The Untold Story of Henrietta Lacks
- Sabrina Zheng
- May 13, 2023
- 4 min read
Medical breakthroughs throughout history have revolutionized the global population’s health, lifespan, and quality of life. Outbreaks of the Spanish Flu, Smallpox, Polio, Cholera, Measles, and Tuberculosis have been crushed by the creation of vaccines through scientific research and clinical studies. But often these breakthroughs are done on the backs of those who can be easily taken advantage of, and their history is buried. This was the case for Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old black woman who passed away from cervical cancer. Her revolutionary HeLa cells have been used by medical researchers and corporations for experimentation and have profited greatly from it. HeLa cells have expanded the knowledge of the medical community, but knowledge of Lacks’ life and impact were not known until nearly 20 years after her death.
Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. As a young child, she worked at her grandfather, Thomas “Tommy” Henry Lacks, tobacco farm while living with her future husband David “Day” Lacks. Some memories from her childhood were, “Each night, piles of cousins packed into the crawl space above a little wooden kitchen house just a few feet from the home-house. They lay one next to the other—telling stories about the headless tobacco farmer who roamed the streets at night, or the man with no eyes who lived by the creek—then slept until their grandmother Chloe fired up the woodstove below and woke them to the smell of fresh biscuits” (Skloot 26). On an evening months before her last pregnancy, Lacks felt a “knot” in her stomach unlike anything she had experienced with her previous pregnancies. She told her concerns to her cousins, who suggested to her to go see a doctor, but she declined. A few months later, she gave birth to her last child, but still felt the “knot” in her stomach. After experiencing vaginal bleeding and feeling the “lump” inside of her, Lacks went to her local doctor, who referred her to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Jim Crow laws in the 1950s allowed owners of establishments to not serve people of color from restaurants, workplaces, parks, churches, schools, and even hospitals. Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of the few hospitals that served both black and white patients, but their treatment of black patients was very different from white patients. Their public ward served patients free of charge, many of whom were black. Samples and cells of those in the public ward were often taken advantage of and used for scientific research because consent was not yet a legal standard of the medical community. Biographics stated (2018), “At Hopkins, the then-leading cervical cancer expert in the world, and Dr. Jones’ boss, Richard TeLinde, believed that since the patients were treated free of charge, the research was a form of payment for the hospital’s services”. Samples of Lacks’ cancerous and healthy cervical cells, unknown to her, were taken and cultured in George Otto Gey’s lab. Gey was a scientist who had been looking for a way to culture cells that would continuously replicate outside of an individual’s body. Lacks’ cells were named “HeLa” for the first two letters of her first and last name. According to WebMD (2022), “Most cells die or make limited copies of themselves after they’re removed from the body by a doctor or a scientist”, but HeLa cells were unique. Weeks after Lacks’ cells were left in Gey’s lab, he discovered that her cancerous cells had duplicated more than twenty times her normal cells. After this discovery, Gey offered the “immortal” HeLa cells to many of his medical colleagues for further use. On October 4, 1951, Henrietta Lacks passed away from terminal uremia caused by cervical cancer. Her cells would be used worldwide for biomedical research and discoveries in the coming decades, without her family’s knowledge for 20 years. HeLa cells have been used to develop vaccines such as the polio vaccine by Jonas Salk and COVID-19 vaccines. HeLa cells have been cloned and researched in areas of gene mapping, cancer, AIDS, and much more. They have been sent into space, to analyze if cells are able to survive in an unearthly environment. A glaring issue from this story was the systematic racism propagated against people of color affecting the treatment of black patients in hospitals. Issues of patient consent to the testing, sampling, and culturing of their cells for research purposes arose after the story of the hidden figure behind HeLa cells broke. A current crucial legal standard in medicine, the law for consent to the use of your cells and information for research, was created through Lacks’ and many others’ experiences in a discriminatory medical system. Companies and medical researchers who have profited from patents involving HeLa cells have not compensated the Lacks’ family for use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells. Understanding the history of the people behind the breakthroughs of science is extremely important to develop humane research processes. Henrietta Lacks’ story teaches us that racism in America causes black communities to not receive adequate healthcare, a right all people of any race, gender, sexuality, and religion should have. Sources:
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