Henrietta Lacks Estate Sues Thermo Fisher over HeLa Cell Line

Attorneys for the family seek compensation for the company’s sale of cells cloned from tissue removed without consent by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital 70 years ago.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Attorneys representing the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were cloned, mass produced, and widely used for research after being removed from a tumor on her cervix without her knowledge in 1951, have filed a lawsuit against one of the companies that commercialized the cell line. In the suit, filed today (October 4), they argue that pharmaceutical giant Thermo Fisher Scientific continued to derive commercial benefit from so-called HeLa cells, which have been used in tens of thousands of scientific and medical studies, long after their unethical origins became known.

The attorneys further request that Thermo Fisher compensate the family, and seek a court order obliging the company to obtain the Lacks family’s permission to use the cell line.

“Black people have the right to control their bodies,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family, says in a statement, The ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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