Chicken Heart!

     In 1966, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, someone brought Bill Cosby's "Wonderfulness" comedy album to school.  This kid raved about how hilarious the Chicken Heart routine was.  As a treat, we were allowed to listen to this part of the record.  It appealed to our juvenile senses of humor.  Because Mr. Cosby slurred over it, no one seemed to notice when the father character in the skit demanded, "What the hell's the sofa doin' on fire?"  For many days afterwards, we would blurt out, "Chicken heart," hoping to frighten the be-jesus out of someone, or we would thump-thump out a heart beat and break into laughs.





     As far as I was concerned, the routine, inspired by some old radio show, was just silliness.  It took forty eight years for me to find out the facts behind the fun.
     My enlightenment came while reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks' story is one of science fiction becoming science fact.  In 1951, Mrs. Lacks developed cervical cancer.  Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who treated her, took part of her tumor and sent it to George Gey, a scientist, who tried to keep the tumor cells alive (and reproducing) in his lab.  These experiments were routinely done with healthy and cancerous human tissue harvested from Johns Hopkins' patients.  Lacks' cells were the first to survive and thrive, possibly due to the aggressive nature of her cancer, and definately due to Gey's extensive research into culture mediums, the food needed to feed the cells .  Within nine months, Mrs. Lacks was dead, but her cells, known as HeLa cells, lived on.  Jonas Salk was able to get his polio vaccine out to the masses in record time because HeLa cells allowed him to complete his research quickly and inexpensively.  HeLa cells are still alive today, growing wildly in cultures, and being sold to laboratories all over the world for research into all sorts of diseases.
     Before George Gey did it in 1951, other scientists tried to grow human and animal cells in petri dishes.  One of these scientists was Alexis Carrel.  In 1912, he actually grew beating heart tissue from samples taken from a chicken.  Also in 1912, Carrel won a Nobel Prize for developing a blood vessel suturing technique that lead to organ transplantation.  Stories of his laboratory grown, beating chicken heart were exaggerated and circulated.   Though Carrel claimed that the chicken's heart tissue lived and quivered rhythmically for twenty years, that was not the case.  His sample cells died off.  They only appeared to stay alive because someone added fresh, living cells to the sample each time they fed it.  The creepy nature of Carrel's beating chicken heart, along with his claims that he could grow a mass of cells bigger than the solar system was fodder for the science fiction writers.
     The radio show Bill Cosby talks about was broadcast in March 1937.  I wonder if Cosby knew about Alexis Carrel and the real chicken heart.  I'm betting he did.  Now I know, too.