as a polymerase to replicate it over and over again until there are millions more copies than what you started with.
Incredibly important and well-done presentation. Every biological and pharmaceutical lab professor should have their students and apprentices watch it.
Just learning about human cell lines existing for decades was worth the listen. Thanks. Hours watching the first 30 seconds of RUclips dumb as a rock videos and then bang...one where I learn something. I'm going to have a good day.
Agreed! If I’m flopped down with the iPad, weathered in, (Minnesota winter), maybe I should learn something.
Thanks SciShow!
The title of this could of also been: The postmortem revenge of Henrietta Lacks…
How are these vendors allowed to label the cell line as INT407 when it's indistinguishable from HeLa?
I wonder this too, they’ve essentially admitted that they’re selling HeLa, so why is it okay that they’re knowingly and actively telling people the cell line they’re selling is INT407?
My dream future has Hank open SciKnow, a science validation organization so we can trust the output. Thank you Hank & SciShow for informing us for so many years.
Cells taken without consent are now systematical destroying cell research.
I mean I've watched scifi/horror movies with worst plot lines.
Helen's Revenge!
@@FelixTheAnimator Hennie's Revenge, really. "Helen Lane" was a pseudonym.
@@eritain @Henscratch Studio Animation Her name is Henrietta Lacks.
The cells were taken with consent. They had no idea that her cancer was special or different.
The only thing they didn’t do was ask permission to continue using the sales, or give her money for them. Which would be unheard of at the time.
@@neilkurzman4907 are you like their descendant or why u so defensive of unethical science?
The book on Henrietta Lacks is truly stupendous. The ethical and human concerns are deeeeeep.
0:56 "lets explore the answer to that.. ON THOUGHT BUBBLE!!!"
Hank... PLEASE would you guys consider a Philosophy Crash Course 2"??
the world could really use it.
Thanks for all the amazing work
Shhh I’m sneaking as much in to the episodes as I can, but if you TELL him… 😉
You should do a follow up on mycoplasma contamination and how difficult it is to detect. We had to send all our in house cell lines for SEM to verify if they were clean or not. About 65% were not clean. You could also talk about how some researchers use antibiotics which creates a false sense of security and doesn't prevent non-bacterial contamination.
Really cool mentioning the HeLa stuff. Not enough people know about it.
I didn't know about it, but it was very interesting to learn it.
Similar hard to challenge misconceptions crop up in other places like history and social norms for example.
Seems like it is very much a human error, especially so in this case... in more ways than one.
Thanks Hanks. I was worried they’d pushed him out. His videos seem to have a certain... wisdom..
Interesting! A problem I didn't even know existed; thanks for helping me learn something today. 👍
I take issue with "Researches are rarely required to prove that their cell lines are the ones they think they are." In the past few years, many of the big journals (more than just Nature owned journals) require short tandem repeat (STR) profiling of all new deposited cell lines as well as your own validation of the cell line you claim you're working with. Same with common microbial contaminants. Source: have performed a LOT of STR profiling and contamination testing on cell lines before submitting manuscripts for publication.
This is a really terrifying opening for someone with a chronic illness.
they need to compensate that womans family. They dun her dirty.
This has to be so frustrating if you've done a bunch of research on the wrong cells! Or rather the wrong cells for the problem that you want to be working on.
Info of this issue was a real revelation to me. Excellent detailed explanations of the how. the why, and what can be done to fix the problems. Thanks!
Thank you.
The HeLa line glitch was 1980's storm.
Growing plant tissues is also problematical.
Love the 'spleen' @4:26
Wow! You guys explain such complicated concepts clearly and, surprisingly to me, with humor!! I love Hank's delivery!
There is a particular scientist who is very good at spotting cell line contamination, and is frequently brought in to assess the culture purity at various research centers. This person was brought in to assess a huge NIH center. They found so much contamination, the management of the center quietly asked them to leave. The problem was so big, management decided it was too expensive to fix.
