The Everlasting Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Franky Elsmore

I

Henrietta Lacks

n 1951 Henrietta Lacks, a young mother of five, visited one of the few hospitals in the US who would treat poorer African-Americans. During this visit the well respected gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones found a large malignant tumour on her cervix. Medical records show that the 31 year old underwent radium treatments that included stitching radioactive material into her flesh in a vain attempt to try to stop the spread of the cancer and hence save her life. Despite this being the best treatment that science had to offer at this point in time, she ultimately she lost her fight and died on the fourth of October of the same year, leaving her young children behind.

Although this story is undeniably tragic, it is not remarkable. What is astonishing is what happened to her cells after her death. A man named Te Linde took a biopsy of Henrietta and sent some of her cervix tissue to the renowned scientist Dr. George Gey. Te Linde was the pioneer of using oestrogen to treat menopausal woman, as well as being the first to discover endometriosis. He was clearly a brilliant mind regarding groundbreaking scientific thinking and had alternative theories about invasion of cancer cells. Despite his impressive scientific observations, his morals were less than admirable and he often used people like Henrietta Lacks from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge or consent. He respected the importance of the comparison between normal and invasive cells and thus offered Dr. Gey a sample of Lacks’ cells in exchange for the growth and culturing of her cells for Te Linde himself to use in further research. When Henrietta died cells from many of her organs were taken during an autopsy without the knowledge or consent of herself of her family.

multiphoton fluorescence image of HeLa cells stained with the actin binding toxin phalloidin (red), microtubules (cyan) and cell nuclei (blue). Credit: National Institutes of Health (Creator: Tom Deerinck, NIGMS, NIH)

For decades Dr. Gey had been on a mission to successfully grow cancer cells within a laboratory outside of the human body, using an elementary technique involving chicken plasma and faetal umbilical blood as culture media as the practice was still in its infancy. How Lacks’s cells responded amazed him, as they were far more durable than any he had come across before. He subsequently isolated a cell and multiplied it, creating a cell line which would go on to be HeLa cells. The name comes from Henrietta’s full name not being able to fit down the side of a test tube, hence abbreviated to ‘HeLa’. These cells are still ‘alive’ and multiplying to this day, 68 years later. During this time, over 10 thousand patents involving HeLa cells have been registered as these cells revolutionised medicinal research, specifically to study human sensitivity to new products and substances; including being fundamental to Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine and the development of the HPV vaccine. On top of this HeLa cells hold the title of being the first human cells to be sent into space. 

Her cells are readily available worldwide to this day, almost 70 years after her death. The unethical process by which these cells were obtained begs the question as to whether they should still be in use, as well as suggesting the possibility that the undeniably intelligent and groundbreaking discoveries that have been made using her DNA may have been muddied due to the very cells that have enabled these advances to be made. Another important point to consider is that at this point these cells are referred to only as HeLa cells, hence lacking any sense of human identity or respect, and the vast majority of scientists using them in research today will be unaware of their history and the woman from which they originated. At this point they are considered only as a resource that is entirely owned by the scientific community, and as such the Lacks family was only granted acknowledgement in scientific papers and some oversight of the Lacks’ genome in August 2013 (after it had been mapped and published earlier that year in Germany) following negotiations with the National Institutes of Health. Her unmarked grave has subsequently been donated a headstone from Dr. Roland Pattillo, and she has been granted a degree posthumously by Morgan State University. But do these comparatively inconsequential marks of respect in any way lessen the ethical issues of using her genetic information without her consent, the molecules that made her herself on the simplest cellular level? At what point were these cells taken to be property of anyone other than Henrietta Lacks? Is this a perfect example of the authority a white male academic thought himself to have over a lower class African-American woman in the 1950s? Do these immortalised cells lack all humanity, following their unconsenting removal from Mrs Lacks?

These cells are simultaneously a perfectly individual case as well as an all encompassing example encouraging conversations surrounding what it means to be human and the ethics of researching human genetics. Since then the regulations and attitudes surrounding medical consent and respect between doctor and patient has improved dramatically, but there is still work to be done in the ethical minefield surrounding medical research.