11 questions · Society & Everyday
In February 1951 a 30-year-old woman from Turner Station near Baltimore, raised on the tobacco farms of Virginia, went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because she could feel a knot inside her. Henrietta Lacks had five children and cervical cancer. The hospital was the only one in the area that would treat Black patients at all, and as was routine at the time a doctor took two small tissue samples during her radiation treatment, without asking. By October that year Henrietta Lacks was dead, aged 31. Her cells were not. Every human cell kept in a laboratory until then had died after a few divisions. These did not. They doubled every 24 hours and simply kept going. The researcher George Gey shortened the donor's name into a label (HeLa) and gave the cultures away to anyone who asked. For the first time medicine had a human tissue that could be multiplied, posted and studied in a thousand laboratories at once. The polio vaccine was tested on it. HeLa cells went into space, survived nuclear tests, and helped with cancer research, in vitro fertilisation, the understanding of HIV and, most recently, the COVID vaccines. More than 110,000 scientific papers rest on them. Her family knew nothing about it for two decades. Only in the 1970s, when researchers suddenly wanted blood samples from the children, did they work out that part of their mother still existed and was being traded around the world. HeLa cells could be ordered from a catalogue; the family, at times, had no health insurance. The journalist Rebecca Skloot turned this into a book in 2010 that stayed on the bestseller lists for months and turned a laboratory label back into a person. In 2013 the family reached an agreement with the US health authorities giving them a say in how the HeLa genome is used. In 2023, on what would have been Henrietta's 103rd birthday, they settled with a biotechnology company that had profited from the cells for decades. The World Health Organization honoured Henrietta Lacks in 2021 and named both things at once: the contribution to science and the wrong done to her.
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HeLa
The name is simply the first two letters of her first and last name.
💡 Did you know? To protect her anonymity it was claimed for years that the donor had been called „Helen Lane“.
They do not die
Every human cell before them died in the laboratory after a few divisions.
💡 Did you know? They double roughly every 24 hours. All the HeLa cells ever grown together weigh many times what she did.
Her consent
That was legal at the time; there was no duty to inform patients about tissue samples.
💡 Did you know? This case went on to shape the whole debate about informed consent and is still taught in medical ethics courses.
The polio vaccine
A dedicated factory was built to grow HeLa cells on an industrial scale for the mass trials.
💡 Did you know? It was the first cell factory in history: nobody had ever needed human cells in such quantities before.
Cervical cancer
She was 31 and left five children, the youngest not yet two.
💡 Did you know? Her grave in Virginia had no headstone for half a century. She finally got one in 2010, paid for by doctors who had worked with her cells.
Only twenty years later
Researchers suddenly wanted blood samples from the children; that is how the family learned HeLa was in use worldwide.
💡 Did you know? The cells could be ordered from a catalogue while the family at times had no health insurance.
Rebecca Skloot
„The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks“ spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
💡 Did you know? Skloot used the proceeds to set up a foundation for the descendants; several grandchildren went to college on it.
Into space
They flew on early Soviet and NASA missions, before humans had gone up.
💡 Did you know? They also survived nuclear tests: researchers wanted to know what radiation does to human tissue without irradiating humans.
The World Health Organization
Its director-general handed an award to her son and spoke openly about the wrong that had been done.
💡 Did you know? The WHO tied the honour to its goal of eliminating cervical cancer; the disease that killed Lacks is now largely preventable by vaccination.
With a settlement
The family had sued because the company had profited from the cells for decades without ever asking.
💡 Did you know? The agreement was reached on what would have been her 103rd birthday, 1 August 2023.
Foto: Oregon State University · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Henrietta Lacks
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