The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks
Kicking off the week with a biological thriller. Without this woman's extraordinary cells there would be no polio vaccines; nor would there be any IVF babies.
Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant in 1920) was an African American tobacco farmer and mother of five, whose cells – harvested without her knowledge during treatment for cervical cancer in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore – became the first immortal human cell line, known as “HeLa”.
When Lacks arrived at Johns Hopkins, she was treated for a lump on her cervix and diagnosed with a malignant tumour. During her care, doctors took biopsy samples from her tumour and healthy tissue without her informed consent – a routine practice at the time. In the laboratory of researcher George Otto Gey, these cells exhibited an extraordinary property: unlike most human cells, which die after only a few divisions in culture, Lacks’s cells continued dividing indefinitely. Gey named the line “HeLa” after the first two letters of her first and last names – although, in fear of being sued by the Lacks family, he pretended that the unwitting donor’s name was actually Helen Lane.
The HeLa cells rapidly became indispensable to biomedical research. They were used in developing the polio vaccine and in studies of cancer, viruses, radiation and toxic substances, as well as in gene mapping and in experiments related to space travel. More than 11,000 scientific patents have been linked to them.
In addition to their vast scientific utility, HeLa cells also unexpectedly wreaked havoc across laboratories worldwide by contaminating other cell lines. Because of their extraordinary robustness and rapid growth, HeLa cells often overgrew slower-dividing cultures – or even spread via airborne dust, shared pipettes or unwashed hands – and effectively hijacked what were thought to be entirely different cell types. The scale was astonishing: one review found over 30,000 research articles based on misidentified or contaminated cell lines, many of which can be traced back to HeLa infiltration. As a result, years of research were invalidated, resources wasted, and conclusions drawn from “distinct” cell models have since been questioned – making HeLa contamination one of the most widespread and enduring hidden crises in biomedical science.
Yet while her cells achieved global impact, Henrietta Lacks herself remained largely unrecognised. Her family wasn’t made aware of the cell line’s existence and the ongoing medical research until 1975, when they learned of it during a chance dinner-party conversation. They lived in relative obscurity and poverty, unaware of the crucial role her cells had played in medicine. Moreover, the fact that her tissue was used without her consent—and that profits and scientific gains accrued without her family’s direct benefit – raises profound questions about ethics, race and patients’ rights in research.
Lacks died on 4 October 1951, unaware that her cells would live on to transform medicine and science. In recent years, her legacy has been honoured in a variety of ways: building dedications, school namings, legal agreements giving her family a say in access to the genome, and widespread recognition of her contribution to science and bioethics. And in 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her, as part of its “Overlooked” history project.
Long live HeLa – and this time we literally mean that.
Story Idea: Melanie Giuffré
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