Here's To You, Henrietta Lacks, Still Delivering Miracles of Modern Medicine 7 Decades After Leaving This Earth
Her family finally gets justice, on what would have been her 103rd birthday. Bless you, Henrietta Lacks.
By Gary Gately
She toiled in the tobacco fields of Virginia under the searing summer sun and struggled to make ends meet. She knew hard times early in life, having given birth to her first child, a son, at just age 14 in 1934, and a daughter four years later.
Henrietta Lacks then married her sweetheart and the father of both children, David Lacks, in 1941, and they looked northward, dreaming of a better life.
They had no doubt that they had found it when they arrived in the spring of 1932 in and settled in Turners Station, an African American enclave southwest of Baltimore.
David landed a well-paying job at Bethlehem Steel, so, at last, Henrietta Lacks could put tobacco farming behind her for good and devote herself to raising her children, the two she arrived here with, and three others she would give birth to during the family’s seven years in Turners Station.
That last child, Zacharia, was just a baby when one word forever altered the course of the family’s life:
Cancer, the doctors at Hopkins told Henrietta Lacks in 1951.
They had discovered a tumor in her cervix, and she died at age 31 in the “Colored Ward” at Hopkins, then buried in an unmarked grave.
Doctors had saved a sample of her cells from the procedure, then turned the cells over to a Hopkins researcher, who wanted to use them in experiments.
These cells – as “HeLa” cells, derived from the two first letters of Henrietta’s Lacks’ first and last name – astonished medical experts almost immediately.
For they did what no other human cells had ever done before: They reproduced themselves, immortal cells in what many came to see as –a modern-day medical miracle.
Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cells have been delivering miracles ever since, even now, more than seven decades after she left this Earth in 1951, saving an inestimable number of lives and bringing treatments that eased the sufferings inflicted by diseases.
Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cells played crucial roles in development of the Polio vaccine, testing other cells for cancers, then treatment for cancers, development of HIV medications, an HPV, Ebola vaccines and cervical cancer vaccines.
Immortal cells, miracles of modern medicine that keep coming, ones that save lives, began with the death of Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins Hospital 72 years ago.
“It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.” — Lacks’ grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr.
But until what would have been her 103rd birthday last week, either Lacks, her family or her descendants received a dime for all the medical miracles her cells gave us.
This, even while a Massachusetts pharmaceutical giant, Thermo Fisher Scientific, reaped billions of dollars in revenue through advances her immortal cells made possible.
Thermo Fisher, family members said in a federal lawsuit, treated “Henrietta Lacks’ living cells as chattel to be bought and sold.”
Finally, the Lacks family got justice last Tuesday when they reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher.
Lacks’ only surviving child, Lawrence Lacks Sr., lives to see justice done, grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. said. Now 86, Lawrence Lacks was 16 when his mother died.
It proved to be a happy 103rd birthday for the Lacks family.
“There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief,” her grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. said. “It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”
Indeed.
I know we can ascribe the phenomenon of the self-replicating immortal cells as a fluke of science.
Me, I consider it nothing less than a miracle, and, Henrietta Lacks nothing less than a miracle worker – and according to my beliefs, I can safely assume that she smiles today in heaven.
Thank you, Henrietta Lacks, our own miracle worker, even from beyond the grave.
