He became known as a vigilante. She organized an effort to build a Henrietta Lacks museum. Michael Rogers— Rolling Stone reporter who wrote an article about the Lacks family in He was the first journalist to contact the Lackses. Slavin founded Essential Biologicals, a company that sold his cells, and later cells from other people so individuals could profit from their own biological materials.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab.
On January 29, , Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital to diagnose abnormal pain and bleeding in her abdomen. Physician Howard Jones quickly diagnosed her with cervical cancer. During her subsequent radiation treatments, doctors removed two cervical samples from Lacks without her knowledge. She died at Johns Hopkins on October 4, , at the age of The cells from Lacks's tumor made their way to the laboratory of researcher Dr.
George Otto Gey. Gey noticed an unusual quality in the cells. Unlike most cells, which survived only a few days, Lacks's cells were far more durable. Gey isolated and multiplied a specific cell, creating a cell line. He dubbed the resulting sample HeLa, derived from the name Henrietta Lacks. The HeLa strain revolutionized medical research. Jonas Salk used the HeLa strain to develop the polio vaccine, sparking mass interest in the cells.
As demand grew, scientists cloned the cells in Since that time, over ten thousand patents involving HeLa cells have been registered. Researchers have used the cells to study disease and to test human sensitivity to new products and substances. In February , Johns Hopkins released the following statement concerning the cervical samples that were taken from Lacks without her consent:.
Sixty years ago, there was no established practice of seeking permission to take tissue for scientific research purposes. Download references. News Feature 10 NOV Correspondence 09 NOV World View 02 NOV Career Feature 25 OCT Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.
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Society Caltech confronted its racist past. Close banner Close. Email address Sign up. Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. The Lacks family, still living in Baltimore City , was impoverished and in poor health. They were being harassed by doctors and researchers for blood samples and developed a serious mistrust of Johns Hopkins Hospital. They felt that they had been robbed by Hopkins and thought that Henrietta was still alive and her body was being held hostage in the hospital.
Some members of the family thought that suing the hospital for taking a part of Henrietta without her consent or knowledge was the proper path, but they would soon learn their case was fruitless.
Around the same time the Lacks family discovered the truth about the HeLa cells, a Californian man named Roger Moore was attempting to sue his doctor for unknowingly scraping his cells and profiting from them. Ehrlich, Jr. Her cells made her immortal: through her death, countless others have been saved by the research that was made possible through her cell line…I sincerely hope her name will also be immortalized as one of courage, hope, and strength, and that due recognition will be given to her role in medicine and science.
Hope came to the Lacks family a few years later in the form of a young, white, female writer named Rebecca Skloot.
Skloot became fascinated with the mystery behind the HeLa cells at age sixteen and spent many years trying to uncover the story behind the immortal cells. The Lacks, understandably, were mistrusting of Skloot and her motives. Deborah never knew her mother but always wanted to understand what happened to her. Through Deborah, Skloot was able to better understand the struggles of the family and tell the story of Henrietta, and through Skloot, Deborah was able to learn about her mother and even hold her cells.
The Lacks family was finally given the recognition they struggled for years to gain.
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