On April 10, 1941, David "Day" Lacks and Henrietta Lacks were married in Halifax County, Virginia. Elsie had epilepsy and cerebral palsy and was described by the family as "different" or "deaf and dumb". Both children were fathered by Day Lacks. In 1939, her daughter Elsie Lacks (1939–1955) was born. In 1935, when Lacks was 14 years old, she gave birth to a son, Lawrence Lacks. She attended the designated black school two miles away from the cabin until she had to drop out to help support the family when she was in the sixth grade. She fed the animals, tended the garden, and toiled in the tobacco fields. Like most members of her family living in Clover, Lacks worked as a tobacco farmer starting from an early age. She shared a room with her nine-year-old first cousin (their mothers were sisters) and her future husband, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002). Lacks ended up with her maternal grandfather, Thomas "Tommy" Henry Lacks, in a two-story log cabin that was once the slave quarters on the plantation that had been owned by Henrietta's white great-grandfather and great-uncle. Unable to care for the children alone after his wife's death, Lacks's father moved the family to Clover, Virginia, where the children were distributed among relatives. When Lacks was four years old in 1924, her mother died giving birth to her tenth child. Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but she was nicknamed Hennie. She is remembered as having hazel eyes, a small waist, size 6 shoes, and always wearing red nail polish and a neatly pleated skirt. Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, to Eliza Pleasant (née Lacks) (1886–1924) and John "Johnny" Randall Pleasant (1881–1969). With knowledge of the cell line's genetic provenance becoming public, its use for medical research and for commercial purposes continues to raise concerns about privacy and patients' rights. Neither she nor her family were compensated for the extraction or use of the HeLa cells.Įven though some information about the origins of HeLa's immortalized cell lines was known to researchers after 1970, the Lacks family was not made aware of the line's existence until 1975. As was then the practice, no consent was required to culture the cells obtained from Lacks's treatment. These cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey, who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still used for medical research. Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day. Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant Aug– October 4, 1951) was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman (born Joseph Lacks)Įliza (1886–1924) and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969) Visit Huntsman Cancer Institute’s Cancer Learning Center to learn how you can check out The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and find more resources about cancer.Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School historical marker at Clover, Virginia It also considers the ethical dilemmas of using patient cells without knowledge or consent, the way race played a part in how Lacks was treated, and the impact on her family decades later. The book introduces us to the woman who helped change modern medicine. Previously, very few people knew the source of HeLa cells. The acclaimed nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells Henrietta Lacks’s cancer story and the revolutionary research, ethical questions, and racism wrapped up in the use of her cells. HeLa enabled the development of in vitro fertilization, the first clone of a human cell, the development of the polio vaccine, advances in gene mapping, and more. Named after the first two letters of her first and last name, HeLa cells were used in many different medical experiments because they could be grown so easily in the lab. Gey grew the cells continuously in the lab, something that had never been done before. Because of a mutation, her cells were able to survive and reproduce outside the body. Lacks’s cells ended up in the lab of cell biologist Dr. The cells were taken without Lacks’s knowledge or consent. Her doctor took two biopsies, one of cancer cells and one of healthy cells. In 1951, a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital to have a doctor look at a “knot” in her womb, which turned out to be cervical cancer.
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