Lacks still heroic, 66 years after death
Henrietta Lacks’ life was as difficult as it was brief.
She was born Loretta Pleasant in rural Virginia in 1920, an African-American in what had been a slave state merely a half-century earlier. That alone was a tough beginning. Then her mother died when Loretta was 4. She was sent to live with her grandfather in a log cabin, which once served as slave quarters on a plantation owned by a great-grandfather and great-uncle, both of whom were white.
As a pre-teen, she worked on a tobacco farm, then gave birth at 14, the first of five children she would have with her future husband, David “Day” Lacks, who also was a first cousin. Their second child had developmental disabilities and the couple placed her in a facility called Hospital for the Negro Insane.
Henrietta – it isn’t known when or how Loretta changed her name – moved to Baltimore when Day got a steel mill job and gave birth for the fifth time in November 1950. Two months later, ailing, she went to Johns Hopkins, the only area hospital that would treat African-Americans. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and died that August at age 31.
Henrietta Lacks was more than a cancer victim, though. While being treated at the hospital, doctors removed two tissue samples from her tumors – one healthy, one cancerous – for research purposes. They did not tell her, or the people closest to her, about the biopsies. Her family, in fact, would not find out about the procedure until the mid-1970s, 20-plus years after Henrietta’s death.
That clandestine act and subsequent silence brazenly disregarded human decency. It was on a par with the discrimination African-Americans endured long after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863. Yet, amid this deplorable mire, Henrietta Lacks emerged heroic. And she continues to be heroic, 66 years after her death.
Those tissue samples were presented to George Otto Gey, a Johns Hopkins physician and cancer researcher, who found Lacks’ cells to be more durable than most. He isolated a cell then multiplied it, creating a cell line he dubbed HeLa – a combination of the first two letters of Henrietta and Lacks. HeLa cells could be reproduced quickly in a lab, making them a valuable research tool.
How valuable? Jonas Salk used the HeLa strain en route to developing the polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh in 1954. Polio was a devastating disease at the time, mostly afflicting children, causing paralysis or death.
Lacks’ unwitting gift keeps on giving, as the HeLa line continues to be used for medical research, long after playing an integral role in the near eradication of polio. Permission to harvest those cells was not required, and usually not sought, in 1951. But even though they have turned out to benefit medical professionals and thousands of patients, the original HeLa cells should not have been harvested amid a cloud of secrecy, and it shouldn’t have taken two decades for the family to find out.
They did get a hint in the early 1970s, when a large quantity of HeLa cells were contaminated and researchers started contacting Henrietta’s relatives, asking for blood samples. Then in 1975, during a casual dinner-party conversation, some family members learned that Henrietta’s cells were still being used for research.
Her story gained prominence in 2010, when Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” became a New York Times best-seller. An HBO movie with the same title will air this year, starring Oprah Winfrey as Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah.
And while it has gained an international audience, the saga of Henrietta resonates here as well. As we reported Monday, there is a branch of her family, named Lacks, living in Washington.
Henrietta Lacks did, indeed, have a brief, difficult life, which ended shortly after the biomedical community used her as a guinea pig and covered it up for more than two decades. Yet, amid those egregious circumstances, that life became immortal. And it is worth recalling as we embark on Black History Month.