Almost 75 years ago, a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore cultured the first immortal cell line that could be easily grown in the lab. Those cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent.
In 1951, Lacks found out she had cervical cancer and was treated at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. George Gey, a cell biologist at the hospital, was working with tissue samples collected from patients to see if the cells would grow in culture.
However, each sample died quickly in his lab — except for the cells from Lacks. Gey discovered that her cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.
The cell line is known today as "HeLa" and has been used to learn more about how viruses work. The cells also played a role in the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines.
After Lacks died in October 1951, her cells were still being used for research around the world without her family's knowledge.
Her grandson, Alfred Lacks-Carter Jr., told his family’s story this weekend to an audience at the University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center.
Lacks-Carter said that it was not until his aunt went to a dinner party and met a Johns Hopkins researcher that the family discovered, 25 years later, that the cells were being used.
"Back when Johns Hopkins harvested her cells, it was more so like normalized racism. That's why myself and my organization, HeLa House, we want to spread the word about being marginalized and the injustices that take place in communities of people of color," he said. He is the president and founder of the nonprofit Henrietta Lacks House Of Healing in the Baltimore area.
"We want to put the human element back into the medical field, that way health care providers can look at their patients as a human being and not just as a subject like they did Henrietta. They just used her as like a lab rat," he said.
Dr. Kevin Cassel, an associate professor at the UH Cancer Center, said that it was important to bring this story to Hawaiʻi.
"It's an important message, especially as Alfred is saying, that providers understand that people are more than just data points or just research subjects. They are humans, and we need to treat them as such," Cassel said.
Lacks-Carter hopes that going forward, people will educate others about Henrietta Lacks.
"If you know about Henrietta Lacks and all her contributions, I would urge you to educate someone else, because even though there's a lot of people who know who Henrietta Lacks is, there's a lot of people who don't know, and there's a lot of people in the medical field who do not know who Henrietta Lacks is," he said. "Teach the next one and just keep it going to keep her legacy alive."
The Lacks family settled a lawsuit last year with Thermo Fisher Scientific, a science and technology company that profited off research done with her cells.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Dec. 16, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