With the news about the COVID public health emergency ending in the US, I'd like to see a SciShow News video about all the negative health and social impacts we can expect, such as people losing access to healthcare, more (particularly marginalized) people dying unnecessarily, the harm caused by the lack of masking in public spaces, etc.
The scary thing is all human advancement is sliding back due to the humans performing the research, manufacturing, theorizing, procedures becoming unaware of previous important knowledge. The stuff we already "know" is not being taught as thoroughly as when it was discovered, and new things we supposedly "know" are constantly wrong. Every time a doctor says to me "we just don't know why" a symptom or disease exists, I roll my eyes. The answer is probably staring someone in the face every moment of every day.
As a Chemist, I can relate.. everyone just leaves unlabeled beakers around and wonder why there reactions don't work.. or if you're unlucky, you'll just get a bad paper to follow where there's a fundamental flaw. My catalyst synthesis from my first year of my PhD was like this - no wonder I dropped out 😂
Once you get out of research then lab housekeeping gets a lot better in my experience. You still need to do the gentle sniff every now and again though.
@@SocialDownclimber I completely jumped ship and now I work in hazardous waste disposal 😂
One wonders what successful treatments we could have now that we don't, solely because of these unintended errors.
Enjoying the new release times with this channel.
“You would hope that the doctor would give you the right medicine for your illness” it better be, it costed me my house for the medicine!
MURICAAAAAA
I thought this was going to be about microplasma, but this is worse. Some cell lines also get infected with viruses which are very difficult to get rid of without killing off the cell line.
As someone doing cell culture work right now, this hasn't been too much of an issue, BUT I do admit to accidentally infecting one knockout line with another and still growing it. They are of the same lineage, but different knockouts, so maybe it's not too bad?
That sounds pretty bad tbh… how will you report that in a manuscript? I bet your PI would just tell you to throw it out and thaw fresh cultures
@@SAHooplahBoth the contaminating and contaminant are knockout clones generated from the same TNBC parental line, but either way, we already have several other clones to use, so it's not that big a deal. I told my PI, and he basically told me to see how it grew, we can decide whether to use it or not later.
(That sounds like the premise of a zombie movie 😂)
I usually split one cell line at a time for this reason.
When I applied for a cancer research grant I had to detail the methods used to confirm cell line identity.
Question for people that work in the field: Are the cell lines being contaminated mostly in-lab, or are the cell lines being bought from distributors already contaminated and not what was ordered? (I would think that the pressure to retest and spend the money proving a cell line is what is claimed should be more on the distributors selling the lines than on the labs that have ordered them, at least financially.)
The more I hear about HeLa, the more I think about a videogame like Callisto or Deadspace where a cell line goes rampant and becomes a pathogen.
I mean it was originally derived from a cancer tissue sample... so technically a pathogen?
Honestly, would be more creative than the big standard zombie apocalypse scenario
@@RomanNumeral04 A pathogen is (very loosely) defined as an infectious microorganism or agent, such as a virus, bacterium, protozoan, prion, viroid, or fungus. As commonly, cancer cells will not transmit to another host, they aren’t classically put under that term.
Having said that, there _are_ cases of transmittable cancers, see e.g. Devil facial tumour disease
That's not even close to the story of the Dead Space series, what the hell are you talking about?
🤔 Doesn’t the HeLa story-in a way, _at least_ *obliquely*-remind anyone of the SyFy movie “Living Hell”?
🤔 Now that was novel as “movie monsters” go-a “cancer monster”…
(Although DC Comics did something similar with a creature called “Kancer,” which was developed from a kryptonite-induced tumor from Superman…)
A petri dish once opened to the air is contaminated. The only question is if the contamination is enough, grows mroe rapidly, or even kills the intended cell culture. Its a huge probloem, Thank You for pointing this out.
In a wild twist of karma, stolen cells from Henrietta Lacks end up ensuring that all future drugs only work on Henrietta Lacks.
