Henrietta Lacks' Family Settles Landmark Bioethics Lawsuit

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Facts

  • Descendants of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cervical cells were taken by Johns Hopkins Hospital scientists without her knowledge in 1951, have reached a settlement with biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. The company was accused of profiting billions from Lacks' cells.1
  • Lacks’ family wasn’t notified about the use of her cells — which were the first to reproduce in a lab and subsequently enabled various medical advancements. These included the development of polio and COVID vaccines as well as cancer treatments.2
  • The Lacks family demanded compensation for the use of her cells, known as "HeLa cells," and announced the settlement Tuesday on what would have been her 103rd birthday.3
  • Though her cells were taken before medical consent laws were implemented, her family argued that Thermo Fisher continued to commercialize the results well after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.4
  • Attorneys for the Lacks family identified 12 product lines sold by Thermo Fisher related to HeLa cells — including Pierce HeLa Protein Digest Standard, T-REx HeLa Cell Line, and Cervical Adenocarcinoma (HeLa-S3) Total RNA.5
  • This settlement comes after, in 2021, the World Health Organization 2021 honored Lacks for her contribution to medicine.3

Sources: 1Associated Press, 2New York Times, 3Independent, 4Business Insider, and 5Washington Post.

Narratives

  • Left narrative, as provided by Al Jazeera. This settlement is a first step towards rectifying the grotesque history of medical racism in America, and it’s too bad Henrietta passed away before she could see justice done. Too many medical organizations made enormous amounts of money off of theft throughout the years, but luckily this settlement can help to curb a healthcare industry built on healthcare inequity.
  • Right narrative, as provided by National Review. The Henrietta Lacks case is an important one, but it has long been hyper-politicized, especially under the Obama administration. A 2010 biography about her life has been widely used in college and high school settings to advance Obamacare-centric narratives and to rail against the private sector. Her story shouldn't be parlayed into a woke agenda to burden healthcare with more red tape and government controls.