Question: Have you ever been scared of cancer cells???????

Christie Waddington answered on 14 Jun 2016:

Not at all, I use cancer cells all the time in my research! They make good cell models to do our experiments on. At the moment I’m using osteosarcoma cells (U2OS, bone cancer) and HeLa cells (cervical cancer cells, from Henrietta Lacks). They’ve been immortalised so that they can keep on growing forever (if you didn’t immortalise them, eventually they would stop growing as most are programmed to divide a certain number of times). Because they can grow forever, we can perform as many experiments on them as we need to. I won’t get cancer from using the cell lines, as cancer typically occurs because of a genetic mutation and not from exposure to cancer.