Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks (August 18, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was the involuntary donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. This is now known as the HeLa cell line.

Early life
She was born as Henrietta Pleasant on August 18, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia to Eliza (1886–1924) and John Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969). Eliza died giving birth to her tenth child in 1924. Sometime after his wife's death, John Pleasant took the children back to where their relatives on their mother's side lived, and where they were raised. In 1929, a 48 year old John, still living in Roanoke at 12th Street Southwest, married a 13 year old girl named Lillian. John worked as a brakeman on the railroad.

Later life
Henrietta Pleasant married David Lacks I (1915–2002) in Halifax County, Virginia. After requesting and convincing her husband, David Lacks, to go north to search for work, Henrietta  Lacks  and the children followed. David found work at the Sparrow's Point shipyards and found a house for them on New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turners Station. This community was one of the largest and one of, if not, the youngest of the approximately fifty historically African American communities in Baltimore County, Maryland. In 1943 Henrietta moved to Turners Station now a part of Dundalk, Baltimore County, Maryland. The couple had five children: Deborah Lacks (born 1948) who married a Pullum; David Lacks II; Lawrence Lacks; Zakariyya Lacks; and another daughter Her last child was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in November of 1950. On February 1, 1951, and just days after a march for a cure for polio in New York city, according to Michael Rogers of the Detroit Free Press and the Rolling Stone Magazine, Mrs. Henrietta Lacks  went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because of a vaginal discharge. That day she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was treated but died on October 4, 1951 at the age of thirty-one. Mrs. Henrietta Lacks was buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery in Lackstown where she was raised. Lackstown is located in the city of Clover in Halifax County, Virginia. Lackstown is the name of the land that has been held by the Lacks' family since they received it from the family whom they were slaves and also descendants of. "Lax" was at first the name of this family. Later the Lax family changed  their  last name to "Lacks". Mrs. Henrietta Lack's mother has the only tombstone of the five graves in the family cemetery in Lackstown.

HeLa's immortality and Lacks' mortality
The HeLa cells were cultured while Lacks was receiving treatment for cervical cancer. Her cancer was metastasizing abnormally rapidly, vastly faster than any other cancer the physicians had seen. Most accounts agree that neither she nor her husband were asked about the cultivation of her cells, or their future use. Her husband was consulted after her death and told that a sample of the cells could be studied with the goal of possibly isolating genetic factors and preventing cancer deaths in future generations. He was not told about the scope of research and the family did not learn of it until twenty-five years later. Today, HeLa cells are still commonly used in research laboratories as a model for human cells.

There was, then as now, no necessity to inform a patient, or their relatives, about such matters because discarded material, or material obtained during surgery, diagnosis or therapy was the property of the physician or medical institution. This was brought up in the Supreme Court of California case of John Moore v. the Regents of the University of California. The court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized without permission or recompense.

The HeLa cell line was originally cultured due to its tremendous proliferation rate, abnormally rapid even compared to other cancer cells. While it was this remarkably speedy proliferation which sealed Henrietta Lacks' fate, the cell line has since been used in thousands of biological experiments, contributing to the understanding of disease processes. HeLa was used in Jonas Salk's development of the vaccine for polio. The cells allowed Salk to produce large amounts of virus in his laboratory. The word "HeLa" was devised by Gey by using the first two letters of Lacks' first and last names to keep her real name a secret. This worked for a while and some thought that the human source of HeLa was "Harriet Lane", "Helen Lane", and others.

Her name was finally released, although it is not clear who released it. Her picture with her name under it appeared in a journal article in 1971. Her family members said that none of them had given anyone the picture. The 1971 article reported that she had been misdiagnosed with the slower-metastasizing epidermoid carcinoma, when in reality she had adenocarcinoma, a fast-metastasizing cancer even in strains lacking the unique characteristics which made Lacks' strain of cancer so virulent. The article also reiterated previous statements that the misdiagnosis would not likely have affected her chances of survival; by the oncological standards of the day, a cancer as fast-moving as hers would have likely been terminal regardless of the diagnosis.

According to anthropologist Hannah Landecker in Culturing Life: How Cells Became  Technologies (2007), in "Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science" in  Science in Context,1999,  and  in a chapter of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics  (2000)) , narratives on Mrs. Lacks   and HeLa have changed over time.  In the earlier 1950s  narratives Lacks was portrayed as  the "angelic", "beneficent" , "heroic" and "self-sacrificing" donor of HeLa  HeLa was considered to be a "standard" or a "universal" and  Mrs. Lacks was "assumed to be white" (2000,64)

After 1966 when it was found that HeLa was contaminating other cell lines (2007, 171),  and after her gender and  race were also discovered,  the following adjectives, nouns, and phrases increased in the narratives, "voracious","vigorous", "aggressive", "malicious", "malevolent", "malignant", "surreptitious", "indefatigable", "renegade", "catastropic", "luxuriant", "undeflatable", "contaminating", "promiscuity", "wild proliferative tendencies,"'colorful' laboratory life", "a monster among the Pyrex". Some wrote about "world domination by HeLa" or HeLa  taking over the world. Landecker ,in addition, writes about narratives that "took on a racial grammar of miscegenation and heredity pollution", and  HeLa cells as "racialized threats to scientific order".

Next in the 1980s and 1990s economic  and "monetary" considerations began to be stressed and there was a focus on "economic injustice". "economic exploitation", economic value, and "economic power and privilege." Three inclinations however persist in these narratives over time, inclinations (1) to emphasize  HeLa's immortality, (2) to "obscure" (2007, 171) and "mask" (2007,64) Lacks' death or misdiagnosis (3) to use her photographs, "as was the case"  with   the tissue from a biopsy as well,  "without any indication that permission was sought or given for its use, either from Lacks or her family". (2000, fn 61,264). Landecker states further that "Although it is difficult to say whether  an accurate diagnosis  of adenocarcinoma would have helped in Lack's treatment", what was evident to her was a "total absence of questioning of the circumstances and adequacy  of her medical treatment --- even with the  clearly stated admission of misdiagnostic error published in 1971"  among scientists and journalists. To Landecker this "absence of questioning... indicates the power of the concepts of immortality produced by the life of these cells." The "death of a person who was Henrietta Lacks has been obscured  by the personification  of her cells as an immortal entity".(2000,55)

Legacy
HeLa has been recognized as a contributor to medical research and public health. Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia recognized the late Henrietta Lacks' family for her and HeLa's contributions and for their and her sacrifices. In 1997, following Morehouse's lead, and after contact with those making a film on HeLa and the Lacks, Turners Station, which is again the home of African American community industrial workers, their families and their descendants and where the Lacks resided on February 1, 1951, recognized her and her family, and have done so annually ever since. The Dundalk Eagle published the first article on her in a newspaper in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and continues to announce upcoming local commemorative activities. Robert Ehrlich then a member of the House of Delegates in the US Congress and later a governor of Maryland,  placed a resolution recognizing her in the Congressional Record on June 4, 1997.

Helacyton gartleri
One biologist, Leigh Van Valen, has written that Lacks' cancer cells have evolved into a self-replicating, single-cell life-form and has proposed HeLa cells be given the new species name of Helacyton gartleri. The cells are a genetic chimera of human papillomavirus 18 (HPV18) and human cervical cells and now have a distinct, stable, non-human chromosome number. His 1991 suggestion has not been followed, nor, indeed, been widely noted. With near unanimity, evolutionary scientists and biologists hold that a chimeric human cell line is not a distinct species, and that tumorigenesis is not an evolutionary process.