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Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks circa 1945–1950
Born	August 8, 1920(1920-08-08) Roanoke, Virginia
Died	October 4, 1951 (aged 31) Baltimore, Maryland
Occupation	Housewife
Spouse	David Lacks I (1915–2002)
Children	Deborah Lacks Pullum, David Lacks II, Lawrence Lacks, and Zakariyya Lacks
Parents	Eliza (1886–1924) and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969)

Henrietta Lacks (August 18, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was the involuntary donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. This is now known as the HeLa cell line.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Later life 3 HeLa's immortality and Lacks' mortality 4 Legacy 5 Helacyton gartleri 6 Further reading 7 References

[edit] Early life

She was born as Henrietta Pleasant on August 18, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia to Eliza (1886–1924)^[1] and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969).^[2][3][4] Eliza died giving birth to her tenth child in 1924. Sometime after his wife's death, John Pleasant took the children back to where their relatives on their mother's side lived, and where they were raised. In 1929, a 48 year old John, still living in Roanoke at 12th Street Southwest, married a 13 year old girl named Lillian. John worked as a brakeman on the railroad.^[5]

[edit] Later life

Henrietta Pleasant married David Lacks I (1915–2002) in Halifax County, Virginia. After requesting and convincing her husband, David Lacks, to go north to search for work, Henrietta Lacks and the children followed. David found work at the Sparrow's Point shipyards and found a house for them on New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turners Station. This community was one of the largest and one of, if not, the youngest of the approximately fifty historically African American communities in Baltimore County, Maryland. In 1943 Henrietta moved to Turners Station now a part of Dundalk, Baltimore County, Maryland. The couple had five children: Deborah Lacks (born 1948) who married a Pullum; David Lacks II; Lawrence Lacks; Zakariyya Lacks; and another daughter^[6] Her last child was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in November of 1950. On February 1, 1951, and just days after a march for a cure for polio in New York city , according to Michael Rogers of the Detroit Free Press and the Rolling Stone Magazine, Mrs. Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because of a vaginal discharge. That day she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was treated but died on October 4, 1951 at the age of thirty-one. Mrs. Henrietta Lacks was buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery in Lackstown where she was raised. Lackstown is located in the city of Clover in Halifax County, Virginia. Lackstown is the name of the land that has been held by the Lacks' family since they received it from the family whom they were slaves and also descendants of. "Lax" was at first the name of this family. Later the Lax family changed their last name to "Lacks". Mrs. Henrietta Lack's mother has the only tombstone of the five graves in the family cemetery in Lackstown.^[7][8]

[edit] HeLa's immortality and Lacks' mortality

The HeLa cells were cultured while Lacks was receiving treatment for cervical cancer. Her cancer was metastasizing abnormally rapidly, vastly faster than any other cancer the physicians had seen.^{[citation needed]} Most accounts agree that neither she nor her husband were asked about the cultivation of her cells, or their future use. Her husband was consulted after her death and told that a sample of the cells could be studied with the goal of possibly isolating genetic factors and preventing cancer deaths in future generations. He was not told about the scope of research and the family did not learn of it until twenty-five years later. Today, HeLa cells are still commonly used in research laboratories as a model for human cells.^[9][10]

There was, then as now, no necessity to inform a patient, or their relatives, about such matters because discarded material, or material obtained during surgery, diagnosis or therapy was the property of the physician or medical institution. This was brought up in the Supreme Court of California case of John Moore vs. the Regents of the University of California. The court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized without permission or recompense.

The HeLa cell line was originally cultured due to its tremendous proliferation rate, abnormally rapid even compared to other cancer cells. While it was this remarkably speedy proliferation which sealed Henrietta Lacks' fate, the cell line has since been used in thousands of biological experiments, contributing to the understanding of disease processes. HeLa was used in Jonas Salk's development of the vaccine for polio. The cells allowed Salk to produce large amounts of virus in his laboratory. The word "HeLa" was devised by Gey by using the first two letters of Lacks' first and last names to keep her real name a secret. This worked for a while and some thought that the human source of HeLa was "Harriet Lane", "Helen Lane", and others.^[11][12]

Her name was finally released, although it is not clear who released it. Her picture with her name under it appeared in a journal article in 1971. Her family members said that none of them had given anyone the picture. The 1971 article reported that she had been misdiagnosed with the slower-metastasizing epidermoid carcinoma, when in reality she had adenocarcinoma, a fast-metastasizing cancer even in strains lacking the unique characteristics which made Lacks' strain of cancer so virulent. The article also reiterated previous statements that the misdiagnosis would not likely have affected her chances of survival; by the oncological standards of the day, a cancer as fast-moving as hers would have likely been terminal regardless of the diagnosis.^[9]

According to anthropologist Hannah Landecker in Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (2007),^[13] in "Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science" in Science in Context,1999, and in a chapter of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (2000)),^[14] narratives on Mrs. Lacks and HeLa have changed over time. In the earlier 1950s narratives Lacks was portrayed as the "angelic", "beneficent" , "heroic" and "self-sacrificing" donor of HeLa HeLa was considered to be a "standard" or a "universal" and Mrs. Lacks was "assumed to be white" (2000,64)

After 1966, argues Landecker, when it was found that HeLa was contaminating other cell lines (2007, 171), and after her gender and race were also discovered, the following adjectives, nouns, and phrases increased in the narratives, "voracious","vigorous", "aggressive", "malicious", "malevolent", "malignant", "surreptitious", "indefatigable", "renegade", "catastropic", "luxuriant", "undeflatable", "contaminating", "promiscuity", "wild proliferative tendencies,"'colorful' laboratory life", "a monster among the Pyrex". Some wrote about "world domination by HeLa" or HeLa taking over the world. Landecker ,in addition, writes about narratives that "took on a racial grammar of miscegenation and heredity pollution", and depicted HeLa cells as "racialized threats to scientific order".

