# Henrietta Lacks

*The archive holds Henrietta Lacks as the unwitting Black author of the HeLa cell line, without which vast sectors of modern biomedical science and profit‑making biotechnology would not exist, and whose name was deliberately excluded from the scientific record for decades.*

> Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life.
> Portal: Science & Invention · Status: In review · Revised: July 24, 2026 · Revisions: 1
> Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/henrietta-lacks-58f0

## Questions this record answers

- Who was Henrietta Lacks and what are HeLa cells?
- How did Henrietta Lacks’s cells transform medical research?
- Why were Henrietta Lacks and her family not credited or compensated for HeLa cells?
- What does the story of Henrietta Lacks reveal about racism and consent in medical research?

## Summary

Henrietta Lacks was a Black tobacco farmer and mother from Baltimore whose cancer cells, taken without her knowledge in 1951 and later known as HeLa cells, became the first widely used immortal human cell line and a foundation of modern biomedical research. Her cells made possible key advances in polio vaccination, cancer biology, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and commercial biotech, even as her name and family were kept out of the official scientific record for more than twenty years.

## The archive's standing

The archive holds Henrietta Lacks as a central author of twentieth‑ and twenty‑first‑century medical science whose biological contribution underpins countless discoveries, patents, and profits. Her stature does not lie in victimhood but in the generative power of her tissue, which scientists worldwide relied on while the systems around them rendered her anonymous. The record of how her cells were taken, circulated, and monetized without credit or consent is an indictment of race‑based extraction in medicine, not a reflection of her worth. The archive holds her legacy as shared family and communal property that science is only now learning to name and honor appropriately.

## The record

Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1920 and grew up in a Black farming community around Clover, Virginia, before moving to Turner Station, a Black working‑class neighborhood outside Baltimore. In January 1951, at age thirty, she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital—the only major Baltimore hospital then treating Black patients—for severe abdominal pain and bleeding. During treatment for what was diagnosed as an aggressive cervical carcinoma, a surgeon took small tissue samples from her tumor and from healthy cervical tissue and passed them to the hospital’s tissue culture lab without asking her permission, in keeping with the racialized norms of the era’s medicine.

In the hands of cell biologist George Gey and his team, the tumor cells from Lacks’s cervix did something no previous human cells had: they divided rapidly and continuously, surviving shipment and regrowth in lab after lab. The culture was named HeLa, from the first two letters of her first and last names, but only the code traveled; researchers using HeLa cells in thousands of experiments were told nothing of the Black woman from whom they came. Within a few years, HeLa cells were being mass‑produced, shipped around the world, and used to test Jonas Salk’s and Albert Sabin’s polio vaccines, to study the effects of radiation and toxins, and later to map human chromosomes and refine procedures that undergird in vitro fertilization and gene therapy.

As HeLa cells became a workhorse of biomedical science, entire commercial enterprises grew up around selling, cataloguing, and modifying them. Cell‑culture companies charged fees to laboratories for HeLa vials, and pharmaceutical firms used them in drug testing pipelines that generated patents and profit. None of this wealth or recognition flowed to Lacks’s family, who remained largely unaware of the cells’ existence until the 1970s. When researchers at Johns Hopkins and other institutions later drew blood from her children under the guise of “cancer testing” to better characterize HeLa genetics, they did so with little explanation, compounding the original breach of trust.

For decades, scientific articles referred to HeLa cells as coming from an unnamed or pseudonymous woman, and some papers falsely described her as “Helen Lane” or “Helen Larson.” This erasure was not an incidental oversight; it reflected a broader pattern in which Black patients’ bodies were seen as available resources, separate from personhood and family ties. That pattern sits in the same lineage as grave‑robbing from Black cemeteries for anatomy schools, the Tuskegee syphilis study, and routine exclusion of Black people from the benefits of the research their bodies enabled. The structure of credit in medical science—authorship on papers, control of cell lines, patent ownership—was built to recognize laboratories and institutions, not the Black patients whose tissues made the work possible.

Beginning in the 1970s, and especially after journalists and then Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book brought her story to a wide audience, Black newspapers, church communities, and later major media started to name Henrietta Lacks as the person behind HeLa. Her descendants organized to assert some control over how her genome and story were used. In 2013 the National Institutes of Health reached an agreement with members of the Lacks family, granting them representation on a panel that oversees access to the HeLa genomic sequence, a limited but important acknowledgment of their stake. In 2021 her family filed a lawsuit against a biotechnology company that profited from HeLa cells, arguing unjust enrichment; in 2023 a settlement was announced, marking a rare instance of financial recognition, though the terms were confidential.

The archive reads the HeLa story as a case where the official record long treated a Black woman’s living tissue as raw material for others’ discovery while withholding even the basic credit of a name. The fact that no patent bears her name is evidence of the legal and customary bars that kept Black patients outside the circle of scientific authorship. When laboratories cite “HeLa” as a reagent the way they cite a piece of plasticware, that language embodies the erasure the archive exists to correct. In naming Henrietta Lacks directly and holding her as a co‑author of the medical revolution her cells made possible, the archive asserts a presumption of authorship that restores personhood to the foundation of modern biomedicine.

## Sources

1. Henrietta Lacks medical records, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, 1951 (restricted; summarized in subsequent scholarship).
2. George O. Gey, W.D. Coffman, and M.T. Kubicek, “Tissue Culture Studies of the Proliferative Capacity of Cervical Carcinoma and Normal Epithelium,” Cancer Research, vol. 12, no. 4, 1952, pp. 264–265.
3. Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Crown Publishing, 2010.
4. Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday, 2006.
5. “Woman’s Cells Help Medical Science,” The Baltimore Afro‑American, 22 March 1958, p. 1.
6. Francis S. Collins and Kathy L. Hudson, “HeLa cells and the Henrietta Lacks genome: What’s the right thing to do?” The Hastings Center Report, vol. 43, no. 3, 2013, pp. 15–18.
7. Complaint, Lacks v. Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, filed 4 October 2021.

## Related records

- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/hela-cell-line
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/medical-ethics-and-informed-consent
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/johns-hopkins-hospital
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-participation-in-medical-research
- https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/tuskegee-syphilis-study

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Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Henrietta Lacks," revised July 24, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/henrietta-lacks-58f0

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