Henrietta Lacks Died in 1951 and Her Cells Are Still Multiplying

Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old tobacco farmer from Clover, Virginia, who in February 1951 traveled to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore — the only nearby facility that treated Black patients — for what turned out to be aggressive cervical cancer. During radiation, the surgeon shaved two small samples off her tumor and another off the healthy cervix and sent them, without her knowledge or consent, down the corridor to the lab of George Gey. Gey had spent two decades trying to grow human cells in culture and watching every line die after a few divisions.

Lacks's cells did not die. They doubled every 24 hours; they grew on glass; they grew in solution. Gey gave them away to anyone who asked. By the time Lacks died on October 4, 1951, samples were on their way to laboratories in California, Texas, and Europe. The line was named HeLa from the first two letters of her first and last names. It is the oldest, most-replicated, and most-cited human cell line in biology.

What HeLa enabled is what made the ethical absence so loud. Jonas Salk used HeLa to titrate the polio vaccine in 1954. The line has been on every Space Shuttle, exposed to atomic blasts, used to map the human genome, used to develop the HPV vaccine, used in COVID-19 research. As of the latest count there are roughly 11,000 patents that involve HeLa cells in some way.

Lacks's family did not learn of the cells' existence until 1975, when researchers contacted them for blood samples. Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks finally made the family widely known. In August 2023 Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the largest sellers of HeLa cells, settled a lawsuit with the Lacks estate on undisclosed terms — the first compensation, 72 years late.