"Then in 1962, Hayflick made another discovery. “Without it, you and I might not even be alive,” says Stuart Jay Olshansky, an expert in biodemography and gerontology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. It began when a nameless woman who was three months pregnant had a legal abortion in Sweden. As the author Meredith Wadman wrote in her book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, the foetus wasn’t incinerated, buried or thrown away – instead it was wrapped in sterile green cloth and sent to the Karolinska Institute in northwest Stockholm. At the time, Hayflick was sourcing the cells he used for his research from this institution. In his laboratory at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, he managed to incubate some of the tissue in several glass bottles at 37C (98F). He added an enzyme to break down the protein that bound the cells together, as well as "growth medium", a solution which contained the nutrients they needed to divide. After a few days, he was left with a continuous sheet of cells. One of these cells eventually turned into the cell line “WI-38”, which stands for Wistar Institute foetus 38."

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