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On a wintery morning in January of 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American farmer, went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, because of bad stomach pains.The head of the research, George Otto Gey, decided to create a cell line--a group of cells that continue to divide without dying--and named it the HeLa cell line after the first two letters of Lacks's first and last name.The HeLa cell line would become the most important cell line in history; HeLa cells have been used in developing vaccines, in cloning, and in gene sequencing.The experience of Henrietta Lacks and the use of HeLa cells raises a number of ethical issues for science and medicine.At the time, Johns Hopkins was the only hospital near Lacks's home that treated African Americans.The biopsy results showed that Lacks had a malignant form of cancer in her cervix.They performed a biopsy--a procedure in which cells are taken from the body to test for diseases.On the night of October 4, 1951, Henrietta Lacks died at the age of 31.Soon after her death, researchers removed many more cancer cells from her body because they believed that they would be useful for a variety of studies.While Lacks was there, doctors noticed an unusual group of cells in her cervix.The biopsy also showed something unusual about Lacks's cancer: The cells were able to survive longer than any cancer cells the doctors had seen before.Because of this, the doctors later removed two more cell samples from Lacks for research.

On a wintery morning in January of 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American farmer, went to
Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, because of bad stomach pains. At the time, Johns
Hopkins was the only hospital near Lacks’s home that treated African Americans. While Lacks was
there, doctors noticed an unusual group of cells in her cervix. They performed a biopsy—a procedure
in which cells are taken from the body to test for diseases. The biopsy results showed that Lacks had a
malignant form of cancer in her cervix.
The biopsy also showed something unusual about Lacks’s cancer: The cells were able to survive
longer than any cancer cells the doctors had seen before. Because of this, the doctors later removed
two more cell samples from Lacks for research. The cancer cells that so interested her doctors could
not be treated. On the night of October 4, 1951, Henrietta Lacks died at the age of 31.
But her story does not end there. Soon after her death, researchers removed many
more cancer cells from her body because they believed that they would be useful
for a variety of studies. The head of the research, George Otto Gey, decided to
create a cell line—a group of cells that continue to divide without dying—and
named it the HeLa cell line after the first two letters of Lacks’s first and last
name. The HeLa cell line would become the most important cell line in history;
HeLa cells have been used in developing vaccines, in cloning, and in gene sequencing. HeLa cells are
used in medical research today.
The experience of Henrietta Lacks and the use of HeLa cells raises a number of ethical issues for
science and medicine. First, Lacks’s cells were taken from her, both before and after her death,
without her permission, and not as part of her treatment. Then, over the next few decades, her cells
were grown, sold, and used for thousands of different research studies, which earned millions of
dollars for the medical industry. However, neither Lacks nor her family received any money from
this. In fact, courts in the United States have decided that patients do not own their cells after they are
taken from their bodies. Cells like these are considered “medical waste,” courts say, and scientists are
free to use them in their research.
A second ethical issue involving the Lacks family came in 2013. A team of researchers in Germany
published details of the HeLa genome, again without asking the Lacks family for permission. Her
family worries that this information could negatively affect them if it is used in the wrong way. In the
United States, cells from hundreds of millions of people are kept in labs and are available for use in
research. Many of these were taken without permission and could be used to develop profitable cell
lines and technologies, for example. This might be great for science, but it creates problems for people
who want their health to be kept private. In the years to come, debate about the ethical use of genetic
material will surely continue.