February 2, 2024

Lily Sharkey

11th Grade

Dominican Academy

A Girl Named Henrietta 

Daughter, wife, mother, cook, farmer, dancer, fashionista: Henrietta Lacks never could have foreseen how her very own cells would shape the future of worldwide biomedical research. Henrietta was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, the ninth child of Eliza and Johnny Pleasant; over time, her name evolved to “Henrietta”. From the age of four, Henrietta was raised in Clover, Virginia, by her grandfather, following the death of her mother in childbirth. She was raised alongside her cousin David “Day” Lacks, whom she would later marry in 1941. During World War II, Henrietta and her family moved to Turner Station, Maryland, after her husband found work at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point steel mill. 

Together, Henrietta and Day shared five children: Lawrence, Elsie, David Jr., Deborah, and Joseph. Around the time of her fifth pregnancy, Henrietta felt a “knot” within her; following Joseph’s birth, she went to the gynecology department at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore with concerns about vaginal bleeding and a lump on her cervix. There, doctors discovered a cervical tumor that had been unidentified during the birth of her son and at a following six-week check-up.

The Discovery of HeLa Cells 

Henrietta received radium treatment, which at the time consisted of stitching small glass capsules filled with the radioactive material enclosed in fabric pouches- called Brack plaques- to the cervix. During the surgery, the surgeon also took two tissue samples- one from the cervical tumor and one from healthy cervical tissue- without Henrietta’s knowledge or consent. The samples were sent to George Otto Gey, the head of tissue culture research at Johns Hopkins. 

At the time, it was quite common for research to be done on patient samples without their knowledge. Storing removed blood and tissue cultures is standard practice with no legal requirement for consent. As a cancer and virus researcher, Dr. Gey had been collecting cells from all patients with cervical cancer who walked through Johns Hopkins’ door. Previously, the samples died quickly in his lab. But Henrietta’s cells survived; not only that, they doubled every 20 to 24 hours. Because her cells did not die after a few cell divisions, they were considered immortal. Dr. Gey isolated one of the cells and multiplied it, creating the immortal HeLa cell line, so called after the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks’ first and last names.

After leaving the hospital, Henrietta returned on August 8, where she would remain until her eventual death on October 4, 1951, at age 31. A partial autopsy showed that the cancer had metastasized throughout her body. But although Henrietta had died, she still lived on in petri dishes in labs across America. Indeed, when Henrietta’s daughter Deborah learned that her mother was “still alive,” she wanted to know what that meant; Deborah had only been an infant when her mother died.

Further Research

25 years after Henrietta’s death, a scientist realized that cell cultures thought to be from breast and prostate cells were in reality HeLa cells. It was discovered that HeLa cells had traveled via dust motes and unwashed hands and contaminated these other samples. A group of scientists hoped to contact Henrietta’s family and take some DNA samples to make a map of Henrietta’s genes to help identify which cell cultures were HeLa cells. This was how the Lacks family first learned about Henrietta’s legacy when they were effectively told that Henrietta was still alive in a laboratory and had been experimented upon for the past 25 years. 

For Deborah, this news meant that there was a chance for her to learn more about her mother. For her brothers, this meant that they learned they had been denied financial compensation for the past 25 years of research that their mother had allowed. The market for human biological material that HeLa cells created launched a multi-billion dollar industry that the Lacks family had reaped no part of. Henrietta had been a poor Southern African-American tobacco farmer, and her family had lived in poverty for much of their lives. They were outraged that while their mother was so important to biomedical research, they could not afford health insurance. 

Now that the HeLa cells had been connected to a living family, there were also concerns about privacy and confidentiality. When the doctors took Henrietta’s samples, they weren’t too concerned about anonymizing her identity. Pseudonyms for the HeLa cells, like Helen Lane and Helen Larsen, were created to hide the family from the media, but her name was still leaked in a 1976 Rolling Stone article by Michael Rogers. 

In early 2013, German researchers published a paper describing the first sequence of the HeLa cell genome. The data was soon removed from public view after bioethicists expressed concern about using the sequence to identify the Lacks family’s possible disease risk; many saw this as a violation of the privacy of the living family. On Wednesday, August 7, 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a statement on a new NIH policy in which the NIH and Lacks family reached an agreement on the sharing of HeLa cells genomic data. The policy states that  “biomedical researchers who agree to abide by terms outlined in the HeLa Genome Data Use Agreement will be able to apply to NIH for access to the full genome sequence data from HeLa cells” (NIH). A six-member panel that will review proposals for access to the data is made up of bioethicists, doctors, scientists, and two members of the Lacks family. Researchers who create full genome sequence data from HeLa cells are instructed to share their data in a universal database. Finally, all researchers who use genomic data from HeLa cells are mandated to acknowledge and express their gratitude to the Lacks family in their publication.

The Magic of HeLa Cells

What is it that makes HeLa cells immortal? HeLa cells are cancerous, so they don’t behave like typical cells. As cancer cells, they have uncontrolled proliferation, which means the cells have an autonomous signal that instructs them to rapidly reduplicate. The cells are also able to avoid apoptosis, or programmed cell death; this means when the cells receive a signal telling them it is time to die, they ignore it, thus they will never die. The same properties that make cancer cells so dangerous in living patients and eventually lead to Henrietta Lacks’ death are the same properties that allow her to live forever through her immortal HeLa cells. Additionally, HeLa cells have an overactive telomerase enzyme. Chromosomes have telomeres that protect the ends during cell reduplication. During each division, the telomeres will get shorter until the cell gets too old to reduplicate. Telomerase is an enzyme that prevents the shortening of the telomeres; because HeLa cells have overactive telomerase, it prevents cellular aging and cell death. 

Modern medicine would not be where it is today without HeLa cells. In the 1950s, Jonas Salk tested the polio vaccine on HeLa cells, which he found to be susceptible to polio; as a result, polio has been 99% eradicated worldwide. In the 1980s, Harald zur Hausen found human papillomavirus (HPV) in HeLa cells, making the discovery that linked cervical cancer and HPV. From this discovery, an HPV vaccine was created that reduces the number of deaths from cervical cancer by 70%. In 2020, HeLa cells were crucial for research on COVID-19 and its vaccine. Her cells have even been to space to see the effects of zero gravity on cells. Henrietta Lacks is not here today to consent to the use of her cells in such a wide-scale manner, but her descendants are happy that her cells have caused so many advancements, especially in terms of cancer, the disease that killed her. As Henrietta’s grandson Alfred Lacks Carter says, “[the cells] were taken in a bad way but they are doing good for the world (Nature)”.