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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.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 22 2021, @02:36PM
Far more than enough rights to be a free person. Again, I think this is a mountain out of a molehill and a right that would kill a lot of people.
In this story, the tissues in question would have been outright discarded - greatly reducing any claim Lacks had to the cell line. Second, consider the list of stuff that was discovered/accelerated [wikipedia.org] as a result of that cell line: polio vaccines, HPV vaccines, cancer studies, and results in genetics and biology in space freefall. For example, just pushing along the polio vaccine years ahead, which I think this did, would have reduced polio by millions of cases (even in 1988, polio still caused 350k cases in the wild) and nervous system damage from polio by thousands of cases.