Cell Line contamination

Today’s scientist must publish in order to stay afloat. There is never enough funding for scientists which creates a supply and demand curve, leading to competition. Scientists spend so many years on one field of research to establish themselves along with their reputation of work. Then they must keep performing year after year putting in countless time and effort.

In 1952, Henrietta Lacks established the first human cancer cell line. This finding would have a long lasting positive and very negative effect on the biological and scientific community. After the establishment of the HeLa cells it became much easier to establish more cell lines and everyone began working on establishing cell lines like a domino effect. These later cell lines that were being established were overgrown by HeLa and it roots from the beginning of establishment. This contamination of cell lines has lead to a major problem that has had no rules or regulations from any of the major research funding agencies or any of the most popular scientific journals. This problem remains because as a scientist without publications one will not progress. So, when someone comes along with a finding of potential contamination on a cell line has been that scientist bread and butter for years it could end your career. Without any rules on the use of contaminated cell lines then scientist will continue to publish tainted research, because they can. It has been nearly forty years since they discovered this problem with cell line contamination and still nothing has been done.

The sad story out of this situation is the scientists who have ignored the problem at hand. A true scientist that really wants to publish new and valid material would not want to even touch a contaminated cell line. But as I said before the nature of business has even affected scientists and they are sacrificing their works credibility. Stopping these researchers that keep using the contaminated cell lines seems like a hopeless effort, but educating scientists and preventing them from beginning their work with a contaminated cell line could be a start. One of the ways to prevent the use of contaminated cells lines is to authenticate them. If it is made a habit to authenticate and compare the cell lines to other authenticated cell lines then no contamination would occur. This process is said to be developed in to a standard for human cell lines that go through ATCC, the American Type Culture Collection. The ATCC is stating that if the authentication of cell lines will become a forced rule if the research community does not embrace the standards for authentication and comply.

Authenticating these cell lines is the key to solving this contamination problem. It will add one step to the process which will save lives, time and the integrity of the research involved.