70 Years of “HeLa” Cells Debate Ends in Settlement For Henrietta Lacks Family

Photo Credit: Darryl Leja, NHGRI. via Wikimedia Commons

70 years after Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cancer treatments touched off a medical revolution, without her consent, some closure for the living relatives for a still raging debate over patient’s rights.

Baltimore Banner:

Henrietta Lacks’ living relatives reached a settlement late Monday with the multi-billion-dollar biotechnology company they sued seeking compensation for its routine use of regenerative cells that were taken from her decades ago without her consent, according to a statement released by the family’s lawyers.

The terms of the settlement with Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific will remain confidential. But the success of the legal strategy increases the likelihood that this becomes the first in a series of complaints seeking compensation for, and control of Lacks’ cells. Her “HeLa” cells were the world’s first capable of replicating outside the body.

The family is represented jointly by attorney Ben Crump, who is known nationally for representing Black victims of police violence, and attorney Chris Seeger, who has led some of the most significant class action lawsuits in U.S. history. They plan to announce the agreement at a news conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, which would have been Lacks’ 103rd birthday.

“The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of court and will have no further comment about the settlement,” said Crump and Seeger, who filed the case on the family’s behalf roughly two years ago.

News of the agreement followed settlement talks that were overseen Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Mark Coulson.

The Lacks family’s lawsuit raised a question that had lingered for 70 years, since cells from Lacks, a Turner Station wife and mother, were taken while she received cervical cancer treatment in a segregated Johns Hopkins Hospital ward: Who owns those tiny pieces of her?

Lacks’ relatives argued her cells belong to her, and companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific must pay for the privilege to use them in research and product development.

Thermo Fisher Scientific officials previously said Lacks’ descendants waited too long to take legal action and have argued the company shouldn’t be singled out for using HeLa cells without the family’s consent, because, it says, countless other companies around the world do the same thing.

Lacks’ 1951 cancer treatment did not work, and she succumbed to the disease within a few months of her diagnosis.

Around the time of her death, Hopkins researchers discovered the cells they had secretly sampled from their patient’s cervix were capable of regenerating outside the body. They shared Lacks’ miraculous cells with other scientists for free, and they have since been used to develop the polio and COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the world’s most common fertility treatment.