“In the Bible story, the woman with the issue of blood tried everything she could think of to get healed. Finally, she had the faith to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment and immediately her flow of blood stopped. He said to her, “Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole.”
In 1951 Henrietta Lacks of Baltimore, MD checked in to Johns Hopkins Hospital with an inexplicable issue of blood – turns out she was suffering from cervical cancer, and it has taken 72 years for her and her family to be made whole.
Last week, a decades-long injustice was righted when Lacks’ descendants reached what had to be a multi-million-dollar settlement with a biotechnology company that has long been profiting from reproducing the Black woman’s cancer cells.
African American super lawyer, Benjamin Crump of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd fame helped negotiate an undisclosed out of court agreement between the Lacks family and Thermo Fisher Scientific, a $219 billion company, which, among other things, dabbles in neurobiology and stem cell research.
Before her death in October of 1951, researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital harvested Henrietta’s cells without her or her family’s permission. The cells turned out to have reproductive capabilities no other cell line had at the time. Because of their longevity and their propensity to multiply in laboratory conditions medical researchers for decades have been able to experiment and profit from using Henrietta’s personal cell line.
But this kind of medical racism has long been par for the course for the healthcare industry in America.
We can never forget the Tuskegee experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1930s when Black men from Alabama were secretly denied treatment for syphilis so that researchers could study the full progression of the disease for which there was no certain cure at the time.
The Tuskegee study didn’t become public until 1972 after several of the men had died or passed on the disease to their spouses and children. After Congressional hearings on the issue, the government finally reached a measly $10 million out of court settlement with the heirs of the infected men.
Perhaps there’s no greater medical injustice toward Black people than the fates of Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey whose surnames are lost to history due to slavery. These three women were used as enslaved guinea pigs for the so-called father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims who in the late 19th century performed multiple surgeries on these women without the benefit of anesthesia.
Renowned in gynecological circles for having invented the vaginal speculum, Sims held the bigoted notion that Black people didn’t register pain in the same way as whites. In fact, he so relished his circumstances in Montgomery, Alabama that he gloated about it in his autobiography:
“There was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation,” he said of the ready supply of enslaved patients. This, he said, was the most “memorable time” of his life.
Disgusting medical capitalism.
In the Lacks case, Thermo Fisher is just one of many companies that profited from her pilfered cells. The so-called HeLa cells – a name coined from the first two letters of Henrietta’s first and last names – have been used in medical science to develop the polio vaccine, in HIV/AIDS research, and even as a steppingstone to the development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
No fewer than three Nobel Prizes in science have been awarded to researchers using HeLa cells as the basis for their work. Henrietta’s cells were even flown into space to study the effects of zero gravity on human cell structures.
Until last week, the Lacks’ family had received little recognition and even less financial benefit from their ancestor’s ground-breaking contribution to medical science. But one family’s settlement isn’t tantamount to touching the hem of the Savior’s garment.
While Henrietta lacks no more (no pun intended), medical science still has a long way to go before making us all whole again.
