“Black History Month: Fact of Da Day”

Henrietta Lacks

Some of Modern Medicines triumps come from the unauthorized use of a poor Black Farmer named Henrietta Lacks who died of Cancer at the age of 30. This is currently a multibillion dollar industry with the sale of these cells to reasearchers across the United States. The Lack family only recently became aware of this and needless to say have not seen a dime of the money generated by the stolen cells.

 Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line’s impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.