AFRICAN AMERICAN & HEALTH
Henrietta Lacks Finally Getting Some Justice
Human dignity at last for a poor African American woman
Henrietta Lacks
Finally, the family of Henrietta Lacks gets justice for their family member. One of the ancestors.
The story goes like this:
In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was terminally ill with cervical cancer. Mrs. Lacks would seek treatment from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Hospital. A physician treating her there would discover that the tumor cells from Mrs. Lacks’ cells were unique. According to Dr. George Gey, Mrs. Lacks’ cells could lead to a cure for cancer because they were so remarkable. The cells didn’t lead to a cure for cancer, but they did change medicine and how patients are treated before, after, and during their illness. Today, her cells, “HeLa cells,” are “the cornerstone of modern medicine.”
Mrs. Lacks’ “cells survived and thrived in laboratories,” according to several accounts. “They became known as the first immortalized human cell line because scientists could cultivate them indefinitely, meaning researchers anywhere could reproduce studies using identical cells.” For the treatment of all sorts of diseases, this was historic.