I'm really not OK with this!!! This needs to be a much longer video or a series. My faith in medicine has been fundamentally shaken to its foundation. We can't wrap this video up and say that the answer is just that scientists should be more careful, and test their samples and Journals should probably verify the research. Like, they've known about this for 70 years and it's still a problem?!? We are supposed to put trust into the drug companies and the science behind it is flawed? 1 in 3 cell lines are corrupted?!? I have Crohn's disease. I worry constantly about getting colon cancer, and dying at an early age. You're telling me that the drugs I've been taking might not be working correctly? The ones I've spent $1,000s over the years?!? I'M REALLY NOT OK WITH THIS!!!
I’m with you here. I have PCOS, fibromyalgia, and some autoimmune disease doctors can’t diagnose yet (won’t show up in tests but I’m having all symptoms and horrible widespread inflammation). All are lifelong illnesses with no cure and medicine that “might” help with symptoms. Imagine how much progress could’ve been made by now for people like us if people were more careful. They’re playing with people’s lives in those labs.
Hank Green actually has Crohn's himself so I imagine he might be just as pissed but didn't want to get too personal in this video. As a healthcare worker myself this is infuriating. Science has a problem of lacking or bad error management culture. Especially errors that are invisible to the researcher like cell line contamination or irreproducibility and misconduct that is incentivized by the publish or perish pressure, by bad working conditions and privatization of science.
Too many studies, papers and research pojects are a waste of money because meticulousness and care is not rewarded enough, resulting in failure. Not to mention office politics and too much toxic competition.
Many scientists are meticulous and careful (and certainly more than their bosses), but the system does not reward those qualities enough. It really needs to. Otherwise the next pandemic will also result in mostly garbage me-too papers and less good research than was possible.
I wonder though why pharma corporations dont't make sure the preliminary studies before their stage one clinical trials were done on the right cell lines. Considering most medications don't make it to the market I would think it would be cheapest to discard those compounds that were not tested with the proper cell lines at the earliest stage possible in the development pipeline!
The story of my grad project...spend a whole week trying to grow my cells and then bam contamination and im set back a week or worse a month. Spraying ethanol on my gloves, cleaning the incubator, the fume hood, autoclaving everything, sterile tools etc....and in the end it doesnt seem to matter.
Ngl, I first read this as "micro plastic problem" and after watching the video I now feel more horrified than if it had been about microplastics.
I THOUGHT I had been researching, spindle formation in colon tumour cells for two years, but turns out, I've never had a job like that.... maybe I saw it on the telly or something.
Ah, yes . . . I started doing immunology soon after the great THP-1/Raji cell mixup was identified. Good times, good times!
As someone who deals with chronic pain & who dealt with a rare condition for men, the absolute & unwavering incompetence of licensed medical professionals was shocking.
I used this as a source for a science review in my college level biology course. Thanks Hank!
Thanks for the video, this was really fascinating!
At long last, have the family of Henrietta Lacks seen any renumeration or other benefit (such as scholarships) from their ancestor's unique donation to science?
Thank you. You have explained this really well.
Ooof though, that's quite a problematic discovery AND how good it was discovered at least! Thank you for teaching about it!
I never even realized this was a problem! Very informative
Interesting piece of the repeatability problem.
May be more of a problem in academia but pharma gets their cell lines certified, aliquots are made and new cells used for limited time. Good cell culturists would easily spot diff in growth rates and appearance of most cell types.. they are not just blobs. He is right that good lab practices are required for consistency.
