About this time, as I mentioned earlier, my wife gave birth to our third child and I purpose arranged with the obstetrician to obtain the placenta and amnion. And because my laboratory was right across the street from University of Pennsylvania Hospital, where my wife delivered, it was very easy for me to take the tissue to my lab, which I did do to my wife's disappointment, in not having me by her side throughout her recovery. But she soon recovered. And I immediately cultured the amniotic tissue using the technique I described earlier, exposure to trypsin, etc.

And after several weeks of culture, I saw what I was certain was, and which later turned out to be true, a transformation occurring. So that these normal amnion cells had now converted to an immortal cell population and in keeping with the recommendations for naming cell lines at that time, recommended by the Tissue Culture Association in the United States, I named it WISH, which stands for the first letters of the following four words, Wistar Institute, the name of the institution where the observation was made, and the first two letters of the name of the donor, Susan Hayflick. And that cell line was described by me in an article and published in the journal Experimental Cell Research and the cell line became very popular.