Henrietta Lacks

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.”

The family still remained unaware until a chance meeting in 1973 between Lacks’ daughter in law and a friend who worked at the National Cancer Institute. When they finally learned the truth they took pride in the fact that Lacks’ cells had helped so many other sick people, believing that this was consistent with her helpful spirit, but they were also angered that they had never been informed or that they lived in poverty while others had grown rich. In a sad irony, some of them suffered from medical conditions that could be treated with medicines and techniques developed through HeLa cell research, but they were too poor to afford the treatments; “It’s not fair,” one son declared, “She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother’s so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?” They also became convinced that the journalists, lawyers, and scam artists who constantly contacted them were trying to further exploit them, and they refused to speak with anyone else about Henrietta until the 2000s when a science writer named Rebecca Skloot won their trust. Skloot’s research led to the 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which went to the top of the bestseller list, and which was made into a 2017 HBO film starring Oprah Winfrey. Lacks’ story also became the subject of the play “HeLa,” several rock songs, a Spanish television series, and an episode of Law & Order. She finally received a headstone, which reads in part “Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.” She posthumously received an honorary doctorate in public service from Morgan State University in Baltimore, and a building and lecture series at Johns Hopkins were named in her honor, as was a health and science high school in Washington State and a planet in the solar asteroid belt. This new awareness did not, however, end the conflict between scientists and Henrietta Lacks’ family. In 2013 researchers published the DNA sequence from the HeLa cells, and the family objected on the grounds that this gave the public access to their genetic information; the conflict was resolved when the National Institutes of Health agreed to give the family some control over access to the information. As of 2020 more than 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have bene grown, resulting in nearly 11,000 patents, but the only money that the Lacks family has received comes from the proceeds of Skloot’s book. Even so, the son who had suffered from anger issues finally found peace when Johns Hopkins admitted that Henrietta Lacks and her family had been mistreated and explained how her cells had benefitted humanity. He and his relatives also drew strength from the Biblical passage John 11:25-26: “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.