BALTIMORE (AP) – The family of a Maryland woman who unwittingly started a research gold mine in 1951 when her cancer cells were removed without her knowledge has hired a prominent civil rights attorney to seek redress from drug companies.
Henrietta Lacks’ relatives have hired Ben Crump, a Florida-based attorney who has represented the families of a number of blacks who have died at police and vigilante groups in recent years. These customers include the families of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and Breonna Taylor.
The Baltimore Sun reported Thursday that an attorney for the Lacks family said a legal team is investigating lawsuits against numerous potential defendants
Cells made from lacquer have been widely used in biomedical research. The so-called HeLa cells became crucial for key developments in areas such as basic biology, understanding viruses and other germs, cancer treatments, in vitro fertilization and vaccine development.
She became famous in 2010 with the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”.
As can be seen from that book, one day in 1951, Lacks was under anesthesia on an operating table at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, being treated for cervical cancer. A researcher had collected cervical cancer cells to see if they would grow continuously in the laboratory. The surgeon who treated Lacks shaved a piece of tissue from her tumor for this project. Nobody had asked Lacks if she wanted to make cells available for research. She died later that year.
Bioethicists have said that it was common at the time to take cells without a patient’s permission.
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