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HeLa is a human continuous cell line originating in cervical cancer biological cells collected from Henrietta Lacks in 1951. Its name combines the beginning of her first and last names.^[ref]

ATCC's CCL-2 HeLa preparation grows attached to a surface. Its product sheet specifies a cell culture medium supplemented with fetal bovine serum, at $37{}^{\circ }\mathrm{C}$ with $5\%$ carbon dioxide in air.^[ref] These are specified conditions for that preparation, rather than defining conditions for every HeLa derivative.

Continuing access to related biological cells makes HeLa useful for comparisons of cell state and responses to interventions. But a continuous cell line is a laboratory model: its history and environment matter, and observations in it do not alone establish responses in an intact organism. Cell counting measures abundance; a trypan blue exclusion test measures a particular membrane-associated readout; neither proves cell line identity.

Source and image attribution: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henrietta_Lacks_(cropped).jpg

Online text: www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henrietta-lacks

Institutional history page issued by Johns Hopkins Medicine, with no individual byline or publication date established. The institution is recorded as issuer, not a credited personal author.

Cited passages: Opening history of Henrietta Lacks’s 1951 biopsy and the explanation of the name HeLa. The historical date concerns the biopsy, not publication of this page.