The descendants of Henrietta Lacks have announced a settlement with biotechnology company Thermo Fisher regarding the unauthorized use of cells taken from Lacks for scientific research by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. While the details of the settlement remain confidential, Lacks’s grandchildren expressed satisfaction with the agreement, which was announced on what would have been Lacks’s 103rd birthday.
Lacks’s grandson, Alfred Lacks Carter Jr., stated, “There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief. It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”
The lawsuit against Thermo Fisher, filed in 2021, accused the company of profiting from a racist medical system. The cells taken from Lacks, who was Black, became the HeLa cell line, the first successful cloning of human cells and a crucial advancement in medical research. Lacks and her family were never compensated, and at the time the cells were taken in 1951, no permission was required.
According to the complaint from Lacks’s descendants, “The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history. Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism.”
HeLa cells have played a significant role in medical advancements, contributing to the development of vaccines such as the polio vaccine and COVID-19 vaccines. However, when Dr. George Gey collected tissue samples from Lacks’s tumor, it left her infertile, and neither she nor her family were aware that her cells had been taken.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the family in the lawsuit, criticized Johns Hopkins for using Lacks and other Black women as “lab rats.” He also accused Thermo Fisher of knowingly seeking rights to products that utilized Lacks’s cells without her consent.
Thermo Fisher initially sought to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the statute of limitations had expired. However, the family contended that the company had continued to profit from the cells over the years.
Lacks, a poor tobacco farmer from Virginia, was 31 when she passed away and was buried in an unmarked grave, leaving behind five children. Her story gained attention in 2010 with the publication of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. In 2017, Oprah Winfrey starred in an HBO adaptation of the book.
Johns Hopkins has acknowledged the book and film on its website and stated that it reviewed its handling of the HeLa cells. The institution expressed support for raising awareness of Lacks’s life and story and acknowledged that more could have been done to work with her family.
Maryland Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin introduced a bill to posthumously award Lacks the Congressional Gold Medal, recognizing her contributions to modern medicine.
In conclusion, the settlement between the descendants of Henrietta Lacks and Thermo Fisher represents a step towards rectifying the injustice Lacks and her family experienced. It brings attention to the history of medical racism and highlights the significant contributions made by Lacks’s cells to medical research.
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