In their complaint, Lacks’ descendants argued that her treatment illustrates a much larger issue that persists into the present day: racism inside the American medical system.
More than 70 years after doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells without her knowledge, a lawyer for her descendants said they have reached a settlement with a biotechnology company they sued in 2021, accusing its leaders of reaping billions of dollars from a racist medical system.
Tissue taken from the Black woman’s tumor before she died of cervical cancer became the first human cells to be successfully cloned. Reproduced infinitely ever since, HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even Covid-19 vaccines.
Despite that incalculable impact, the Lacks family had never been compensated.
Doctors harvested Lacks’ cells in 1951, long before the advent of consent procedures used in medicine and scientific research today, but lawyers for her family argued that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has continued to commercialize the results well after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.
The settlement agreement came after closed-door negotiations that lasted all day Monday inside the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Several members of the Lacks family were in on the talks.
Attorney Ben Crump, who represents the Lacks family, announced the settlement late Monday. He said the terms of the agreement are confidential.
“The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement,” Crump said in a statement.
Thermo Fisher representatives didn’t immediately respond to requests by phone and email from The Associated Press for comment on Tuesday.
HeLa cells were discovered to have unique properties. While most cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, her cells survived and thrived in laboratories. This exceptional quality made it possible to cultivate her cells indefinitely — they became known as the first immortalized human cell line — making it possible for scientists anywhere to reproduce studies using identical cells.
(Henrietta Lacks in the 1940s.Lacks Family via The Henrietta Lacks Foundation / AP)
The remarkable science involved — and the impact on the Lacks family, some of whom suffered from chronic illnesses without health insurance — were documented in a bestselling book by Rebecca Skloot, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” and Oprah Winfrey portrayed her daughter in an HBO movie about the story.
Lacks was 31 when she died and was buried in an unmarked grave. A poor tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, she was raising five children when doctors discovered a tumor in her cervix and saved a sample of her cancer cells collected during a biopsy.