"Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henrietta Lacks, commonly referred to as “the mother of modern medicine”. Her cells have been used in experiments in laboratories around the world but were cultivated without her consent. Eventually, her story led to the rewriting of the rules around ethics in healthcare. As the dawn of an era of personalised medicine begins, the lessons from her story are more important than ever.
Lacks, an African American tobacco farmer from Virginia, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951. Her doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore obtained a biopsy from her cervix for diagnosis and treatment. A small part of her tissue was taken to the tissue culture laboratory without Lacks’s knowledge or consent – a common practice at the time.
Nobody had yet been able to keep human cells alive for a long period of time outside the body. However, George Gey, who was head of the tissue culture laboratory, found that Lacks’s cells survived and replicated. Nearly seven decades later, these so-called HeLa cells have now lived more than twice as long outside Lacks’s body than inside.
Lacks died a few months after her cancer diagnosis, but her cells continue to be used for research. They have been vital to studying diseases, including covid-19, as well as for developing vaccines and IVF, to name a few examples. They have also become the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry. There are more than 17,000 patents involving HeLa cells."
| | Genetic privacy: We must learn from the story of Henrietta LacksManinder Ahluwalia Henrietta Lacks's cells are used in experiments in laboratories around the world but were cultivated without her... |
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