Cancer cell culture has its own history. After discussing the Introduction of Cancer Cell Culture, today we are going to discuss about the cancer cell culture history from beginning until now. In fact, cell culture has started to develop since the last century. We can trace back the story from year 1885.
Cancer Cell Culture History
In 1885, a scientist named Wilhelm Roux proved that the medullary plate of a chick embryo can be survive in saline solution for several days. As amphibians are cold blood organisms, most of the early experiments of cell culture will choose to use amphibians as material to be studied.
In 1887, another scientist name Arnold showed that frog lymphocytes can migrate and stay alive in saline. Next, Ljunggren reported his first experiment using human tissue in 1898. He demonstrated that the human skin tissues can survive in ascetic fluid.
However, in 1903, a scientist named Jolly was successfully to make the salamander leukocytes to stay alive in vitro for one month. Yet, Harrison who is recognized as the father of tissue culture had explanted tissue from frog embryos into frog lymph clots and the fragments of tissues not only survived but nerve fibres developed from the cells. This well-recognized technique was further improved by Montrose Burrows. He replaced lymph clot with plasma clots. On the other hand, Alexis Carrell had shown to us that embryo extracts had useful growth promoting activities and is a good feature for growing within culture.
Furthermore, Warren Lewis started to look for the growing factors required for tissue to grow in culture in 1911. Three year later, Losee and Ebeling started to culture cancer cells. The first continuous rodent line was developed by Wilton Earle in 1943.
In 1951, George Gey was successfully to generate the first human cancer continuous cell line, HeLa. This is one of the most essential discoveries for cancer cell culture and cancer research. From that, the cancer cell line culture has been developed vigorously by many other scientists such as Eagle, Fischer, Parker, Healy, Morgan, White, Waymouth, Ham, Sato, and so on.
In summary, from the storyline of cancer cell culture development, we know that it is not easy to culture a cell. Without those scientists’ efforts, we might still not be able to grow the cell now. Therefore, we should appreciate their contributions to the science Biology.
Reference: “Cancer Cell Culture” by Simon P. Langdon
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