On the 70th anniversary ofHenrietta Lacks' death, her surviving family members are suing a pharmaceutical company for using her groundbreaking cells without her consent.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump announced the lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific on Monday, the same day the complaint was filed in Maryland.
Crump shared a similarstatementon his Twitter account.
A rep for Thermo Fisher Scientific did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Known as HeLa cells, they continued to divide and remained viable even outside of her body in test tubes, allowing researchers to share the cell line widely and continue to perform tests. HeLa cells have since contributed to a vast range of medical advancements, including vaccine development, cancer treatments and AIDS research.
Despite the groundbreaking innovations that resulted, the Lacks family has never been compensated for the medical industry’s widespread use of Henrietta’s cell line.
“Thermo Fisher Scientific’s choice to continue selling HeLa cells in spite of the cell lines' origin and the concrete harms it inflicts on the Lacks family can only be understood as a choice to embrace a legacy of racial injustice embedded in the U.S. research and medical systems,” attorney Crump said in a statement. “Black people have the right to control their bodies. And yet Thermo Fisher Scientific treats Henrietta Lacks' living cells as chattel to be bought and sold.
The lawsuit states that white doctors at Johns Hopkins in the 1950sfrequently experimented on Black women with cervical cancer, removing tissue samples from patients' cervixes without their knowledge or consent.
Courtesy HBO.
“At several points across those decades, we found that Johns Hopkins could have — and should have — done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks' family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests,” the Johns Hopkinswebsitestates. “We are deeply committed to the ongoing efforts at our institutions and elsewhere to honor the contributions of Henrietta Lacks and to ensure the appropriate protection and care of the Lacks family’s medical information.”
source: people.com
