Science - International Graduate Program Medical Neurosciences

8 CNSNewsletter June 2011
FOCUS/Check This Out
Journal of Unsolved Questions
PhD students from the Graduate School of Material Science (MAINZ) launched a
scientific journal to publish negative results.
In the journal of Unsolved Questions
(JUnQ), scientific projects gain
interest that would never be published
in traditional scientific journals: those with
negative or inconclusive results. As most of
the research projects fail to show positive
results with clear conclusions, many
results are not published. Accordingly, a
lot of information is not available to the
scientific community and gets lost.
Publication of negative
results as an important
milestone
This Journal provides a platform to
exchange data on projects which did not
work and are unfinished. Thereby, JUnQ
wants to establish the publication of
negative results as an important milestone
for scientific communication especially
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
A Book by Rebecca Skloot
By Carena Teufelhart, technician, Experimental Neurology, AG Meisel
2011 International Graduate Program Medical Neurosciences
among different disciplines to overcome
biases and fraud. In addition to these
articles, JUnQ also publishes short essays
about open scientific questions which have
not been solved yet but are important to
the science community. According to good
scientific practice, the articles are peerreviewed
by independent referees of the
respective scientific field. Furthermore,
the essays about open questions will be
broadly reviewed in order to only publish
scientific questions that do not contain
false facts.
Beyond that, JunQ wants to reflect
about the day-to-day business in science
from a meta-perspective. This will be
achieved through different formats. Thus,
this summer semester, JUnQ organized a
lecture series with the topic “Publish or
Perish...?” which discusses the influence
of prevalent publication practices in
natural sciences.
Do you work in cell culture? If so,
you might as well have HeLa
cells in culture. You are possibly
aware that these cells were derived
from a woman‘s cancer. However, do
you know that the name of the woman
was Henrietta Lacks, that she was Afro-
American, mother of five children and
lived in miserable conditions?
You do not work in cell culture. You
are busy in research and scrape through
from paper to paper. One day, you will
read about HeLa cells, too, since they
are dealt with a whole lot. A scientist
estimated that there are 50 million tons
of these cells all over the world.
If you would like to learn more about
the history of these cells, read the book
about Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca
Skloot. The author established contacts
to Henrietta‘s family and looked into her
case with a lot of empathy. She received
considerable support from Deborah,
Henrietta‘s daughter.
Henrietta Lacks was born in Virginia
in 1920. In 1941, she married her cousin
Day with whom she cultivated tobacco
The first issue of JUnQ was published
on January, 1st, 2011 and contained two
articles and 4 open questions. To get a
copy and more information about JUnQ,
go to http://junq.info. The next issue will
be published on July, 1st, 2011. Send your
open question until June 15th or your
article until June 1st to
JUnQ@uni-mainz.de(nh)
for a living. As early as at the age of 14,
she delivered her first child, a son. Four
years later, she gave birth to a daughter
who suffered from epilepsy which was
diagnosed some time later. The family
settled down in Baltimore where three
more children were born. After the birth
of the youngest daughter, Henrietta
palpated a tumor which turned out to be
malign. She was treated in the Hopkins
hospital where tumor cells were taken
and cultivated later on by Doctor Grey.
With these cells, it became possible to
proliferate cells as often as desired for
the first time. Henrietta Lacks died a
short time later, in 1951. Has she really
died? A large number of scientists have
already seen her cells growing, alive in
the cell culture dish.
For the descendants of the family
Lacks, the extent of the cell donation is
hard to comprehend. The author wants
to raise awareness and is not afraid of
asking ethical questions. The cells have
grown close to her heart and she allows
for pursuing the way of a human cell line
with her book. Enjoy reading it!