Cobra Effect · Evidence in medicine
The cells that would not stop growing
How one woman's cells changed medicine, and the question of consent they raised.
7 cards, read aloud in 3:04, with a test and sources.
In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
She was a Black woman living near Baltimore, a mother of five, about thirty years old. Johns Hopkins was one of the few hospitals in the area that treated Black patients then. During her treatment, doctors took samples of her tumour. Nobody asked her permission. At the time, that was normal practice.
In a laboratory, her cells did what no human cells had done before.
George Gey had spent years trying to keep human cells alive and growing outside the body. Samples usually died within days. These cells kept dividing, doubling in number about once a day. The cell line was named HeLa, from the first letters of her names.
Henrietta Lacks died in October 1951, but her cells lived on.
Gey shared them with other researchers, and they spread to laboratories around the world. For the first time, scientists could repeat experiments on the same human cells, again and again. Before long, HeLa cells were being grown in enormous numbers.
HeLa cells helped test the polio vaccine.
Polio virus grows well in them, so they could show whether blood from vaccinated children could block the virus. A laboratory at the Tuskegee Institute produced them by the million for testing. Since then, HeLa cells have been used to study cancer, viruses, genes and much more.
For years, her family did not know that her cells were still alive.
They found out in the 1970s, when researchers contacted them. HeLa cells had become a vital tool, sold by companies, while her family struggled to pay for their own medical care. In 2010, the writer Rebecca Skloot told their story in a best selling book. In 2023, the family settled a lawsuit with a company that had sold HeLa cells.
In 2013, the question of consent came up again.
Scientists in Germany posted the genetic code of HeLa cells online, without asking the family. A genome can reveal things about a person’s living relatives too. The data was taken down, and that August the family reached an agreement with the US National Institutes of Health. Two family members now sit on a panel that decides who may use the full genome data.
So when research uses people, ask whether they were asked.
The rules of 1951 did not require consent, and Henrietta Lacks was never told. Her cells have helped bring medical advances that benefit millions. Both things are true at once. Research keeps people’s trust only when it asks, explains and shares what it learns.
Sources
- The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks, Johns Hopkins Medicine. The hospital’s own account of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells.
- Decades After Lacks’ Death, Family Gets A Say On Her Cells, NPR. The 2013 agreement over who may use the HeLa genome.
- Family matters, Nature. The journal’s editorial on the 2013 agreement with the Lacks family.
Nearby ideas
- Nearly two million children and a fair test. How a vast, blinded trial showed the polio vaccine worked, and why checking went on.
- The reviewer who asked for more. How one reviewer's demand for better evidence kept thalidomide off American shelves.
- Twelve sailors and a fair test. How a fair test at sea pointed to a remedy for scurvy, decades before the Navy acted.
- The doctors who tracked smoking. How two doctors showed smoking causes lung cancer without a single experiment.
- The first public operation under ether. How a public test in Boston made painless surgery believable.