Until recently, for the layman she was just a young black woman from Virginia, a mother of five children who died in 1951 of cervical cancer at the age of 31. Today Henrietta Lacks is celebrated everywhere as one of the most important people in biomedicine research.
Thanks to her today we have the polio vaccine, we have much more powerful tools against cervical cancer and many other types of cancer, new drugs against AIDS, haemophilia, Parkinson’s. We know much more about the effects of cosmic radiation on human cells and also about what happens to the organism in conditions of microgravity.
We have made progress on genetic diseases. Research on fertility and assisted reproduction owes her a great deal, and precision medicine is achieving unexpected successes thanks to her. Even the Covid-19 vaccines owe a lot to this woman. But she, Henrietta Lacks born Loretta Pleasant on 1 August 1920, never knew all this.
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Those cells taken in 1951
In fact, only his cells, taken in 1951 by the doctors of Johns Hopkins Hospital di Baltimora she had turned to for her illness. During the tests, the doctors realized that the cancer from which she was struck had unique characteristics. In fact, tumor cells had an extraordinary ability to replicate in vitro at rates never seen before – one generation every 24 hours – and were particularly resistant outside the human body, being able to resist for more than 36 hours.
A sort of immortality, therefore, which later proved to be very useful for research: over the decades the HeLa cell lines, named after that woman from whom they were taken without her knowledge, have grown and multiplied relentlessly in the laboratories, traveling in every part of the globe and even in space.
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Thanks to them, thousands of researchers have been able to investigate the causes of diseases or verify the efficacy and safety of new therapies. From the 1950s to today, it is estimated that over 50 million tons have been distributed, to be the subject of over 75,000 studies.
Cells that are precious for medical advances, but also precious for the pockets of those who have built a billion-dollar business on these cell lines. Without anyone from Henrietta’s family knowing anything about it or deriving any economic benefit from it.
Henrietta’s descendants have long been fighting to right this wrong. And just in these days theWorld Health Organization, through the mouth of the General Manager Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, paid tribute to this “immortal” woman and her fundamental contribution to medicine with a special ceremony in the Geneva office.
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“What happened to Henrietta Lacks is deeply unfair, for at least three reasons,” Ghebreyesus recalled in his commemoration. “Firstly, because the whole affair took place at a time when racial discrimination was widespread in the United States – as it still is in various parts of the world. Secondly, because Henrietta is one of many women. blacks whose bodies have been exploited and abused by the scientific community.
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“She was a woman who had faith in the health system, which she had turned to in search of a treatment for her disease. Yet that same system that was trying to save her has taken over part of her,” added the WHO Director. . Finally, because the medical technologies that originated from that first theft have been used to perpetuate other injustices: the resulting knowledge has not been shared fairly across the world. In countries where cervical cancer is more widespread, there are insufficient doses of vaccine against HPV, the papillomavirus which is the main cause of this tumor. And even Covid-19 vaccines, which also owe a lot to HeLa cell lines, have not been distributed sufficiently in middle- and low-income countries. For this – concluded Ghebreyesus – today we must heal this injustice by honoring Henrietta. Even in health and science, black lives matters.
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Access to the data of its genome
After years of battles and controversies, however, Henrietta has, at least in part, achieved justice. First, in 2013, family members obtained from the US National Institutes of Health that access to the genome data of the HeLa cell line be regulated, to avoid privacy violations that would also affect living family members. In 2020, on the centenary of Henrietta’s birth, the family launched HELA100, a project intended to train new generations of researchers on the impact of Henrietta Lacks’ HeLa cells while promoting health equity and social justice.
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A step forward for bioethics
And the Henrietta Lacks Enhancing Cancer Research Act is also in 2020, a law that obliges federal agencies to ensure greater inclusiveness of government-funded clinical trials on cancer, so that they are also conducted on traditionally under-represented populations. In this sense, Henrietta’s trace cannot be read only on laboratory counters. It is also very important that left in modern bioethics policies and informed consent laws, which today protect trial participants and help build patients ‘rights and patients’ trust in medicine.
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