Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks (née Loretta Pleasant; August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was an African American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data and research to the present day.

Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during her treatment for cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951. These cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey, who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still used for medical research. As was then the practice, no consent was required to culture the cells obtained from Lacks's treatment. Neither she nor her family were compensated for the extraction or use of the HeLa cells.

Even though some information about the origins of HeLa's immortalized cell lines was known to researchers after 1970, the Lacks family was not made aware of the line's existence until 1975. With knowledge of the cell line's genetic provenance becoming public, its use for medical research and for commercial purposes continues to raise concerns about privacy and patients' rights.

Biography

Early life

Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, to Eliza Pleasant (née Lacks) (1886–1924) and John "Johnny" Randall Pleasant (1881–1969). She is remembered as having hazel eyes, a small waist, size 6 shoes, and always wearing red nail polish and a neatly pleated skirt. Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but she was nicknamed Hennie. When Lacks was four years old in 1924, her mother died giving birth to her tenth child. Unable to care for the children alone after his wife's death, Lacks's father moved the family to Clover, Virginia where the children were distributed among relatives. Lacks ended up with her maternal grandfather, Thomas "Tommy" Henry Lacks, in a two-story log cabin that was once the slave quarters on the plantation that had been owned by Henrietta's white great-grandfather and great-uncle. She shared a room with her nine-year-old first cousin and future husband, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002).

Like most members of her family living in Clover, Lacks worked as a tobacco farmer starting from an early age. She fed the animals, tended the garden, and toiled in the tobacco fields. She attended the designated black school two miles away from the cabin until she had to drop out to help support the family when she was in the sixth grade. When Lacks was 14 years old, she gave birth to a son, Lawrence Lacks (1935–2023). In 1939, her daughter Elsie Lacks (1939–1955) was born. Both children were fathered by Day Lacks. Elsie had epilepsy and cerebral palsy and was described by the family as "different" or "deaf and dumb".

Marriage and family

On April 10, 1941, David "Day" Lacks and Henrietta Lacks were married in Halifax County, Virginia. Later that year, their cousin, Fred Garrett, convinced the couple to leave the tobacco farm in Virginia and move to Turner Station, near Dundalk, Maryland in Baltimore County, so Day could work in Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Not long after they moved to Maryland, Garrett was called to fight in World War II. With the savings gifted to him by Garrett, Day Lacks was able to purchase a house at 713 New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turner Station. Now part of Dundalk, Turner Station was one of the oldest and largest African-American communities in Baltimore County at that time.

Living in Maryland, Henrietta and Day Lacks had three more children: David "Sonny" Lacks Jr. (1947–2022), Deborah Lacks (later known as Deborah Lacks Pullum, 1949–2009), and Joseph Lacks (later known as Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam, 1950–2020). Henrietta gave birth to her last child at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in November 1950, four and a half months before she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Zakariyya believed his birth to be a miracle as he was "fighting off the cancer cells growing all around him". Around the same time, Elsie was placed in the Hospital for the Negro Insane, later renamed Crownsville Hospital Center, where she died in 1955 at 15 years of age. Historian Paul Lurz says that it is possible that Elsie was subjected to the pneumoencephalography procedure, where a hole was drilled into a patient's head to drain fluid from the brain, which was then replaced with oxygen or helium to make it easier to see the patient's brain in X-rays.

Both Lacks and her husband were Catholic.

Illness

Diagnosis and treatment

On January 29, 1951, Lacks went to Johns Hopkins because she felt a "knot" in her womb. She had previously told her cousins about the "knot" and they assumed correctly that she was pregnant. But after giving birth to Joseph, Lacks had a severe hemorrhage. Her primary care doctor, William C. Wade, referred her back to Johns Hopkins. There, her doctor, Howard W. Jones, took a biopsy of a mass found on Lacks's cervix for laboratory testing. Soon after, Lacks was told that she had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix. In 1970, physicians discovered that she had been misdiagnosed and actually had an adenocarcinoma. This was a common mistake at the time, and the treatment would not have differed.

Lacks was treated with radium tube inserts as an inpatient and discharged a few days later with instructions to return for X-ray treatments as a follow-up. During her treatments, two samples were taken from Lacks's cervix without her permission or knowledge; one sample was of healthy tissue and the other was cancerous. These samples were given to George Otto Gey, a physician and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins. The cells from the cancerous sample eventually became known as the HeLa immortal cell line, a commonly used cell line in contemporary biomedical research.

Death and burial

On August 8, 1951, Lacks, who was 31 years old, went to Johns Hopkins for a routine treatment session and asked to be admitted due to continued severe abdominal pain. She received blood transfusions and remained at the hospital until her death on October 4, 1951. A partial autopsy showed that the cancer had metastasized throughout her entire body.

Lacks was buried in an unmarked grave in the family cemetery, in a section of Clover, Virginia, called Lackstown. Lacks's exact burial location is unknown, but the family believes that it is within a few feet of her mother's gravesite, which for decades was the only one in the family to have been marked with a tombstone. In 2010, Roland Pattillo, a faculty member of the Morehouse School of Medicine who had worked with George Gey and knew the Lacks family, donated a headstone for Lacks. This prompted her family to raise money for a headstone for Elsie Lacks as well, which was dedicated on the same day. The book-shaped headstone of Henrietta Lacks contains an epitaph written by her grandchildren that reads:

Medical and scientific research

George Otto Gey, the first researcher to study Lacks's cancerous cells, observed that these cells were unusual in that they reproduced at a very high rate and could be kept alive long enough in culture to allow more in-depth examination. Until then, cells cultured for laboratory studies survived for only a few days at most, which was not long enough to perform a variety of different tests on the same sample. Lacks's cells were the first to be observed that could be divided multiple times without dying, which is why they became known as "immortal". After Lacks's death, Gey had Mary Kubicek, his lab assistant, take further HeLa samples while Henrietta's body was at Johns Hopkins' autopsy facility. The roller-tube technique was the method used to culture the cells obtained from the samples that Kubicek collected. Gey was able to start a cell line from Lacks's sample by isolating one specific cell and repeatedly dividing it, meaning that the same cell could then be used for conducting many experiments. They became known as HeLa cells, because Gey's standard method for labeling samples was to use the first two letters of the patient's first and last names.

The ability to rapidly reproduce HeLa cells in a laboratory setting has led to many important breakthroughs in biomedical research. For example, by 1954, Jonas Salk was using HeLa cells in his research to develop the polio vaccine. To test his new vaccine, the cells were mass-produced in the first-ever cell production factory. Additionally, Chester M. Southam, a leading virologist, injected HeLa cells into cancer patients, prison inmates, and healthy individuals in order to observe whether cancer could be transmitted as well as to examine if one could become immune to cancer by developing an acquired immune response.

HeLa cells were in high demand and put into mass production. They were mailed to scientists around the globe for "research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa cells were the first human cells successfully cloned, in 1955, and have since been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other products. There are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells.