February 6, 2013 • 23 mins
Did the medical community wrongfully exploit the Lacks family? Listen in to learn how John Hopkins Hospital got a hold of Henrietta Lacks' "immortal" HeLa cells, how these cells transformed modern medicine and more.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And as part of our celebration
of Black History Month, we wanted to talk about a
woman whose name has come up in a number of
(00:24):
listener emails that we have gotten requesting that we talk
about her, and someone who we absolutely need to talk about,
not just because it's Black History Month, but because we
have her to think for a lot of modern medical
conveniences and practices, and that is Henrietta Lax. Yeah, who
(00:48):
was Henrietta Lax? Caroline? Henrietta Lax was a black woman
from Virginia who in nine one was diagnosed with terminal
server call cancer stage one epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix.
She had felt for a couple of years uh and
not in her lower stomach, but she didn't go to
(01:11):
the doctor. And one day after after bleeding, she she
did go to Johns Hopkins, which was the only medical
facility in the area who would treat black people, and
when she saw the doctor, they found that she had
the cervical cancer and that it was growing incredibly fast.
Once she was diagnosed. She actually died six months later. Yeah,
(01:33):
she was only thirty one years old. And um, she
came from a very poor background. She was raised by
her grandfather on a tobacco farm. She was a granddaughter
of slaves. She married David Lax, had the five kids,
and died from the cervical cancer. But before she died,
a sample was taken from that those cervical cancer of
(01:59):
the cervical cancer cells um. And the thing about cervical
cancer at the time was that the pap smere had
just been created, and cervical cervical cancer was incredibly difficult
to diagnose and with pretty much any patient, any female
patient who was being admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital at
the time. They were having samples taken because a team
(02:21):
of doctors, doctor George Gay and Margaret Gay, they were
husband and wife team. They wanted tissue cultures of the
cervical cells because they were looking for a line of
human cells that would live indefinitely outside the body in
order to study cancer. And the incredible thing about what
(02:42):
happened with the sample from Henrietta Lacks was that it
did not like almost all of the other previous samples.
Dr Gay had taken quickly die in culture. For the
most part um normal cells grown outside the body um
would divide about fifty times and then they die. And
(03:02):
doctors had figured out how to grow cells outside the
body in nineteen o seven. So you know this is
they've been trying to figure this out for a while.
And then all of a sudden, Henry Alax's cells grow
like crazy. Yeah, they were doubling every twenty four hours.
And doctor Gay could not believe his eyes. He he
(03:24):
actually started sending the HeLa cells as they became known
to any scientists interested in cancer research. So all of this,
like we said, he never asked Henriette A. Lax. He
never told her this was going to happen. They just
took a sample of the cancer cells and her healthy
cervical cells, and once they saw how fast they reproduced
(03:45):
and that they were so strong, they figured they had
hit the jackpot. Yeah. In October four ninety one, Henriette A.
Lax dies. The same day this doctor Gay goes on
national television holding vial of HeLa cells and says, quote,
it is possible that from a fundamental study such as this,
(04:06):
we will be able to learn why a way in
which cancer can be completely wiped out. So the you know,
at this point, they don't care about Henrietta lacks, like
the whole thing of patient privacy and bioweapics that does
not exist in medical practice at the time. All they're
looking for is a way to use these cells that
(04:27):
are reproducing an incredible rate, to inject them with different
strains of cancer or inject them with different viruses, just
essentially to see how they operate. And because HeLa cells
are so incredibly vibrant and grow so much, they've become
used around the world for an insane amount of experiments
(04:51):
that lead to enormous breakthrough is one of the first
huge breakthroughs. For instance that HeLa cells were used for
was a polio vaccine. Yeah, incredible. Well, the family finally
gets involved twentysothing years later. They did not find out
that lacks of cells are being used all over the
world until nine, by which point the HeLa cells had
(05:13):
become standard reference cells and few molecular scientists hadn't worked
with them. So after gay success with the cells, all
of a sudden, culturing cells becomes suspiciously easy, and there's
this doctor who starts spreading what they just think is
a rumor at the time that Henrietta cells had basically
(05:34):
infected every other culture, and it turns out that they
kind of had. Her cells had traveled through the air
on hands or on the tips of pipe's overpowering any
cell cultures they encounter because all of a sudden, you know,
like Christen said earlier, it was so hard to keep
these cells alive in the lab, and now all of
a sudden, they're having a lot of luck with it.
