The Woman Behind the Immortal Cells
Poppy Willis
The Science of the Forgotten: Hybrid Vigor 2022-2023 Edition
Henrietta Lacks is a name that seems mundane to a lot of people until they learn that “HeLa cells” actually come from this woman. Though HeLa cells are known throughout the medical and scientific world, the woman behind these cells is often forgotten. HeLa cells were the first immortal human cell line. They led to some amazing scientific discoveries that have saved millions of lives today, such as the eradication of polio, mapping the human genome, and further knowledge about how cells stay young. All of these medical discoveries would not have been possible without Henrietta Lacks. We must remember this name today as there was not enough effort to remember back when Henrietta was alive. Henrietta Lacks: the immortal woman.
Cells multiply through mitosis, going through prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telophase. Though at some point, these cells stop multiplying. At the end of each chromosome is a non-coding part of DNA called the telomere. These sequences protect the DNA from loss of coding genes and DNA polymerase error. Therefore, they are very useful in preventing coding errors which can eventually lead to many diseases including many forms of cancer. Though, over time, the telomeres shorten as more and more telomere length is lost as DNA is copied. Once there is no telomere left, the cell stops replicating and goes into apoptosis - cell death: cell life is not infinite. This is why cells live a short life. So how did Henrietta’s cells live such a long life--rather, an immortal life? The fact that cell life is finite might seem like a bad thing, but really it prevents us from getting cancer. Cancer is when cells grow uncontrollably and can invade other parts of the body. Thus, the shortening of telomeres is what prevents our cells from growing uncontrollably and forming a cluster of cancerous cells. However, some people, including Henrietta Lacks, have an enzyme called “telomerase.” Telomerase is an enzyme that prevents the shortening of telomeres, causing cells to grow infinitely without any way to stop it. This is unfortunately what caused Henrietta’s cervical cancer and what eventually led to her passing.
Henrietta Lacks was a black woman living in Baltimore during the 1940s, a time of systemic racism and Jim Crow laws. She was born to Eliza and John Pleasant in 1920. In 1941, she married Day Lacks, and they had five children together. In 1950, Lacks felt a constant knot in the lower part of her stomach, though she did not seek any medical attention. After feeling this knot for almost a year and spotting blood coming from her uterus, Henrietta Lacks decided to finally seek medical help. She went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, as this was the only hospital available to her due to her race. Yet she was still treated in an underfunded, understaffed black ward. Shortly after arriving at the hospital, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Though, to prevent her family getting worried, she decided to keep this a secret, only telling her husband. To treat this cancer, Henrietta’s doctors would sew tubes of radium onto her cervix to kill the cells. Whilst treating her, the doctor’s took some of her cancerous cells without her consent to help with research. Unfortunately, this treatment was unsuccessful and Henrietta Lacks died on October 4th of 1951. Henrietta Lacks was remembered by her family to be a caring and selfless mother.
Though HeLa cells have contributed to many medical miracles, the way these cells were retrieved and subsequently the way these cells were distributed around the world was completely unethical. Henrietta Lacks was heavily mistreated because of the color of her skin. When the doctor’s retrieved her cells during a biopsy, they did not inform her nor her family, neglecting to even get consent from her. The doctor’s treating Henrietta Lacks then gave the cells to researchers at Johns Hopkins University who were looking for cells that could multiply infinitely. The head researcher was George Otto Gey. Gey was surprised when her cells multiplied outside of the body, as all the other cells he had been testing had all died immediately after being taken out of the body. Gey was astonished and knew he could benefit a lot from this discovery. After finding these miracle cells, Gey started distributing them to labs around the United States. Though, once he started the distribution, it was virtually too late to stop it from being widespread. Because these cells could multiply infinitely, the labs that first received these cells were able to give their cells to other labs, and so on. A few years after cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks, there were HeLa cells all over the world. Today, the main seller and producer of HeLa cells is the biotech company “Thermo Fisher Scientific.” The cells are sold at prices at a minimum of $4000 and largely contribute to Thermo Fisher Scientific’s $35 billion profit per year. Her family, largely misinformed about these cells, received none of the profit, even to this day. Currently the Lacks family is suing many companies, mainly Thermo Fisher for depriving them of profits. The Lacks family was a poor, black family living in segregated America, and the reasons these funds were kept from them was because of their race and social status. This is a clear case of segregation and discrimination. Not only did the doctors not properly inform the Lacks family, but they also did not give them any profit at all.
The unethical properties of this case have created many changes in the medical world. The Henrietta Lacks case sparked the creation of many bioethics laws to protect patients, which include but are not limited to informed consent, research approval through an Institutional Review Board (IRB) and improving patients’ access to their medical records. Though what happened to Henrietta Lacks never should have happened at all, it did spark immense change in the medical and scientific world, and this is only one of the huge impacts Henrietta Lacks has made to this world.
Henrietta Lacks is often forgotten, but we must remember the impact she made on not only the medical world, but the world in general. From creating cells that helped create the polio vaccine and genome mapping to raising awareness on the unethical practices of labs and hospitals around the United States, Henrietta Lacks is one woman that should never be forgotten. Henrietta’s story is important to always remember, as unethical practices are still prevalent in the US. Families with lower wages are still denied basic healthcare, good hospitals are largely unavailable in lower-class communities, and doctors are still mistreating patients based on race, gender and money. Inequalities in medicine are still something we need to fight to today, but thanks to Henrietta Lacks, this fight has already made a lot of progress.
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Butanis, B. (n.d.-b). The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks. Retrieved 24 February 2023, from https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henriettalacks/
Greely, H. T., & Cho, M. K. (2013). The Henrietta Lacks legacy grows. EMBO Reports, 14(10), 849–849. https://doi.org/10.1038/embor.2013.148
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What Are HeLa Cells? (n.d.). Retrieved 20 March 2023, from https://www.webmd.com/cancer/cervical-cancer/hela-cells-cervical-cancer
