Walter Nelson-Rees (11 January 1929 – 23 January 2009) was a
cell culture
Cell culture or tissue culture is the process by which cells are grown under controlled conditions, generally outside of their natural environment. The term "tissue culture" was coined by American pathologist Montrose Thomas Burrows. This te ...
worker and
cytogeneticist
Cytogenetics is essentially a branch of genetics, but is also a part of cell biology/cytology (a subdivision of human anatomy), that is concerned with how the chromosomes relate to cell behaviour, particularly to their behaviour during mitosis a ...
who helped expose the problem of
cross-contamination of cell lines. He used
chromosome banding to show that many
immortal cell lines, previously thought to be unique, were actually
HeLa cell lines. The HeLa cells had contaminated and overgrown the
other cell lines.
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]
Biography
He was born on January 11, 1929. Nelson-Rees retired in 1980. In 2005 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award, from th
Society for In Vitro Biology (SIVB)
San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
, from complications from a broken hip.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nelson-Rees
Cell biology
1929 births
2009 deaths
Cell biologists