by Michaela Lamb | Almost everyone knows someone whose life has been affected by cancer, but they may not understand how cancer actually works. All of that is changing and it starts in a high school classroom.

Every year, students in Principles of BioMedical Sciences get an opportunity that most high school students could never imagine having. They are given the chance to work with cancer.

The cells that high school students are able to work with are, of course, sterile. Living cancer cells pose a danger to anyone working with them or in an area that may be contaminated with them. The cells come from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died in the 50s of cervical cancer.

“HeLa cells are cancerous cells from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was the first person that scientists were able to cultivate cells from and those are the cells that people look at when they are doing research on cancer,” junior Sania Lohdi said.

For reasons unknown to scientists, Lacks’ cancerous cells never fully died, even after they had been removed from her body and cultivated in a lab. They have been called immortal cells, but they are more commonly known as HeLa cells.

Because the secret of the cancerous cells rests in the DNA, students are taught the actual procedure that scientists use in extracting the DNA from the nucleus of the cell. And it is not as high-tech as it sounds.

“It was a really exciting process,” junior Macayla Witt said. “We drop the HeLa cells from several feet up, onto a slide so that the nucleus of the cell bursts and we can see the chromosomes. Seeing the difference between normal cells and cancer cells was really interesting. Cancer cells have an extra chromosome and you can see it when you look at the slides under a microscope.”

This lab is one of the favorites of both students and teachers in the BioMedical program.

“I really like doing the HeLa cell lab. It teaches you how to separate cells and group them according to different characteristics. I think it’s taught me about how science has grown over the years and everything we are learning someone discovered doing what we are doing now,” senior Andrew Reith said.

With such a relatable topic, it is easy to keep students on task and interested in what they are learning. Labs like this one further a student’s understanding of the disease.

“I like this lab for a lot of reasons. I think that this type of thing is where students really start to learn,” Principles of Biomed teacher Tim Block said. “It’s a great history lesson and it illustrates how science works in the real world.”