Henrietta Lacks
In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Upon examination, Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. At the time, The Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of only a few hospitals to treat African Americans.
As medical records show, Mrs. Lacks began undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer. This was the best medical treatment available at the time for this terrible disease. A sample of her cancer cells retrieved during a biopsy were sent to Dr. George Gey’s nearby tissue lab. What he would soon discover was that Mrs. Lacks’ cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, Mrs. Lacks’ cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours. Henrietta herself was unaware that any sample had been taken; at that time it was not uncommon to study patients and their tissues without their knowledge or consent
Today, these incredible cells— nicknamed “HeLa” cells, from the first two letters of her first and last names — are used to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones, and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans. They have been used to test the effects of radiation and poisons, to study the human genome, to learn more about how viruses work, and played a crucial role in the development of the polio vaccine.
By September the cancer had spread throughout her body, and early the following month Henrietta died October 4, 1951. HeLa cells, famed for their longevity, continued to thrive in culture long after Henrietta’s death. HeLa became a ubiquitous study material, contributing to the development of drugs for numerous ailments, including polio, Parkinson disease, and leukemia. In 2013 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted the Lacks family control over how data on the HeLa cell genome would be used (the genome of a HeLa cell line had been sequenced in full earlier that year). Two members of the Lacks family formed part of the NIH’s HeLa Genome Data Access working group, which reviewed researchers’ applications for access to the HeLa sequence information.
