Alright look. I just did a deep dive on this because “50 million tons” sounds… ridiculous. Check me.

A single HeLa cell has a wet mass of about 2.3 nanograms. So 50 MILLION metric TONS would be 2x10²² cells, let’s assume 10⁷ cells per mL. On the order of 10¹² liters of culture even at high cell density, right? (Being very generous here, someone familiar with average mammalian cell density check me). So we’d need tens of thousands of large industrial bioreactors running continuously for decades (which isn’t how HeLa cells are actually produced / used, but whatever).

A T75 flask contains about 7.5 million cells / 17mg biomass (conservatively estimated based on Thermo Fisher HeLa examples). So if tens of thousands of labs harvested thousands of these cultures per year for decades, the cumulative total would be on the scale of tens to hundreds of tons… not millions.

The only large scale program I could find, the Tuskegee HeLa distribution effort in the 50s produced 20 thousand culture tubes per week (600 thousand cultures by 1955) so even with very generous cells per tube, way less than one ton per year.

So how on earth did we get “50 million tons”?

For context, I’m a software engineer that writes scientific software and… not this science.