Henrietta Lacks

The estate of Henrietta Lacks sued a biotechnology company on Monday, accusing it of selling cells that doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took from the Black woman in 1951 without her knowledge or consent as part of “a racially unjust medical system.”

SENECA FALLS, N.Y. (AP) — “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin and Nobel laureate and “Beloved” author Toni Morrison will be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame Thursday as part of a posthumous class of Black honorees that also includes Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were widely used in biomedical research; Barbara Hillary, the first […]

Henrietta Lacks passed away 67 years ago, but legacy lives on within the medical community. Her “HeLa” cells are the first immortal cell line and have been studied to produce vaccines and various forms of research. Born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1940 in Roanoke, Va., Lacks worked as a tobacco farmer as a teenager […]

Just go ahead and give Oprah Winfrey her Emmy now.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Oprah Winfrey is expanding her participation in HBO’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” to an on-screen role. The cable channel said Monday that Winfrey will star in the TV movie that she’s been shepherding as an executive producer. The film is based on Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction book of the same […]

NEW YORK (AP) — Some 60 years ago, a doctor in Baltimore removed cancer cells from a poor black patient named Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent. Those cells eventually helped lead to a multitude of medical treatments and laid the groundwork for the multibillion-dollar biotech industry. It’s a saga made famous by the […]