“It’s a Way of Reparations”: Why Henrietta Lacks Settlement Matters for Bioethics & Racial Justice
By Amy Goodman,
Democracy Now!
| 08. 07. 2023
The family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose cells were taken by Johns Hopkins University Hospital without her consent in 1951, has reached a deal over the unethical use of her cells with pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher Scientific. Henrietta Lacks’s family has denounced the racist medical system that allowed the biotech company to make billions in profit from the “HeLa” cell line, which helped produce remedies for multiple diseases, including the first polio vaccine. Details of the settlement were not made public, but the plaintiffs celebrated the lawsuit’s resolution last Tuesday, on Henrietta Lack’s birthday. For more on the case and the history of medical racism in the United States, we speak with Dorothy Roberts, director of the University of Pennsylvania Program on Race, Science and Society. She is the author of several books, including Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. “What happened to Henrietta Lacks didn’t just happen to her. It’s part of a long history of experimentation and exploitation of Black people in biomedical research,” says Roberts... see more
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni, STAT | 08.17.2023
When someone says the word embryo, what do you think of? Probably that picture you’ve seen a thousand times on a thousand different news articles: a translucent orb swelling with cytoplasm being prodded by a microinjection needle under the light...
By Clarence Williams, The Washington Post | 08.10.2023
The heirs of Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman who died in the 1950s and whose cells have been reproduced for decades in scientific research, filed suit Thursday in Baltimore federal court alleging that a pharmaceutical company profited from using cells...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 08.09.2023
Twenty-five years ago, in 1998, researchers in Wisconsin isolated powerful stem cells from human embryos. It was a fundamental breakthrough for biology, since these cells are the starting point for human bodies and have the capacity to turn into any...
By Stav Dimitropoulos, proto.life | 08.03.2023
Imagine a not-so-distant future, when a 60-year-old man named John Doe goes to the doctor to replace a faulty gene or insert a whole new gene into his body—something that cures his diabetes, for instance. This is no pipe dream. ...