The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Despite what the family of Henrietta Lacks has endured, they are proud to honor the her memory and her unparalleled contributions to science and medicine. Their message is positive, optimistic, and—above all—celebrates Henrietta’s life and legacy. This presentation offers a sincere first-person perspective on the collision between ethics, race, and the commercialization of human tissue.

Members of the Lacks family shares with audiences what it meant to find out—decades after the fact—that Henrietta’s cells were used in laboratories around the world, bought and sold by the billions. Henrietta Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells, taken without her knowledge in 1951, went on to become the first immortal human cells ever grown in the laboratory. Those cells, named HeLa, became one of the most important tools in modern medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Though Henrietta died in 1951, her cells—alive and growing to this day—are still the most widely used cell line in the world.