LEONARD HAYFLICK
Adjunct Professor of Anatomy
University of California, San Francisco© RAMIN RAHIMIANLeonard Hayflick learned to culture cells under the tutelage of a famous expert, Charles Pomerat. In 1958, after completing his fellowship in Pomerat’s lab, Hayflick became a member of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, providing cell cultures for its researchers. “It was a golden opportunity because it would leave me with plenty of time and resources to do what I wanted to do without worrying about getting grants or being subject to supervision.”
Hayflick was interested in detecting viruses that might cause human cancer. He would extract viruses from the culture fluid in which he grew cancer cells and attempt to transform normal cells into tumor cells. Human adult cells frequently contained unwanted viruses, so Hayflick obtained tissue from fetuses to use as a source of virus-free normal cells. He found that tissue from the lung, which is already a discrete organ by three months of embryonic development, was best for making fibroblast cell strains. “Like everyone else who did cell culture, I was persuaded to believe the 60-year-old dogma that when you culture cells, they have the capacity to divide forever. In practice, this never happened and people attributed their failure to ignorance of culturing methods, media ...