(05:55):
And so basically to accept or reject this whole chaos theory,
they needed the family, and it just so happened that
the family had just learned about Henrietta cells being you know,
in labs and used around the world. So the family
had been calling Johns Hopkins. Nurses and doctors went to
the Lax family in Virginia gathered blood samples from the
(06:18):
children that would determine important information about Henrietta, like her
blood type that they could use to study her cells.
The family, however, thought they were being tested for cancer
for the same genes that Henrietta had, and the doctors
never got back to them about the tests. So this
is like ethics one oh one awful all around on
all sides. Yeah, and not to mention um. You know,
(06:40):
at this point the Lax family, uh still is not
wealthy by any means. Um. A lot of them couldn't
afford to even go to a doctor at that point,
Um and the hell of cells had made a lot
of people very rich because by that point the vials
of their mother's cells are being sold for twenty five
(07:01):
dollars a vile and um listen, listen to this quote.
One scientist estimates that if you could pile all the
HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more
than fifty million metric tons, an inconceivable number given what
an individual cell weighs. Another scientists calculated that if you
could lay all HeLa cells ever grown into ind they'd
(07:21):
wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more
than three hundred and fifty million feet. And that is
coming from the book The Immortal Life of Henry Henrietta Lax,
written by Rebecca Sclute, who was a science writer who
spent ten years uncovering the mystery of HeLa cells and
trying to to speak to the Lax family about their mother,
(07:45):
find out what they could about who this woman was,
who essentially is responsible for an incredible number of medical breakthroughs.
But it took Sclute so long to even get in
contact with the Lax family because they felt that they
had been so taken advantage of by the medical community
(08:06):
and by other journalists who had come in and just
wanting to um kind of sensationalize the whole thing and
continue to to use them while they, you know, just
didn't didn't know. They had no idea that that there
that their mothers and their their wife, their grandmother's cells
had even been taken from her in the first place. Right, Yes,
(08:26):
sclutes book definitely won't help the portion of the public
who don't trust physicians and scientists already. Um Ruth Faden,
who's the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Bioethics Institute said,
and that this was in that Johns Hopkins magazine article
that Kristen mentioned, said that the story is a sad
commentary on how the biomedical research community thought about research
(08:49):
in the nineteen fifties. But she says it was not
at all uncommon for physicians to conduct research on patients
without their knowledge or consent, and even now, I mean
there are pieces of all of us kind of floating
around places. Well, it was so um uh eye opening
as well too when you when you think about the
(09:10):
mentality of where these doctors were coming from. They they
were it wasn't a bad thing that they were looking
for a cure for cancer, but a lot of times,
you know, maybe that pursuit of science overlooked the human
side of things. Um. The lab assistant Mary Cuba Sek,
who was the person who actually took the took a
(09:30):
sample from Henrietta Alax after she had died. Um She
says that she she walked in and saw Alex's corpse
and noticed red tonnail polish on her, and she told
Rebecca Scleute, who was that author of the Immortal Life
of Henrietta Alax. She told Scout that when I saw
those tonails, I nearly fainted and I thought, O ge
s She's a real person. And that's why the story
(09:54):
is so important, is because there is a a human
side to it. I mean. On on the plus side
of things is thanks to HeLa cells, we do have
the incredible ripple effect of things, including the modern field
of virology, biological supplies industry, blood type identification, genetic hybrids, cloning,
live cell transport, space biology. HeLa cells were the first
(10:17):
to go up in space nanotechnology, bio ethics, the HPV
vaccine um and speaking of ethics, Carolina in nineteen sixty six,
listen to this, after a scientist injects HeLa cells into
unwitting test subjects to see how cancer grows, a National
Institute of Health investigation leads to the institution of medical
review boards of for informed consent by patients. And that
(10:42):
came from Wired magazine, an infographic over there by Aaron
Biba talking about ethics and just the whole industry of
what has come out of basically is stealing too strong
word taking these women's cells without permission. UM In nineteen
fifty or uh, the for profit distribution of HeLa cells began.
(11:05):
That's also when the microbio Biological Associates begins mass producing
the cells. And nowadays it's big business. We have genetic medicine,
genomic science, and bioengineering that are becoming bit bigger fields.
And while John's Hopkins specifically has never sold licensed or
patented HeLa cells, a number of commercial firms do. UM
(11:28):
In that article, the Johns Hopkins magazine article that we
talked about. Uh. They point out that the term bio
bank has entered the lexicon. For instance, this is basically
a living database of human cells used for research, um
and they've been created, they're they're everywhere now, and they've
been created by a wide range of groups, everything from
disease advocacy groups to commercial research companies and academic centers
(11:53):
and back in so I'm sure it's even higher now.
