Insight Medicine Lacks — The Continuing Relevance of Henrietta Lacks

The Henrietta Lacks legacy grows.

On 7 August 2013, the US Nat­ ional Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it had reached an agreement with the descendants of Henrietta Lacks concerning NIH­funded uses of the HeLa cell line [1], which, over the past 60 years has been featured in tens of thousands of experiments all over the world, and even in outer space. The origin of these cells, although never a secret, did not become w...

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

If you are employed in a biomedical laboratory, it is likely that you have worked with HeLa cells. Dependable and hardy, these cells have been used for all manner of scientific research: They’ve been shot into space, exposed to radiation, and treated with cocktails of steroids, hormones, cosmetics, and infectious agents. They were used to develop the polio vaccine, visualize and analyze chromos...

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks (August 18, 1920, to October 4, 1951) was a poor Southern African-American tobacco farmer whose cancerous cervical tumor was the source of cells George Otto Gey at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, cultured. These “immortal” cells remain “alive,” 60 years after her death, revolutionizing medical research. In her 2010 book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot...

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reconsidered.

received renewed attention in August after the National Institutes for Health reached an agreement with the Lacks family over the use of the HeLa genome. The book details how researchers took cancerous cervical cells from a poor black woman, without even telling Lacks or her family, and how the cells evolved into the scientifi cally signifi cant and commercially lucrative HeLa cell line while t...

The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks.