In my junior year of high school, I was enrolled in a women’s studies class with quite possibly the most influential teacher I had in high school. This teacher taught me how to find my voice in writing, develop a new sense of empowerment, and even helped me to discover my own identity in ways I had never explored.
In this women’s studies class, we discussed everything from gender-based crimes and women in sports to reproductive health care. This class was a full year long and in the winter part of the course, we were looking for new ways to engage with women’s history, and the teacher presented us with the story of Henrietta Lacks.
We viewed her story through the incredible film “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, starring Oprah Winfrey and Renée Elise Goldsberry (I was shocked to see Angelica Schuyler, as well). I later found the book by the same name and gained a deeper understanding of Henrietta Lacks’ life.
Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman whose cancer cells were used without her knowledge for huge discoveries in medicine. During her treatment of cervical cancer, she had a cancerous cervical tumor removed, unbeknownst to her or her family. These cells are now known as HeLa cells, known as the first immortal human cell line.
During this time, it was not uncommon for tissue samples to be removed from cancer patients for research without their informed consent, so Henrietta’s story is not unique. However, her cells (HeLa cells) were particularly unique because they have continued to grow indefinitely and are still used in medical research to this day, despite Lacks passing away in 1951.
HeLa cells have been used extensively in biomedical research and have played a vital role in developing vaccines like polio and COVID-19, as well as helping to study how viruses interact with cells, as studied with HIV, HPV, Zika, and mumps.
Without Henrietta Lacks, much research would have been impossible to complete or even identify the needs for. Unfortunately, there is a serious ethical issue with the case of Henrietta Lacks, and this case cannot be regarded as the highly impactful case it was.
Neither Henrietta, nor her family, were properly informed about their findings of her cells and the ways they were exploited from the time they were extracted. Her family remained unaware of their existence and the usage of HeLa cells until the mid-1970s. That is truly inexcusable.
The Lacks family was not well-off financially and struggled with access to proper medical care, while the labs were at work using HeLa cells to make discoveries and creating profits.
This brings up a true question of the ethics of informed consent. There were no legal requirements at the time of her extraction, but that doesn’t mean she and her family didn’t deserve information at the very least about the discoveries. It is a true case of the intersections in medicine between racial, gender, and ethical disparities in medical research. It is not just about one case; it’s about the system of inequality that has existed and continues to exist.
Sources: The Importance of HeLa Cells | Johns Hopkins Medicine; The Complicated History of HeLa Cells: Henrietta Lacks’ Legacy in Biomedical Research — Stanford Blood Center