The end of the beginning ?
Published by :
In2Publishing Ltd ., PO Box 7492 , Kidderminster , Worcestershire , DY11 9HB , UK
Publishing Director : Jon Fellows
Editor : Dr Andrew Warmington editor @ specchemonline . com
US Editor : Gregory Morris gdlm @ enterpriseandindustry . com
Design : Sean Roper Print Consultant : Jamie Ringrose
Global Commercial Manager : Charlie Wise charlie @ in2publishing . co . uk
US Sales Agent : Ben Jones bjones @ centurygloballlc . com
European Sales Manager : Rob Dubery rob @ in2publishing . co . uk
East Asia Sales Agent : Sadao Mizoguchi mijinc7 @ ybb . ne . jp
While every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the publication , In2Publishing Ltd . cannot accept liability for any statement or error contained herein . © Speciality Chemicals Magazine 2023
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES : Speciality Chemicals Magazine welcomes feature articles from industry , consultants and academia with a technical , chemistry , regulatory and / or business and market focus . We also welcome opinion or comment pieces on issues in the fine and speciality chemicals sectors .
The articles we use are typically 800-1,500 words , with one picture , figure , diagram , table or other illustration per 500 words . Opinion pieces can be shorter . All submissions are subject to review by the editor to ensure that they are in line with house style and values . SCM does not take placed news stories .
Your article should focus on a scheduled feature , or be of general interest across the sector . We also have a ‘ Special Features ’ category if you need to supply a more general piece of work . Article titles should be no longer than 12 words , with a short standfirst summarising the content of the article and giving the name ( s ) and affiliation ( s ) of the author ( s ).
Figures and tables should be numbered and given a caption of no more than ten words . Text should be submitted in Word format , with illustrations as separate files in an editable format . Chemical formulae should be provided as PDFs . Pictures must have a minimum of 300 dpi resolution for colour printing .
FOR FURTHER GUIDELINES : editor SEP @ / specchemonline OCT 2023 . com
August saw a landmark in a US legal case that has raised many social and ethical issues , when Thermo Fisher Scientific settled a lawsuit brought by the estate of Henrietta Lacks over the use of cells take from her body in biomedical research . It will not be the end of the story , however .
Lacks , a poor black woman was admitted to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1951 , suffering from cervical cancer . Clinical evaluation showed that tumour cells from her tissues that were taken for a biopsy doubled in culture every 20 – 24 hours . They were the first cell lines that were able to survive and reproduce indefinitely in Petri dishes under laboratory conditions .
Before Lacks died later that year , the hospital propagated the cells and later commercialised them under the name HeLa . The cells have been an immense boon to medical research and thus to humanity . They have been used to test the polio vaccine , research the effects of radiation on human cells and develop a treatment for sickle-cell anaemia , among many other things . Research involving HeLa cells has been described in over 110,000 publications .
Using cells without the patient ’ s consent was common practice in the 1950s . Discarded material or material obtained during surgery , diagnosis or therapy was the property of the doctor or the medical institution , though in this case neither profited from it . Lacks herself never knew anything about it and her family only found out when a research group that had found other cell cultures being invaded by suspected HeLa cells contacted them to request DNA samples . Naturally they were distressed and angry .
There had been little knowledge of the case before Rebecca Skloot ’ s best-selling book , The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks , was published in 2010 . It was turned into a feature film in 2017 . In 2021 , her descendants sued Thermo Fisher , which sells various HeLa-related product lines , such as peptide and RNA standards , saying they had “ not seen a dime ” of the money the company and its predecessors had made from HeLa cells . Indeed , many of them were living without health insurance .
This is certainly not going to be the end of the matter . The family family ’ s civil rights attorney Ben Crump had already told Thermo Fisher that they “ shouldn ’ t feel too alone because they ’ re going to have a lot of company soon ”. The family has since filed suit against Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical , a specialist in rare and ultra-rare genetic diseases , over the use HeLa cells to manufacture adeno-associated virus vectors for gene therapies . More will follow .
The case has also cut deep into the racial divide in the US . Inevitably , taking cell tissue without consent was much commoner where poor patients , many of them black , were treated for free and were not regarded with any great respect . Crump described Ultragenyx ’ s use of HeLa cells “ as a choice to embrace a legacy of racial injustice embedded in the US research and medical systems ”.
Just as importantly , the publicity may have cemented the suspicions black Americans have about medical research . In 2022 , a Pew Research Centre survey showed 55 % of them saw misconduct by medical research scientists as a moderate or very big problem . Black Americans are also more suspicious in general than others of the COVID vaccines – some of which were , of course , developed using HeLa cells .
Some of the lessons of this – such as the need for transparency and consent – have largely been learned already . Some may need to be learned again .
Dr Andrew Warmington
EDITOR – SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE
SPECCHEMONLINE
. COM 5