Immortality is still a chimera. Henrietta Lacks, however, comes pretty close to that impossible dream of humanity.
Her cells are alive and are a key aid to important scientific achievements, as well as profit for a pharmaceutical company known to have raked in billions behind the back of that woman’s family.
The Thermo Fisher Scientific company reached an agreement this week with Lacks’ descendants, who will receive financial restitution, without specifying the amount, for the use of the cells known as HeLa.
The agreement was announced the day this African-American woman, turned guinea pig, would have turned 103.
“Henrietta Lacks was not an inferior being, in fact she was extraordinary,” said lawyer Ben Crumb, who brought the lawsuit. “Her cells from her were stolen from her body. She made an incredible contribution that has changed medicine for 70 years and has improved people’s quality of life, ”he insisted.
“The suffering of many black citizens has fueled medical progress and benefits without compensation or recognition,” remarks the family’s lawsuit, which stresses that the pharmaceutical company uses that tissue in a dozen products. The HeLa have been used in the creation of vaccines (covid, polio), the treatment of cancer or AIDS.
Her story led to the best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, and a 2017 film starring Oprah Winfrey.
Lacks, a resident of Baltimore, was 31 years old, and had five children, when in 1951, at John Hopkins, a hospital that operated segregated, she was discovered to have cervical cancer.
Dr. George Gray collected a tissue sample from a tumor without authorization. Unlike other cells Gray had worked with, Lacks’s were still dividing and had the ability to reproduce outside of the human body, opening up extraordinary research possibilities. The Hopkins shared the HeLa with other specialists.
Lacks passed away shortly after being diagnosed. Her children suffered from her absence, from her lack of care, totally unaware of her mother’s legacy.
The exploitation of their cells was discovered when family members began to receive strange telephone calls from scientific researchers in the 1970s, asking for blood samples. Their medical records were published without consent.
One night at dinner, a guest asked them if they were connected to the origin of the HeLa. They learned that their mother’s cells were still alive all over the world.
