Henrietta Lacks family settles suit over use of cells taken without consent

The descendants of Henrietta Lacks said Tuesday they had agreed to a settlement with biotechnology company Thermo Fisher over the use of cells taken from their ancestor without her permission for scientific research by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The details of the settlement remain confidential, but Lacks’s grandchildren, who were part of the lawsuit, seemed pleased with the agreement — announced on what would have been Lacks’s 103rd birthday. 

“There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief,” Henrietta’s grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. said, according to The Associated Press. “It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”

The Lacks family sued Thermo Fisher in 2021 for profiting from what they called a racist medical system.

The cells taken from Lacks, who was Black, became the source of the HeLa cell line, the first human cells to be successfully cloned and a critical development in medical research. Lacks and her family had never been compensated, and at the time the cells were taken in 1951, no permission was required to take the cells.

“The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history,” according to the complaint from her descendants. “Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism.”

HeLa cells have helped push the world of medicine forward, aiding in the development of vaccines including the polio vaccine and the COVID-19 vaccines.

But when Dr. George Gey collected tissue samples from the tumor in Lacks’s body, it left her infertile. When she died, neither she nor her family knew her cells had been taken. 

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the family during the lawsuit, said Lacks was racked with pain until the end of her life as a repercussion of Gey’s procedure. He blasted Johns Hopkins for using Lacks — and other Black women — as “lab rats,” and said the experience was something many Black Americans could relate to. 

Though Johns Hopkins has never profited from HeLa cells, according to The Associated Press, Crump accused Thermo Fisher of knowingly seeking the rights to products that use Lacks’s cells despite her never giving consent for the cells to be taken.

Thermo Fisher attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed when it was filed, arguing the statute of limitations had expired, but the family countered that the company has been profiting from the cells all this time.

Lacks, a poor tobacco farmer living in Virginia, was 31 when she died. She was buried in an unmarked grave, leaving behind five children. 

Lacks’s story gained attention in 2010, when Rebecca Skloot published “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” In 2017, Oprah Winfrey starred in an HBO movie of the same name based off the book. 

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In a statement on its website, Johns Hopkins acknowledges the book and film and said it had reviewed the way in which the HeLa cells were handled. 

“Johns Hopkins applauds and regularly participates in efforts to raise awareness of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks,” the statement reads. “The publication of Skloot’s book led Johns Hopkins to review our interactions with Henrietta Lacks and with the Lacks family over more than 50 years. At several points across those decades, we found that Johns Hopkins could have — and should have — done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks’ family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests.”

Last week, Maryland Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin introduced a bill to posthumously award Lacks the Congressional Gold Medal.

“Henrietta Lacks changed the course of modern medicine,” Van Hollen said at the time. “It is long past time that we recognize her life-saving contributions to the world.”