Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero
Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who died of cancer in 1951. During her treatment, doctors took a sample of the cancer. The sample ended up with a researcher who noticed the cells were much more resilient than any other cell type then known, cancerous or otherwise. This made them extremely useful for biology experiments, and now a substantial portion of world bio research is done on cells descended from Lacks’ cancer.
It wasn’t typical to ask patient consent in the 1950s, and nobody asked Henrietta or her family for consent to sample her cells or to use them for research. This has become a typical cautionary tale of bad scientific ethics (also probably racism and sexism). Nobody compensated her family, and none of the windfall produced by researching her cells went to them. Everybody talked about HeLa cells, the amazing cell line that makes research much more effective, and nobody talked about Henrietta Lacks, the person. Companies published the HeLa cells’ DNA, and records of Lacks’ cancer, without asking family members.
It would be an understatement to say that has since been corrected. There have been hundreds of articles talking about how racist and disgusting science is for not treating Lacks’ family better or acknowledging Henrietta the person - see for example this article in Nature saying that Science Must Right A Historical Wrong by various things including “celebrating her life and legacy”:
