WIKIMEDIA, EMWSeveral family members of Henrietta Lacks, the unwitting donor of tumor cells developed into the widely used HeLa cell line, say they were never compensated for the cells. They are now planning to sue Johns Hopkins University, which developed the cell line without Lacks’s permission several decades ago, according to The Baltimore Sun.
“Everyone else is making funds off of Henrietta’s cells,” Lacks’s grandson, Ron Lacks, told the Sun. “I am sure my grandmother is up in heaven saying, ‘Well, what about my family?’”
Johns Hopkins told the newspaper that the institution had never patented nor profited from the cells.
The Lacks story was documented in a book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which highlighted how the paucity of informed consent affected her family. In 2013, family members worked out a deal with the National Institutes of Health for the appropriate sharing of the HeLa genome with researchers. At the time, journalist Rebecca Skloot, who wrote The Immortal Life, told The Scientist that commercialization was discussed during negotiations between the Lackses and the NIH, but that science ...
