Racism in Medicine & the Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks

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Who ever heard of Henrietta Lacks? Countless people owe their health to her — perhaps even their lives.

Lacks was the daughter of Virginia sharecroppers. At the age of thirty, checked into the ‘coloured ward’ at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer. In the course of surgery that followed, unbeknownst to her or her family, a piece of her cervix was removed, then passed along to a cell biology researcher.

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Henrietta Lacks died of her cancer on October 4, 1951. Her highly aggressive cancerous cervical cells lived on — immortal — doing what no line of cultured human cells had ever done: reproduce indefinitely in lab dishes.

HeLa cells, as they came to be known, revolutionized biomedical research. Among the advances they leveraged — the polio vaccine, treatment for sickle cell anemia and in vitro fertilization.

Monoclonal antibodies bound to HeLa cells

HeLa cells also generated huge profit for a company called Thermo Fisher Scientific. The Lacks family never saw a penny. Indeed, advanced medical treatments made possible by HeLa cells were beyond their means.

In 2021, the Lacks family launched a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher. In August 2023, the case was settled for an undisclosed sum. The GPM spoke about Henrietta Lacks and medical racism in America with Dorothy Roberts.

Dorothy Roberts is Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society at U. Penn’s Center for Africana Studies. She’s also a prolific writer and human rights advocate.

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Listen to our conversation with Dorothy Roberts in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation about Henrietta Lacks and the history of racism in American medicine with Dorothy Roberts:

In Gaza today – seemingly uninhabitable after a thousand days of joint US-Israeli genocide – young women and men are writing poetry! Coastal Lines Press is a collective of thirty-eight writers. The goal of their Zines From Gaza project: to turn words into life-saving supplies for their families.

In the last couple of GPM editions, we’ve spoken with three Zines From Gaza poets — Noor Abu Mariam, Nourhan Shaheen, and Lama Alharazin. After our conversation with Lama, she reached out, telling us that her younger brother and sister would like to speak with us.

We reached Mohammad, 21 years-old, and Farah, 12-years-old, in a tent café at Al-Mawasi, on the beach in south-central Gaza.

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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here: