A lawyer for the descendants of Henrietta Lacks has just won billions of dollars after it was discovered that Johns Hopkins Hospital took her cervical cells without her knowledge.
According to the Associated Press, the family reached a monumental settlement with a biotechnology company after the hospital took tissues from a tumor inside of her before she died of cervical cancer more than 70 years ago. They would then grow and reproduce the cells in lab dishes. The report further added that HeLa cells would become the foundation of new-age medicine, facilitating numerous scientific and medical modernizations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and COVID-19 vaccines.
But despite the huge impact, Lacks’ family never received a dime.
The woman’s cells were first harvested in 1951 during a time when it was legal to do so without the patient’s permission. But her family’s lawyers contended that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. continued to make profit from the results long after the “origins of the HeLa cell line became well known,” according to the report.
In a suit filed in 2021, the company unreasonably enhanced itself off Lacks’ cells, the family claimed.
During negotiations Monday in Baltimore, a settlement was reached. Attorney Ben Crump announced the settlement shortly thereafter, adding that the terms of the settlement are confidential.
Lacks was a low-income tobacco farmer from Virginia and moved to Baltimore with her husband, where they raised five children. While in Maryland, doctors found a tumor in her cervix and saved a sample of the cells during a biopsy. She would eventually die at 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
“While most cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, her cells survived and thrived in laboratories,” the AP report reads. “They became known as the first immortalized human cell line because scientists could cultivate them indefinitely, meaning researchers anywhere could reproduce studies using identical cells.”
Years later, Johns Hopkins said it did not sell or commercialize the cell lines, although many companies were able to patent them.
“In the same year Mr. Lacks was self-publishing a book in the hopes of finding some help for his family, the CEO of Thermo Fisher received a compensation package of over $26 million,” according to a brief.
Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins acknowledged an ethical responsibility and said in a statement that it “has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line.”
Lacks’ only surviving child, Lawrence Lacks Sr., is content justice has been served, according to her grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. Lawrence Lacks, 86, was 16 when his mother died.
“There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief,” Carter told the AP. “It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”
