Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951)

FROSTBITE GREEN_square block.jpg — Henrietta Lacks has become a symbol in science not even known by her true name

Voice of Thackray Curator, Laura Sellers

All of the people I’ve written about so far in the historical health heroes series were people who had careers in medicine - they made the choice to be there and to have an impact on medicine. Today I’m writing about Henrietta Lacks, someone whose contribution to medicine cannot be underestimated but who had no choice to be involved.

Henrietta’s story

Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia in 1920. The reason for her name change to Henrietta is unrecorded. Brought up by her grandfather after her mother’s death, Henrietta worked on the family tobacco fields. She was married to David Lacks (known as Day), was a house wife, had 5 children, 3 sons (David Jr, Lawrence and Joseph) and 2 daughters (Elsie and Deborah).

When she was 21, Henrietta, Day and their children moved to Baltimore. This move would allow Day to get better paid work during the Second World War. Henrietta cared for the house and the children, and regularly took them home to visit the rest of the family. She was an excellent cook, loved blues music and dancing.

“bein’ with her was like bein’ with fun” - henrietta’s cousin, Sadie.

Cancer diagnosis

In January, Henrietta went to John Hopkins Hospital with a “knot” in her womb. She’d been experiencing pain before she’d had her son Joseph but after his birth it was worse. She found a lump on her cervix. She went to see her doctor who referred her to hospital, the Lacks had to travel 20 miles to John Hopkins because it was the only hospital in the area that treated black patients. Like many other black people in America, the Lacks avoided hospitals unless necessary, it was the Jim Crow era and hospitals were a foreign world. Henrietta had ‘epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, stage 1’ but it is unclear if this was ever explained to her.

Like many researchers of the time, Henrietta’s doctors used patients on the public wards for research (usually without their knowledge). It was generally accepted that because these patients didn’t pay for their care, they were fair game for research purposes. Consequently, hospitals in poor and/or predominantly black areas of America has “no dearth of clinical material.”

Treatment

After her biopsy and diagnosis Henrietta returned to hospital and started her cancer treatment. As was common at the time she was treated with radium. Whilst undergoing the surgery to sew radium to the cervix, tissue samples were taken without permission. The first radium treatment seemed to have been successful, the tumour had gone. A second round was applied to ensure no cancer cells remained. But when Henrietta got her period, she did not stop bleeding. She returned to John Hopkins for radiation therapy where beams of radiation were fired at the cervix. This probably made her extremely ill, but her records show she was more upset about becoming infertile which had not been explained to her before the treatment.

Henrietta Lack’s cells have been used in more scientific research than I could ever list.

The treatment was brutal, the skin of her breasts and abdomen was charred black and she became very weak. Pain spread throughout her body. Although doctors didn’t find anything at first, a stoney mass appeared on her pelvis, but it was decreed ‘inoperable’. Tumours sprang up all over her body, the radiation treatment continued to try and reduce them. She returned to hospital and more cells were taken at the request of the lab - unknown to Henrietta and her family still.

Life after death

When Henrietta died in August 1951, scientists had already spent decades trying to keep human cells alive in cultures - they hadn’t succeeded.

**For some reason, Henrietta’s cells not only survived in a petri dish, but they reproduced every 24 hours or so, and didn’t stop. They were the first immortal cells grown in a lab.**

They were called “HeLa cells” (taking the first two letters of her first and last name) and Henrietta’s name and story was pretty much forgotten.

The miracle cells were soon shared with other scientists and labs across America and then further afield. Henrietta’s cells have been used in their trillions in labs around the world (and are worth millions if not billions of dollars).

These cells have helped researchers looking at cancer, lactose digestions, STI’s, appendicitis, and the cellular effects of working in different environments. They’ve helped create drugs for herpes, leukaemia, depression, influenza, haemophilia and Parkinson’s. Henrietta Lack’s cells have been used in more scientific and medical research than I could ever list.

Closing thoughts

Henrietta has become a symbol in science not even known by her true name. As we go through this pandemic and the protests currently happening in the USA as a result of George Floyd’s murder, I think we need to think about symbols. Floyd has become a symbol of oppression and to some degree rightly so, but we also need to remember the individuals and the lives they led.

Hero is usually a word which comes with choice - you choose to put yourself in a certain position and risk potentially sacrificing something to put other’s needs above yourself. I don’t have an alternative word for people like Henrietta Lacks or George Floyd whose sacrifice was not their choice.

We need heroes and we need symbols, but we must also remember the individuals. It matters that Henrietta Lacks had a name and it matters that she, George Floyd, and countless others had a life worth celebrating. In their deaths they become symbols for more than they perhaps ever could in life, but that doesn’t mean their lives were worth sacrificing.