In January, 1951 Henrietta Lacks was referred by her doctor to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, because she suffered from abnormal bleedings between her regular menstrual cycles. The gynecologist Howard Jones, working at the hospital, discovered a small tumor of purple color on her cervix. Mary Kubicek was successful in establishing an immortal cell line using Henrietta Lacks’ cells. Today’s knowledge of fundamental processes in malignant and healthy cells was largely derived from HeLa cells, but they also played an important role in applied research, for example, in the development of a vaccine against poliomyelitis.
In this PBL case, students get to research cell lines and moleculary biology methods, and debate on the ethics of doing research with human cells.
Simon J. Büchner studied Cognitive Science and Philosophy in Freiburg and Cognitive Psychology in Amherst, Massachusetts, supported by scholarships from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation and the Fulbright Commission. He then worked in interdisciplinary research projects on human spatial navigation and received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Freiburg. As a graduate student, he was a visiting researcher at Concordia University, Montréal. Dr. Büchner is responsible for the Major Life Sciences at the University College Freiburg. This includes the development of the curriculum, the course offerings per semester, recruiting and supporting Teaching Fellows, as well as thesis supervision.
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