Henrietta Lacks
Wikimedia CommonsWhen Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins for cancer treatment, she unwittingly made a tremendous contribution to science.
In 1951, a poor black mother of five named Henrietta Lacks saved the world without even knowing it.
Lacks had visited Johns Hopkins Hospital for a checkup after noticing a lump near her cervix. Her doctor took a biopsy and regretfully informed Lacks that she had cervical cancer — the lump was a tumor. Treatment in the 50s was nowhere near what it is today and Lacks’s options were limited.
As Lacks’s condition worsened, her doctor noticed a strange thing while he was studying her tissue sample. The cells in the samples he had collected from other patients died off so quickly he was unable to study them but Lacks’s cells continued to multiply at an incredible rate.
Unfortunately, this abnormality also meant that the cancer cells were multiplying faster than the treatment could kill them. Seven months after seeking help at Johns Hopkins, Henrietta Lacks died.
National Portrait GalleryHenrietta Lacks’ portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
Yet Henrietta Lacks’s cells lived on. To the shock of all the doctors at Johns Hopkins, Lacks’s cells seemed impossible to kill and were growing at an unprecedented rate.
The doctors sent samples to medical professionals all over the country, eager to get their input and see what the cells could do for them. One of those professionals was Jonas Salk and he used Lacks’s cells to create the polio vaccine.
With Henrietta Lacks’s cells, dozens of medical breakthroughs were made possible. Among them were the HPV and polio vaccines, an early-stage Zika virus vaccine, the Human Genome Project (which created a fine-tuned map of the human genome), discoveries about cell aging, and the creation of the field of virology.
Henrietta Lacks never knew what she had contributed to the world of medicine, as her tissue sample was taken and distributed without her or her family’s consent — a practice that was common at the time but has since raised ethical questions about the lab’s actions.
Though the moral uncertainty surrounding her treatment casts a shadow over the story, there can be no doubt that Henrietta Lacks deserves a place on the very short list of people who have saved the world.
