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upstart writes:

WHO honours Henrietta Lacks, whose cells changed medicine:

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has honoured Henrietta Lacks, recognising the world-changing legacy of a Black woman whose cancer cells have provided the basis for life-changing medical breakthroughs but were taken without her knowledge or consent.

Researchers took tissues from Lacks’s body when she sought treatment for cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the 1950s, establishing the so-called HeLa cells that became the first ‘immortal line’ of human cells to divide indefinitely in a laboratory.

In recognising Henrietta Lacks, the WHO said it wanted to address a “historic wrong”, noting the global scientific community once hid her ethnicity and her real story.

“WHO acknowledges the importance of reckoning with past scientific injustices, and advancing racial equity in health and science,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “It’s also an opportunity to recognise women – particularly women of colour – who have made incredible but often unseen contributions to medical science.”

Lacks died of cervical cancer at the age of just 31 in October 1951 and her eldest son, 87-year-old Lawrence Lacks, received the award from the WHO at its headquarters in Geneva. He was accompanied by several of her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and other family members.

Henrietta Lacks' story is a fascinating one, the intermixing of the medical and the social, and more. I first learnt about it from the 1997 BBC documentary Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh by Adam Curtis (my favourite documentary maker). I know Oprah was behind a dramatisation too a few years ago.

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