In 1951, a 31-year-old Black woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Before she died, doctors took a sample of her cancer cells without her knowledge or consent. Those cells are still alive today—73 years later—and have been reproducing in laboratories around the world ever since.
Scientists named them "HeLa cells" (using the first two letters of her first and last name), and they quickly discovered something extraordinary: unlike normal human cells that die after dividing a certain number of times, Henrietta's cancer cells were essentially immortal. They could divide indefinitely, doubling every 20-24 hours, making them perfect for medical research.
Here's where it gets wild. HeLa cells have been used in nearly every major medical breakthrough since the 1950s. They were essential in developing the polio vaccine, cancer treatments, AIDS research, gene mapping, cloning, in-vitro fertilization, and even COVID-19 vaccine development. More than 75,000 scientific studies have used HeLa cells.
Scientists have grown approximately 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells—if you weighed all the HeLa cells ever grown, they'd outweigh Henrietta's original body weight thousands of times over. There are likely more HeLa cells alive today than there are cells in any living human being.
But here's the truly disturbing part: Henrietta's family had no idea her cells were being used until 1975—24 years after her death. They found out accidentally when scientists contacted them for blood samples to do more research. Meanwhile, companies had been making billions of dollars selling HeLa cells to researchers worldwide.
Henrietta's family couldn't even afford health insurance, while corporations profited enormously from her cells. Her children didn't understand how their mother's cells could still be alive, with some initially thinking scientists had somehow cloned their mother or brought her back to life in a lab.
The ethical violations don't stop there. In the 1970s, scientists published Henrietta's medical records and her family's genetic information without consent, violating their privacy. Her family's DNA became public knowledge while they struggled financially and had limited access to healthcare themselves.
It wasn't until 2013—62 years after Henrietta's death—that the National Institutes of Health finally reached an agreement with the Lacks family giving them some say in how HeLa cells are used in research. Even today, while some companies have made agreements with the family, there's no requirement to compensate them for the continued use of the cells.
Think about that: one woman's cells, taken without permission, have contributed to countless medical advances and generated billions in profits, while her family received nothing and didn't even know about it for decades. Henrietta Lacks made modern medicine possible, but she never knew it—and her family is still fighting for recognition and compensation today.