Next in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Landecker, economic and monetary considerations began to be stressed and there was a focus on "economic injustice". "economic exploitation", economic value, and "economic power and privilege." In the last instance, the poverty of one is contrasted to the wealth of the other. Levels of educations are contrasted as well. Three inclinations however persist in these narratives over time, namely inclinations (1) to emphasize HeLa's immortality, (2) to "obscure" (2007, 171) and "mask" (2007,64) Lacks' death or misdiagnosis (3) to use her photographs, "as was the case" with the tissue from a biopsy as well, "without any indication that permission was sought or given for its use, either from Lacks or her family". (2000, fn 61,264).

Landecker states that "Although it is difficult to say whether an accurate diagnosis of adenocarcinoma would have helped in Lack's treatment", what was evident to her was a "total absence of questioning of the circumstances and adequacy of her medical treatment --- even with the clearly stated admission of misdiagnostic error published in 1971" among scientists and journalists. To Landecker this "absence of questioning... indicates the power of the concepts of immortality produced by the life of these cells." The "death of a person who was Henrietta Lacks has been obscured by the personification of her cells as an immortal entity".(2000,55)

[edit] Legacy

Henrietta Lacks has been recognized as an unintentional contributor to science, research, medicine and public health. Her contributions, which began almost immediately after her February 1, 1951 trip to Johns Hopkins Hospital, continue until today. According to reporter Michael Rogers, her visit and the subsequent development of HeLa by a researcher at the hospital, helped answer the demands of 10,000 who marched for a cure to polio just a few days before. By 1954 HeLa was used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio. As stated by reporter Van Smith in 2002 a "demand" for HeLa "quickly rose ... the cells were put into mass production and traveled around the globe--even into space, on an unmanned satellite to determine whether human tissues could survive zero gravity".^[15]

Reporter Smith continued, "In the half-century since Henrietta Lacks' death, her ... cells ... have continually been used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa was used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue cosmetics, and many other products.

In 1996 Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and the mayor of Atlanta recognized the late Henrietta Lacks' family for her posthumous contributions and for their sacrifices. Her life is commemorated annually by Turners Station. A Congressional resolution in her honor was tabled by Robert Ehrlich.^[16]

In 1998, "Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh" the documentary on Mrs.Lacks and HeLa won the Best Science and Nature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Immediately following this film's airing in 1997, an article on HeLa , Mrs. Lacks, and her family was published by reporter Jacques Kelly in the Baltimore Sun. In 2001 it was announced that the National Foundation for Cancer Research would be honoring "the late Henrietta Lacks for the contributions made to cancer research and modern medicine" on September 14th.

[edit] Helacyton gartleri

One biologist, Leigh Van Valen, has written that Lacks' cancer cells have evolved into a self-replicating, single-cell life-form and has proposed HeLa cells be given the new species name of Helacyton gartleri. The cells are a genetic chimera of human papillomavirus 18 (HPV18) and human cervical cells and now have a distinct, stable, non-human chromosome number.^[17] His 1991 suggestion has not been followed, nor, indeed, been widely noted. With near unanimity, evolutionary scientists and biologists hold that a chimeric human cell line is not a distinct species, and that tumorigenesis is not an evolutionary process.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Further reading

• Modern Times: The Way of the Flesh; (1997) BBC documentary on Henrietta Lacks, directed by Adam Curtis
• Michael Gold, The Conspiracy of Cells (1986)
• Rebecca Skloot, 2007, HeLa: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (
• Hannah Landecker 2000 Immortality, In Vitro. A History of the HeLa Cell Line. In Brodwin, Paul E., ed.: Biotechnology and Culture. Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics. Bloomington/Indianapolis, 53-72, ISBN 0-253-21428-9
• Hannah Landecker, 1999, "Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science," Science in Context, 203-225.
• Hannah Landecker, 2007, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. HeLa is the title of the fourth chapter.
• Russell Brown and James H M Henderson, 1983, The Mass Production and Distribution of HeLa Cells at Tuskegee Institute, 1953-1955. J Hist Med allied Sci 38(4):415-43
• Sources on Mrs. Lacks and HeLa^[18]

[edit] References

Persondata
NAME	Lacks, Henrietta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Pleasant, Henrietta
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Medical patient
DATE OF BIRTH	August 18, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH	Maryland
DATE OF DEATH	October 4, 1951
PLACE OF DEATH	Johns Hopkins University Hospital