Henrietta Lacks' family wants compensation for her cells
By Andrea K. McDaniels,
Baltimore Sun
| 02. 15. 2017
The eldest son of Henrietta Lacks wants compensation from the Johns Hopkins University and possibly other institutions for the unauthorized use of her cells in research that led to decades of medical advances.
Lawrence Lacks said that he is the executor of his mother's estate and that an agreement the National Institutes of Health made with other family members over the years regarding use of the cells were not valid. That agreement did not include compensation.
The cells collected from the 31-year-old Turners Station woman during a diagnostic procedure before she died of an aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951 were the first to live outside the body in a glass tube. They were dubbed the HeLa cells and have become the most widely used human cells that exist today in scientific research.
Vaccines, cancer treatments and in vitro fertilization are among the many medical techniques derived from her cells.
"My mother would be so proud that her cells saved lives," Lawrence Lacks said in a statement. "She'd be horrified that Johns Hopkins profited while her family to this...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi, The New York Times | 07.15.2024
By Katie LaGrone, WPTV | 06.28.2024
Image by National Cancer Institute from Unsplash
TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa jury recently found the now-defunct Lung Institute in Tampa guilty of engaging in “deceptive or unfair practices” while it offered customers “valueless” stem cell therapy to treat incurable...
By Peter Aldhous, Scientific American | 07.02.2024
In June a notice posted on the website of the journal Nature set a new scientific record. It withdrew what is now the most highly cited research paper ever to be retracted.
The study, published in 2002 by Catherine Verfaillie...