What did doctors fail to tell Henrietta during her treatment? Was it illegal for doctors to take cells from Henrietta without her consent?

Henrietta Lacks was born  Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, and lived until October 4, 1951.

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line, and one of the most important cell lines in medical research.

An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.

Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951.

These cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey, who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still used for medical research.

As was then the practice, no consent was required to culture the cells obtained from Lacks’s treatment.

Neither she nor her family were compensated for the extraction or use of the HeLa cells.

Even though some information about the origins of HeLa’s immortalized cell lines was known to researchers after 1970, the Lacks family was not made aware of the line’s existence until 1975.

With knowledge of the cell line’s genetic provenance becoming public, its use for medical research and for commercial purposes continues to raise concerns about privacy and patients’ rights.

What did doctors fail to tell Henrietta during her treatment?

Her doctors did not tell her that radiation would result in infertility. Her medical record reads, “Told she could not have any more children. Says if she had been told so before, she would not have gone through with treatment.” The radiation ultimately failed as her cancer metastasized throughout her body.

Was it illegal for doctors to take cells from Henrietta without her consent?

Lacks’s cells were harvested in 1951 when it was not illegal to do so without a patient’s permission. But lawyers for her family argued Thermo Fisher Scientific, of Waltham, Massachusetts, continued to commercialize the results long after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.