The family of Henrietta Lacks has settled their lawsuit against biotech company Thermo Fisher over the continued use of her cells for scientific research.
On Tuesday (August 1), attorneys Ben Crump and Chris Seeger announced the settlement with Thermo Fisher on what would’ve been Lacks’ 103rd birthday, per USA Today.
“Members of the family of Henrietta Lacks and Thermo Fisher have agreed to settle the litigation filed by Henrietta Lacks’ Estate, in U.S. District Court in Baltimore,” the attorneys’ said in a statement. “The terms of the agreement will be confidential. The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement.”
In 1951, Lacks, then 31, was receiving treatment at John Hopkins Hospital for cervical cancer when Dr. George Gey collected a sample of tissue from her tumor without her knowledge or consent. Gey discovered that Lacks’ cells continued to divide and were still viable outside of her body in test tubes, allowing researchers to perform tests on them in a way that had never been done before.
The continued use and study of Lacks’ cells, known as HeLa Cells, led to advances in vaccines, cancer treatments, AIDs research, and more. However, Gey’s extraction left Lacks infertile, Crump said when the lawsuit was filed in 2021. Lacks died the year her tissue was removed with her family unaware of the procedure and its subsequent role in medicine.
“The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history,” the lawsuit stated. “Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism.”
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