Henrietta Lacks was a poor black lady that worked in the plantations in the south. Without her knowledge, some cells were taken from her while she was at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. She would become one of the “most important tools in medicine” (Skloot).
Henrietta was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia. At some point she changed her name to Henrietta. When her mother had died in 1924, she was sent to live with her grandfather in a log cabin that had been slave quarters of a white ancestor’s tobacco plantation. While living there, she and her first cousin David “Day” Lacks shared a room. In 1935, they had a son, Lawrence (Skloot). Henrietta would’ve only been 14. In 1939 they had a daughter, Elsie, and married …show more content…
The cells, after they were taken directly from Henrietta’s cervix, an assistant from the hospital picked her sample and sliced them carefully into tiny squares. The she sucked each square into a pipette and dropped them into clots of chicken blood at the bottom of test tubes. The assistant then covered the clots with cultured medium and plugged them with stoppers (Skloot).
Four days after the assistant acquired Henrietta’s sample cells, she went to the incubator room to check on them. Mary, the assistant, expecting to find that the cells had died, found that “Henrietta’s cells were just merely surviving but they were growing with mythological intensity” (Skloot). They kept growing, doubling ever twenty-four hours. They grew twenty times faster than Henrietta’s normal cells, and as long as they had food and warmth they seemed unstoppable.
Dr. George Otto Gey noticticed an unusual quality in the cells, Gey had isolated and multiplied a specific cell, creating a cell line. Thus the HeLa cells were born. Soon enough George told a few of his colleagues that he thought his lab might have grown the first immortal human …show more content…
Books were also later written, and even Oprah Winfrey announced plans to develop a film based on Sklott’s book. Henrietta’s sons and her granddaughter consulted on the film and Skloot will be a co-executive producer.
Organizations that have profited from HeLa have publicly recognized Henrietta Lack’s contributions as research. The Lacks family has been honored at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Foundation for Cancer Research (Skloot). Morgan State University granted Henrietta a posthumous honorary degree. In 2010, Dr. Roland Pattillo of Morehouse donated a headstone for her unmarked grave.
The HeLa case has raised questions about the legality of using genetic materials without permission. Neither Lacks nor her family granted permission to harvest her cells, which were then clones and sold (Skloot). The California Supreme Court upheld the right to commercialize discarded tissue in the 1990 case Moors v Regents of the University of California. In 2013, German researchers published the genome of a strain of HeLa cells without permission from the Lacks family