Henrietta Lacks’ Family Reaches Settlement in Fight Over Her Stolen Cells

From Capital B

The agreement marks the second time a company has paid the family of the woman whose cells fueled major medical breakthroughs.

A long overdue reckoning for Henrietta Lacks — the Black woman whose cancer cells led to breakthroughs in the field but were harvested without her consent — has been slow but steady in recent years. 

It took decades for her relatives to learn that her tissue had been used for research and for them to receive any sort of compensation. But a recent settlement with her estate is the latest win for the legacy of a mother who died of cervical cancer at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Novartis has settled a lawsuit by Lacks’ estate that alleged the pharmaceutical giant profited off her cells, which were taken from her tumor without her knowledge. The cells were reproduced in labs and led to major medical advancements and cancer research, as well as COVID-19 and polio vaccines.

In 1951, Lacks was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. At the hospital, Dr. George Gey harvested her tissue without her permission, which was legal at the time. He performed the first successful cloning of human cells and went on to use the cells, which he called HeLa cells, in medical research.

Before HeLa cells, scientists wanted a way to grow and study human cells in the lab to conduct studies that are impossible to do in a living person. 

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The Lacks family and Novartis said in a joint statement they are “pleased they were able to find a way to resolve this matter filed by Henrietta Lacks’ Estate outside of court” but aren’t commenting further.

It’s the second settlement in lawsuits filed by the estate that accused biomedical businesses of reaping rewards from a racist medical system that took advantage of Black patients like Lacks. The settlement ends litigation between Novartis, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and the estate of Lacks.

The original article has more details.

Modern medical racism looks much different.

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