What Happens If You Inject Healthy People with Cancer Cells?

Most people think cancer is “contagious” like HIV or a cold…… The truth is, it is not.

But what actually happens if you deliberately inject millions of aggressive cancer cells under the skin of a perfectly healthy person?

Well, we know the answer, because it was done hundreds of times in the 1950s and 1960s by the very infamous researcher, Chester Southam, which proved that cancer is not contagious.

The True Story of the HeLa Cell Experiments

In the 1950s, Dr Chester Southam who was a researcher at America’s top cancer hospital (Sloan-Kettering) was worried that researchers working with HeLa cells (Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cervical cancer cells) might accidentally give themselves cancer if they pricked their finger.

So he decided to test it to see if it was possible.

First, he injected live HeLa cancer cells into cancer patients who were already very sick.
These patients’ tumors grew fast. Some spread to lymph nodes. The patients’ weak immune systems could not fight back, so the tumors had to be cut out surgically.

Still not satisfied with the result, he then moved to healthy people.

Between 1956 and the early 1960s, Southam and his team injected live HeLa cells into more than 600 people; mostly Ohio state prisoners, some hospital patients, and even women who thought they were just getting a routine “skin test” during gynaecology surgery.

Mind you, none of these people gave proper consent to his action. They were all lied to.

What Actually Happened Inside the Healthy Bodies

Soon as these healthy people got injected;

1. Within days, a small hard lump appeared at the injection site (usually the forearm).
2. The lump grew rapidly; some reached 2 cm or more in just three to four weeks.
3. The growth behaved exactly like real cancer: it invaded nearby tissue and in a few cases even spread to nearby lymph nodes.
4. Then the crucial difference appeared.

After four to eight weeks, the healthy people’s immune systems woke up fully.
Their white blood cells attacked the foreign cancer cells.
The tumors stopped growing.
They turned dark, shrank, and either fell off or were completely absorbed into their bodies..

In almost every healthy person, the cancer disappeared on its own within two to six months.
No chemotherapy. No surgery (except in one or two cases where the tumor grew very large before the immune system won).
Not a single one of them developed permanent cancer.

Even researchers who accidentally stabbed themselves with HeLa-contaminated needles only got tiny nodules that vanished quickly.

But Why Did the Healthy Immune System Win Every Time?

Well, cancer cells from another person are seen as foreign tissue. And just like a donated kidney or liver, our body’s strong immune system rejects them completely.
That is why cancer is not contagious in real life. In humans, our immune system will simply not let a foreign cancer cell grow in our body.

But was Dr. Chester punished for his actions?

Well, It’d surprise you to know that NOTHING happened to him.

When the scandal of Dr. Chester finally broke in the 1960s, a reporter asked him why he never injected himself if he thought it was safe.

His answer was ice-cold:

He said: “Let’s face it, there are relatively few skilled cancer researchers in the world, and it seemed stupid to take even the slightest risk with my life.”

He believed his life was worth more than the prisoners’ or patients’ lives and so they could be experimented upon like guinea pigs.

Those experiments helped create the today’s medical ethics rules and informed consent forms which are used in hospitals all over the world.
Dr. Southam didn’t get punished because there was no law against what he did then. But today, no doctor can ever do what he did without going to prison.

So, if you inject a healthy adult with millions of another person’s cancer cells, these will happen:

• A real tumor will grow at the injection site
• It may even spread to nearby lymph nodes
• But in nearly 100 % of cases, the healthy immune system will destroy every last cancer cell within months
• The person will walk away completely cancer-free

Yes, our immune system is that powerful.

That is why, even though all of us produce mutant cells every day, very few people ever develop actual cancer.
The body catches and kills them before they become a problem.

References

1. Southam CM. (1960). Transplantation of human tumors into healthy adults. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
2. Skloot, Rebecca. (2010). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Crown Publishing – the definitive book on the experiments and ethics scandal.
3. Lerner BH. (2004). Sins of omission: Cancer research without informed consent. New England Journal of Medicine.
4. National Institutes of Health historical review of human tumor transplantation studies.