Henrietta Lacks lived to 31. Her cells are 75 years old and still dividing
In 1951 doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore took a small piece of Henrietta Lacks's cervical tumour. She was 31. Nobody asked her permission, or even told her: US rules requiring patient consent were still decades away.
That sample became the first human cancer cell line that could keep dividing in a lab dish for ever. It was named HeLa. Henrietta died of her cancer the same year, and her cells went on to help develop the polio vaccine in 1952. Roughly 60,000 scientific papers cite work done with them.
In 2013 a German team posted the HeLa genome to open databases. That upset the Lacks family, because a genome can reveal things about a person's descendants too. The US National Institutes of Health then agreed with the family that researchers must apply for access to the data. The applications go to an NIH working group.
Two of her relatives now sit on that group and help decide who may read her genome.
Sources
- Hudson, K. L., & Collins, F. S. (2013). Biospecimen policy: Family matters. Nature, 500(7461), 141–142. doi:10.1038/500141a
- Mittelman, D., & Wilson, J. H. (2013). The fractured genome of HeLa cells. Genome Biology, 14(4), 111. doi:10.1186/gb-2013-14-4-111