From the 1950s until today
Loretta was one of 10 children born to Johnny and Eliza Pleasant. When Loretta was only four, her mother died while giving birth to her 10th child, forcing her impoverished father to distribute his children amongst family members around Virginia. Loretta was placed in the care of her maternal grandfather, Thomas Lacks. It was around this time that, for reasons we may never know, Loretta's name was changed to Henrietta.
The two settled in Turner Station, and David began working at a nearby Bethlehem Steel factory. In Maryland, Henrietta gave birth to three more healthy children.
The family was large and not without its worries. While there was no lack of love, the family's health became an unforgiving source of pain and sorrow.
Shortly after their wedding, the new Lacks family moved north to Maryland at the behest of a friend who ensured Henrietta's husband, David, could find work in the far more industrialized region of Baltimore.
The woman who should be known the world over as Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in rural Roanoke, Virginia.
When Henrietta was 20 years old, she married her cousin, whom she had grown up with working on a tobacco farm with their grandfather. The two were married on April 10, 1941. By the time of their marriage, the couple had already welcomed two children.
Shortly before her mother's death, Elsie was transferred to Crownsville Hospital, a segregated insane asylum that, even in the mid-20th century, had a horrifying reputation of abuse, including, but not limited to, unethical and nonconsensual medical experiments.
Henrietta's second-eldest child, Elsie, had been born with severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy. Neither the family nor the society they found themselves in had the means to provide the treatment young Elsie needed.
Elsie died at the age of 15 at Crownsville Hospital. Although the official cause of death provided by the asylum cited respiratory failure, further investigations have pointed towards pneumoencephalography, a procedure now considered barbaric that involves draining the skull of the fluid around the brain so as to take clearer X-ray images. The procedure, if repeated more than once, was extremely dangerous. Given the asylum's, and the wider nation's, reputation for using incarcerated minorities for medical experimentations, it is highly likely that this procedure was performed on Elsie numerous times, leading to her death.
Henrietta's diagnosis came in January 1951, after she had returned to Johns Hopkins complaining of a post-natal hemorrhage and informing the doctors that the "knot" in her womb had still not gone away. After a biopsy was performed, Lacks was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer.
Lacks was summarily hospitalized and received a round of brachytherapy, a radiation treatment that involves physically inserting radium tubes into the cancerous area. After this, Lacks was sent home and told to come back for occasional X-rays.
Sure enough, Henrietta gave birth to Joseph Lacks in November of 1950. This was only a few short months before Henrietta was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer. This revelation has led family members, including Joseph himself, to deem his birth a "miracle," saying he was "fighting off the cancer cells growing all around him."
During Lacks' brachytherapy, Jones scraped two cell samples from her cervix: one of cancer cells, and one of her healthy cervical cells. These tissue samples were taken casually, without her knowledge or consent, to be handed over to the hospital's tissue research center.
In the early 1950s, it was common practice to collect tissue samples from patients for research purpose without their knowledge. Lacks was certainly not an exception, but the revelation of incredible gifts that her cells provided opened up an important conversation about informed consent in the medical world. Discussions and court cases regarding the ownership rights of an individual over their own tissue have ushered in invaluable legislation concerning the consent of patients and the transparency of doctors.
In the mid-20th century, Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of the only hospitals in the Baltimore area that treated African Americans. Like virtually every other American hospital in the early-to-mid-20th century, John Hopkins was no stranger to controversy, but has proven to be one of the most influential medical institutions of all time, fostering the birth of entire specialties such as neurosurgery and heart surgery.
Just before Elsie was sent to her doom, Henrietta Lacks had gone to doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Lacks complained of severe abdominal and cervical pain, which she described as a "knot in the womb." She was told, partially correctly, that there was nothing wrong; Lacks was simply pregnant with her fifth child.
Henrietta Lacks died on October 4, 1951, at the age of 31, without ever knowing of the miracles that were being discovered within her cells. A biopsy performed shortly after her death showed that her cancer had metastasized throughout her entire body.
The gynecologist treating Lacks, the one who would soon take tissue samples from her cervix without her permission or knowledge, was one Howard W. Jones. Jones was an early and pioneering specialist of gynecology, along with his wife (pictured), but has come under scrutiny for his morally questionable practices encompassing more than just the case of Henrietta Lacks.
While most of Henrietta succumbed to cancer and was buried in an unmarked grave in rural Virginia, the cells that had been taken from her cervix were thriving in Dr. Gey's lab. Gey quickly realized that Lacks' cells, named HeLa cells, were more durable and longer-lasting than any human cells he had ever seen before. What's more, he found that HeLa cells could be divided again and again without perishing, allowing Dr. Gey to start a brand new cell line and produce infinite amounts of HeLa cells.
Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, used HeLa cells as a primary research tool in his work, which has saved the lives of millions. Additionally, HeLa cells have been instrumental in the study of HIV/AIDS, and opened the door to less invasive and more efficient treatments. These are just a few of the life-changing developments in medicine made possible by the cells of Henrietta Lacks.
Speaking to The New York Times in 2013, Henrietta's granddaughter, Jeri Lacks Whye, said that "the biggest concern was privacy—what information was actually going to be out there about our grandmother, and what information they can obtain from her sequencing that will tell them about her children and grandchildren and going down the line." Having some amount of say regarding the use of Henrietta's cells was imperative for the peace of mind of the surviving Lacks family.
One would imagine the compensation and rewards for providing such an incredible gift to humanity to be great. However, that was not the case. The medical community, throughout the decades following the discovery of HeLa cells, paid no mind to the legacy of Lacks or the large, working-class family that survived her. The family wasn't made aware of the discovery, nor did they have any say in how their matriarch's cells would be used.
This revelation proved to be one of the single most important moments in medical history. Unlike normal cells, which died in just a few days, HeLa cells could be used for long-term and diverse experimentation and study, aiding in everything from cancer research to vaccine development and product testing.
Over the decades, Henrietta Lacks was given recognition in almost all forms except monetary. Innumerable college buildings, hospital wings, statues, and even public schools have been erected and named in Lacks' honor, but neither her estate nor her family received even a small amount of compensation from the dozens of doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and other institutions that have made millions off of HeLa cells. The cells even contributed to the development of the life-saving COVID-19 vaccine.
A highly contentious discussion has been brewing in the years since Henrietta's story found the spotlight. Observers have wondered about the societal context in which this grand story of theft and discovery took place. Some argue that Henrietta fits into a much longer and wider history of the American medical community exploiting people of color in the name of science, citing horrific events such as the Tuskegee Experiment, in which 400 black men were intentionally left with untreated syphilis. Others claim that John Hopkins Hospital's practice of collecting tissue from patients of all races cancels out any accusations of medical racism.
Rebecca Skloot, author of 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,' informed the family in 2013 that their family's DNA genome had been published without their knowledge or consent, and another study using their DNA had been submitted for publishing. After months of deliberation with the National Institutes of Health, the family came to an agreement that granted them partial control over who had access to the findings of the two 2013 studies, and placed two immediate family members onto a committee dedicated to the accessibility of future findings.
In 1980, the entire family's medical records were published without their consent or knowledge. The cavalier use and distribution of HeLa cells galvanized the conversation of consent and ownership in the research community. It wasn't until the 21st century that the Lacks family began to gain some ground in the fight for their ancestor's cells.
As her immortal cells continue to benefit all of humanity, Lacks' surviving relatives also finally received some financial compensation in 2023. They took biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific to court for profiting from the cells without consent, and reached an undisclosed settlement on July 31.
See also: Dissecting the major medical advances throughout history
The researcher who received Lacks' cells from Dr. Jones was George Otto Gey, a leading biologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Gey regularly observed tissue samples from numerous unwitting patients, trying to increase the longevity of notoriously short-lived cells so that more research could become possible. That is exactly what the cells of Henrietta Lacks provided.
Discoveries that change the face of medicine overnight come along only once in a generation. The medical professionals behind these life-changing and lifesaving developments are almost always given their due praise and fanfare as saviors of humanity, true and just egalitarians dedicated to the greater good. But while that is often true, it is also true that their discoveries were often built on the backs of other members of society who may have been exploited, abused, or subjected to unethical medical practices, and have never received their own recognition or compensation. The most infamous story of this occurrence is the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken without her knowledge and consent.
Click on to learn more about the fascinating story of medicine's greatest unsung hero.
HeLa cells: The most influential and controversial discovery in medicine
Henrietta Lacks' family reach settlement in suit over "stolen cells"
LIFESTYLE Science
Discoveries that change the face of medicine overnight come along only once in a generation. The medical professionals behind these life-changing and lifesaving developments are almost always given their due praise and fanfare as saviors of humanity, true and just egalitarians dedicated to the greater good. But while that is often true, it is also true that their discoveries were often built on the backs of other members of society who may have been exploited, abused, or subjected to unethical medical practices, and have never received their own recognition or compensation. The most infamous story of this occurrence is the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken without her knowledge and consent.
Click on to learn more about the fascinating story of medicine's greatest unsung hero.