Who was Henrietta Lacks?

Born in Virginia 1920, Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman that had her cervical cancer cells stolen without her knowledge or consent in 1951 when she was 30 years old.

Her birth name was Loretta Pleasant and she was born on the 4th of August 1920. Her parents were Eliza Lacks Pleasant and John Randall Pleasant. Sadly, Eliza died while giving birth to Henrietta’s sister in 1924 which led to her father moving them all to Washington DC, to a town called Clover in where her family lived at the time. Here, John divided her and her nine other siblings between her relatives.

Henrietta was raised on a tobacco farm with her grandfather in Clover. They lived in what was once a slave living space on the farm. She lost contact with her father over time.

In 1941, Lacks and her cousin David got married and had five children together. Later, they moved to a town called Turner Station in Maryland. While they lived here, David worked in a Steel Mill.

Tragically, when Henrietta was only 30, she became very ill. She attended the local hospital, Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951 where Lacks was diagnosed with severe cervical cancer. This was the only hospital locally that treated black people at the time. Despite radiation treatment, her cancer worsened extremely fast and she passed away that October, shortly after she turned 31.

The Immortal HeLa Cells.

While Henrietta was being operated on, a surgeon horrifically took a section of her tumor tissue without her permission.

The medical facility named her cells the HeLa Cells, an abbreviation of her name. What the biomedical scientists found was that Lacks cells multiplied significantly under conditions that all other people’s cells they had studied had died swiftly after being removed from each patient.

Dr. George Gey, a researcher at John Hopkins Hospital discovered that her cells could be kept alive and would separate continuously. It was during his research that the first ever Immortalised Cell Line which Dr. Gey used the code: HeLa.

Since then, scientists believe her cells to be unique due to a HPV-18 infection. This infection allowed them to mutate and the scientists have science been able to regrow a type of cell called Telomeres. Telomeres regrowth stops the typical aging process of normal cells.

Miraculously, it was from her mutated cells, scientists were able to produce various vaccines including Polio, and more recently, HPV and Covid19 vaccines. Her cervical cells also helped in the study of HIV and Parkinson’s Disease.

Henrietta Lacks cells were the first ever human cells to be cloned successfully and were launched into space

Ethical Controversy

Nobody at the institution ever asked Henrietta or her family were informed about the harvesting of her cervical cells. It was over twenty years later, long after she had passed away that her loved ones were contacted by scientists asking for more samples. You can only imagine how horrified and extremely angry they were, and rightfully so.

To add insult to injury, the HeLa cells had led to the format of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. While the Lacks family were extremely poor and many of them had no health insurance for decades.

Justice & Recognition

An author named Rebecca Skloot wrote a book in 2010 called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This book brought global awareness of Henrietta and her story. Three years later, the Nation Institutes of Health (NIH) gave the Lack family some control over the data regarding the HeLa genome.

It was only as recent as 2023 that Henrietta’s family reached a court settlement with the biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientists over the commercial use of her cells.