Henrietta
Lacks (1920-51), farmer. Loretta Pleasant was born in Roanoke,
Virginia. When she was four her mother died in childbirth, and she and her nine
siblings were divided up amongst their relatives, with Loretta going to live
with her grandfather on a farm near Clover, Virginia. Loretta grew up in a
house that had originally been a slave cabin for her ancestors, pulling tobacco
on their farm and as a hired hand for white farmers. She became a mother at the
age of fourteen and married several years later. When the U.S. entered World
War II in 1941, she and her family, like thousands of other African Americans,
moved to the Turner Station community near Baltimore to work at a steel plant. Several
years later began experiencing severe pain until finally visiting Johns Hopkins
Hospital, where in 1951 she was diagnosed with a rapidly growing case of
cervical cancer. Johns Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in the country and
the only one in the area that treated African Americans, and it also treated
the poor whether they could pay or not, but it also secretly used its poor
patients for medical research. This included collecting samples from cervical
cancer patients with the hopes of growing “immortal” human cells that would
continually replicate and thus provide scientists with an inexhaustible supply
for experiments. These efforts had always proved unsuccessful until the arrival
of Lacks, whose HeLa cells (a shortened version of her name) doubled in number
every day. It was later discovered that while the telomere, a string of DNA
within each human chromosome, normally shortens each time the cell divides and
thus eventually cause the cell to die, Lacks’ cancerous cells contained an enzyme
called telomerase that rebuilds the telomeres with each division and thus prevents
the cells from ever growing old. She underwent radiation treatment that shrank
her cancerous tumor but also burned the flesh in her mid-section, leading her
to tell relatives, “Lord, it just feels like that blackness be spreading all
inside me.” She returned to work in the tobacco fields and continued to raise
her family. This included her daughter Elsie, who had suffered from physical
and mental challenges since birth and was finally sent to a mental health
facility ninety miles away, where Lacks visited once a week. One cousin later
recalled that “Hennie made life come alive – being with her was like being with
fun. Hennie just loved people. She was a person that could really make the good
things come out of you,” while another stated that “Even after she got sick,
she never was a person who say ‘I feel bad and I’m going to take it out on
you’…But she didn’t seem to understand what was going on. She didn’t want to
think she was gonna die.” After several months the cancer returned, spreading
even more rapidly than before. As she lay dying in the hospital, her last words
were to her cousin: “Don’t you let anything bad happen to them children when
I’m gone.” Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 at the age of thirty-one, leaving
behind a husband, an infant son, and four other children. With no money for a
tombstone, she was buried in an unmarked grave near her mother.
Meanwhile, the HeLa cells that had been taken from Lacks’
body began paying dividends for others. The U.S. was in the midst of a polio
epidemic that in 1952 alone killed more than 3,000 people and crippled 21,000
others, but scientist Jonas Salk developed a vaccine and tested it using HeLa
cells, and within a few years the disease was eradicated in the U.S. except in
isolated communities whose members oppose vaccination. HeLa cells were also
used to develop vaccines and/or treatments for herpes, measles, mumps, chicken
pox, and equine encephalitis, as well as chemotherapy drugs. Technicians used
them to create new methods for freezing cells, while geneticists measured the
number of chromosomes in human cells and studied conditions like Down syndrome
and Turner syndrome. Other scholars used them to study the effects of nuclear
radiation, deep-sea diving, and spaceflight on the human body, and when the
U.S. began sending spacecraft beyond the earth’s atmosphere, HeLa cells were on
board. They were also used to test products such as glue and cosmetics, they
led to advances in the field of bioethics due to new rules on human research,
and in 1955 they were the first human cells to be successfully cloned. The HeLa
cells used in this research initially came from a lab at Tuskegee University
that produced 6 trillion cells every week and distributed them on a non-profit
basis while also providing jobs and training to black scientists, but
eventually a company called Microbiological Associates took over production and
became a multi-billion dollar business. When journalists began wondering about
the origin of the HeLa cells, Johns Hopkins stated that they had come from a
woman named Helen Lane; other sources said the name was Helen Larson. As a
result, Lacks’ family did not learn what was happening for several decades. At
that time it was standard procedure that patients did not have to consent to
have tissue samples removed from their own bodies and that they had no right to
profit from any research developments. The few patients’ rights rules that did
exist were often ignored when the patient was poor, black, female, or in Lacks’
case all of the above. When steel production at Sparrows Point declined, the
community descended into poverty. Three of Lacks’ children developed
tuberculosis due to pollution from the factory. A cousin and his wife moved
into the family home and began sexually and physically abusing the children.
One of them suffered from anger management problems and was incarcerated
multiple times, with his family convinced that his mind had been affected by
the cancer that grew in Henrietta’s body while she was pregnant with him. The
family could not find Elsie until years after she died in the asylum, having
suffered from long-term neglect and abuse. Finally, in the early 1970s concerns
about contamination of the HeLa cells led to a reexamination of Lacks’ original
sample, and her true name was finally known to the world. One article stated
that “It has been estimated that the weight of these cells in the world today
exceeds that the American negro from whose cervical tumor they originated. That
lady has achieved true immortality, both in the test0tube and in the hearts and
minds of scientists the world over, since the value of HeLa cells in research,
diagnosis, etc., is inestimable.”
©David Brodnax, Sr.
