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12/01/2014
Cannabalism?
CHAPTER 51 Questionable Cells and Medicinal Choices
Last month, one of the topics I mentioned was a promising medical achievement in which nasal cells were used to help a paralyzed patient to walk. Medicine has come a long way over the past millennium but there are still some worrisome problems, one of which concerns the identities of various cell lines used medical research. I learned of this problem in an article titled "Trial and Error and Error and Error ....." by Jill Neimark in the November issue of Discover magazine. You may have heard or read of Henrietta Lacks and a recent settlement with her relatives by the NIH concerning access to so-called HeLa cells and acknowledgement of the Lacks family in publications of work utilizing HeLa cells. HeLa cells are an immortal line of cells cultured from a tissue of Lacks' cervical cancer back in the year of her death in 1951. These robust HeLa cells have been cultured and multiplied ever since and have been used in thousands of studies. Wikipedia cites Jonas Salk's polio vaccine as one case in which HeLa cells played a role.
But what about many other cell lines? Neimark cites the case of Kenneth Ain, a renowned researcher in the field of thyroid cancers. Ain had cultured cell lines of thyroid cancers and shared them with researchers around the world, where they were used to study cell changes and to come up with drugs to fight the cancers. Ain was shocked to learn from another cancer researcher that his cell lines were actually not thyroid cancer but some other form of cancer. On checking back he realized that a human error years before had introduced more rapidly growing melanoma and colon cancer cells into his samples. Ain was conscientious and sent letters to researchers in various countries telling of the contamination but, out of 69 letters, heard back from only two.
It seems that today up to a third of cell lines are not what they are purported to be. And, of those contaminated cell lines, it seems that about 20 percent of them are actually dominated by HeLa cells. Henrietta Lacks' cells are so robust that they take over from other cancer cells if they make their way into a cell line. How did the contamination occur? One way is simply that a lab may be studying more than one cancer and a pipette may inadvertently be used without thorough cleaning - human error. As pointed out in the article, the most disturbing thing is not the contamination, but the fact that, even today, papers are published and references cited to studies that are known to have been carried out using misidentified cell lines.
As long as we're talking about unpleasant medical subjects, let's consider something medicinal that I truly found disgusting. If, as do I, you have European ancestors, were some of them cannibals? In the December issue of the Smithsonian magazine, the featured story deals with the boy king Tutankhamun (my spellchecker says Tutankhamen). The article deals with recent studies on King Tut and the controversies that still remain over this relatively minor pharaoh of Egypt. Given all the publicity associated with Tut, I was taken with a quote attributed to Egyptologist Chuck Van Sielen, "Considering how much attention we pay to Tut, it's as if you wrote a history of the presidents of the United States and devoted three long chapters to William Henry Harrison." (You may recall that Harrison died of pneumonia just a month after his inauguration.)
The Smithsonian article tells of how Tut's mummy has been poked and prodded and X-rayed and all kinds of studies performed it. Even so, there's still controversy over how he died. Was he murdered or in a chariot race, for example? Did he have a clubfoot or were his leg bones placed that way in his tomb? Despite all the manipulating and tests performed on Tut's mummy, it's treatment seems relatively benign compared to the fate of other Egyptian mummies.
In a disturbing article in the Fall 2014/Winter 2015 issue of Chemical Heritage magazine, the ultimate fates of some other mummies are described at length. The article, "Mummies and the Usefulness of Death" by Mariel Carr, begins with a bit about a painting from 1815 by Martin Drolling titled "Interior of a Kitchen". The painting of two young women sitting at a table in a kitchen contains various shades of brown in their dresses and in the table and copper pots. Nothing unusual about that, you might say. However, the choice of pigment used to obtain the particular shades of brown might surprise you; at least it did me - ground up Egyptian mummies! Apparently, ground up mummies as pigments were used by artists from the 16th through 19th centuries. Even as late as 1915, a London pigment dealer is quoted as saying one mummy would supply him and his customers pigments for 20 years.
Now to the "cannibal" part. Even before the use of mummies for pigments, back in the 12th century, Europeans were eating mummies, ground up or broken into pieces, as medicine! I imagine that you may be as surprised as I was to learn of this medicinal way of disposing of mummies. However, there does seem to be some degree of reasonableness for the practice. It has to do with bitumen, which we generally associate with the asphalt that's used in coating roads. In her article, Carr points out that the Roman Pliny the Elder in his 1st-century "Natural History" suggests taking bitumen with wine to cure coughs and dysentery. Bitumen had various forms ranging from somewhat liquid to the hard sticky stuff we know. And it was used as a medication for various maladies, with natural bitumen widely available in the Middle East. Indeed, it seems that bitumen was a sort of wonder drug for those times and supplies of it were dwindling.
Well, with the discovery of the mummies and the blackish coatings resulting from the resins used by the Egyptians, the mummies were thought to be coated in bitumen. The Persian word for bitumen was "mumia" (mum meant wax). Over the centuries, mumia came to mean not only bitumen but the flesh of the embalmed bodies as well. King Charles II apparently carried with him his own mumia, a tincture of human skull, the King's Drops. One might think that the supply of mummies was quite limited but it wasn't only pharaohs that were mummified. Mummification became popular with the middle class Egyptians and even some Romans and Greeks who were in Egypt were mummified. Even so, when the supply of mummies ran low, the Europeans might rely on plain old corpses, typically hanged criminals and such for their supply of mumia. Toasted camel was sometimes passed off as mumia.
I've only covered a bit of the long article by Carr. And it's not all about mummies. Recall that the title contains the phrase "the Usefulness of Death". As one who has recently made arrangements to donate my body to the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where I was an adjunct professor after retiring from Bell Labs, I was interested to learn that the first person to donate his body to science was one Jeremy Bentham in 1832. However, I'm not specifying that my body be treated as was Bentham's. He specified that his body be publicly dissected by his friend and colleague, Thomas Southwood Smith, following which the head was to be preserved and the body stuffed in as lifelike a manner as possible. Turns out Smith was unable to mummify the head in a lifelike fashion and had to resort to a wax model. You apparently can see Bentham's stuffed body and wax head in a case on public view at University College London, where the body was dissected. The mummified head now resides in a climate controlled room in the archaeology division of the college.
Well, so much for medical topics. I'll probably get back next year to my obsession with space-related stuff. Obviously, I should have been writing here about Rosetta and the landing on the comet. However, that got so much publicity that I wouldn't be able to add to what you already know.
Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah or whatever other holiday you celebrate and, hopefully, I'll be back on or about January 1, 2015.
Allen F. Bortrum
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