This revelation actually made me shake with rage - rage at the inevitable sequelae: That the old, but very *well known maxim of "PUBLISH OR PERISH," has more than likely driven many researchers to COVER UP THIS **_HORRID ERROR IN LABS!_*
That thought _INSTANTANEOUSLY_ flew into my retired - but still active - "old nurse's brain," and *It. Simply. Will. **_NOT._** Leave!* "Publish Or Perish" has been pernicious enough, through the years - as it has been for ages - but when something like _THIS_ is thrown into the mix, *the temptation to just **_GO! GO! GO!_** PUBLISH, B'GOD, & THE DE'IL TAKE THE HINDMOST!* must, surely, be near to _ABSOLUTELY OVERWHELMING!_ THAT idea should be promptly purged, whilst *_SIMULTANEOUSLY_** MAKING ALL RESEARCH LABS CLEARLY KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT THIS EGREGIOUS & OUTRAGEOUS PROBLEM!*
Thank you, Sci Show folks (especially the ever-smiling Hank Green!), for letting us "lay people" in on this important knowledge, and for so, so much more science. *The more that **_EACH OF US_** KNOWS, the better off **_ALL OF US_** WILL BE!*
Me, a cell culture researcher: new fear unlocked
Ok, now my friends in the biology department should not be so hard on themselves for cell line contamination. Now I know that I’m not alone and no one in particular is to blame for this universal issue. Actually I saw how my seniors’ projects are going when I was younger so I ended up abandoning biology projects altogether as a result 😢 (from just a kid perspective because we are being graded by the results). Now that I proceed further in the field and started opening myself up again for new challenges, I can do my best and not be too hard on myself if things failed 😂
SciShow is a world treasure
You Betta check yo cell, befo' you wreck yo cell, BOOOOOYYYYY!!!!
Thank you for acknowledging Henrietta!
"just imagine you got sick"
Me, who's chronically ill: "Ah, a regular tuesday then"
This is called as Cross-contamination. It usually happens when you deal with different cell types or you share places with people working with different cell types. Also why people rarely identify their own cells is because they already think it’s authenthicated already, because they usually just buy their cells from a cell bank and doesn’t focus much on characterizations.
This video was super informative.
Mistaking cervical cells for intestinal cells... So Wrong hole on a scientific level 😂
HeLla wrong
Underrated comment and reply!
dude that's hilarious lmfao
Distasteful comment.
@XYZ You'd think it'd be Prude nt for them to remove
I work in medicine, and good manufactoring processes are 100% necessary with what we do. We need certificates with every item that we use, even then we sample each batch either in house or a separate lab to make sure that it's up to quality.
If it fails, the whole lot goes back. And even if it passes, we have constant quality checks at ever step to make sure the quality is up to par.
Thank you so much for this warning!!! Can you get het clean lines from providers?
Hm regarding the Linode ad: the internet isn't the world wide web, rather the www is one application on the internet - websites and stuff, documents linking to other documents building a web of knowledge
The internet is the communication network below, also running other applications like email, games, .. all the other stuff x)
If Maury Povich can determine that Dashawn IS Loyanda's baby daddy, why can't scientists determine what their cell lines are??
Excellent content, thanks. Science research is rarely simple.
Small changes in science are often overlooked as insignificant by the general public. That's why my favorite example of why small changes in science can have a big impact, is the fact that if we mirror the molecule that is responsible for the taste of oranges, we get the taste of lemons. Chemically speaking, it is exactly the same. The only difference is that it's been mirrored. Yet it instantly becomes something entirely else. The most famous medical catastrophe involving this, is the Thalidomide disaster. But it is also that same disaster that is responsible for us now knowing how little it takes to completely change the biological chemistry of living things and how easily we can accidentally kill, maim and/or seriously injure thousands of people through what seems like a single, miniscule mistake.
The absolute best part of cell culture is putting in hours and hours of work to end up with a bunch of little wells of indistinguishable pink liquids
Do a video on blastosis hominis!
"The cool thing about science is that if there's a problem you can fix it! With more science." -Cave Johnson, I think.
1/3rd of all commercially used cell lines “is/are” contaminated with cell lines not of the expected subject base. I see! “That’s quite different, isn’t it!” ~ Emily Littell
“Where do we go from here! When all of the children are grown up?” ~ Alan Parsons
Odd thing i noticed while watching this: the containers that hold the cell lines look like little glass coffins.
I actually work with HeLa's every day.
We are in the middle of checking if one of newer KO HeLa cells is actually faulty and contain multiple phenotypes (failed crispr or contaminated)
There needs to be a special prize for replication studies similar to the Nobel with a substantial cash payout. This way there is more than just principle at stake for actually catching these mistakes.
virally transmissible cancer is like my favorite disease, it's just so cool