None of the biotechnology or other companies that profited from her cells passed any money back to her family. The hospital where her cells were collected was one of only a few that provided medical care to Black people. One of their most recent applications has been in research for vaccines against COVID-19.īut the story of Henrietta Lacks also illustrates the racial inequities that are embedded in the US research and health-care systems. Today, work done with HeLa cells underpins much of modern medicine they have been involved in key discoveries in many fields, including cancer, immunology and infectious disease. The researcher shared them widely with other scientists, and they became a workhorse of biological research. In the laboratory, her cells turned out to have an extraordinary capacity to survive and reproduce they were, in essence, immortal. They gave some of that tissue to a researcher without Lacks’s knowledge or consent. Months earlier, doctors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, had taken samples of her cancerous cells while diagnosing and treating the disease. She died in 1951, aged 31, of an aggressive cervical cancer. Last month marked 100 years since Lacks’s birth. “This is my great-grandmother I’m holding in my hand,” Johnson remembers feeling. The cell line originated from tissue taken from a woman named Henrietta Lacks - and Johnson’s mother was a Lacks. The teacher was leading the students through experiments involving cells from a widely used line known as HeLa. That day in Erika Johnson’s high-school biology class, some 20 years ago, is seared into her memory. Credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post/Getty Nobody asked Henrietta Lacks for consent to use her cells in research in 1951 - and, shockingly, consent is still not always required in the United States today.
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