But back in, the Rand Corporation estimated that there were
three hundred and seven point one million human tissue samples
stored in various repositories throughout the US well. And one
of the most controversial aspects of the Henriette lect story
is the fact that her cells profited so many people
(12:16):
in these these new biomedical industries that popped up, and
yet her family didn't benefit monetarily from it at all.
But at the same time, Uh, there's an article in
Johns Hopkins magazine about this, talking about how, uh you
get into very dice a territory when you open up
(12:37):
the potential for people to profit from their own cell
or their own tissue samples and donating their own like
say blood or organs or any you know, because then
you create a market, and then you might create a
difficult network where things might get backlogged because you have
to process payments and pay people and um. It seems
(13:01):
like the bigger issue is more a thing of patient
privacy and also how the Henrietta Lack story is just
one chapter as well in African American patients in particular
in the United States being taken advantage of by the
medical community. There are a number of dark chapters in that.
(13:23):
For instance, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was initiated in
nineteen thirty two, which took place among four hundred men
who intentionally were not treated for cyphilis just to see
what would happen just among like four hundred black men.
And they were tartted because they were in a you know,
more vulnerable community who who wouldn't have had as much
of a say in things. Yeah, men wanted to researchers
(13:45):
wanted to observe how the disease progressed differently in black people.
In its late stages, the men were actually told they
were being treated for bad blood, but they never received treatments.
So not only are these men being exploited, but they
were also lied to and in nineteen seventy where there
was a ten million dollar settlement where the government agreed
to provide lifetime medical benefits and burial burial services to
(14:06):
all of the living participants. But that's not all. I mean,
it goes way back. We've talked about Jay Mary and
Sims in our gynecology episode, he did gynecological surgery and
experiments on enslaved black women. Uh. And in eighteen fifty five,
escaped slave John fed Brown recalled that the doctor to
(14:30):
whom he had been indentured actually produced blisters on his
body to see how deep my black skin went. So
there was just this idea of performing experiments and surgeries
on black people because they were the other. Yeah, they
weren't as valued as say a white patient. And um,
A lot of this is detailed in Henrietta Washington's book
(14:51):
Medical Apartheid. Um. She also talks about how, uh, black
Floridians in the early nineteen fifties were deliberately exposed to
storms of mosquitoes carrying allow fever and other diseases and
experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA. I mean,
it's it's horrific when you when you start to just
itemize these things. And in a way, the Henrietta Lax
story is far more benign because it was a tissue
(15:15):
sample that was being taken from you know, all the
patients who were coming in with cervical cancer at the time.
Um um and it but it just it speaks to
so many different things like privacy violations, not just the
money but also privacy violations. For instance, in nineteen seventy,
Science published a paper detailing an analysis of blood drawn
(15:37):
from Debora Lax was Henrietta's daughter, and forty three genetic
markers found in the lax Is DNA that could not
happen today that kind of information um would not be
would be illegal to publish. Well in the Lax family
was abused again because someone gave Henrietta's medical records to
(15:59):
journalist Michael Gold, who quoted them in his So yeah,
I just this family has been through a lot. And
you know you mentioned earlier the danger in the question
of payment for for these tissues and organs and cells,
(16:19):
and the ethicist argument is basically the common good model.
So no, we definitely shouldn't be paid for our tissues
because in their model the payoff is not in dollars,
but in better medicine in the future. So you don't
ate your blood now, you don't ate your tissues now,
and in the future will have better medical care. But
Fade and Ruth Faden, who we mentioned earlier, says that
(16:40):
there's a problem with that. She says that in the
absence of guaranteed access to a decent level of medical care,
the moral justification for that structure breaks down, and that yeah,
and and that medical care access is an important point
in the Lack story because one thing that Rebecca's sclute
brings up over and over again, not just in the book,
(17:00):
but in her interviews about the book um was how
the family had medical needs that they weren't able to
attend to. The reason why Henrietta Lax died so quickly
following her diagnosis of terminal cervical cancer was because she
could not even afford to go to the nearest charity hospital,
(17:21):
which was Johns Hopkins at the time. And so you
wonder if, uh, you know, what would happen if if
there were broader healthcare access for everyone. I mean, again
on the upside, like thanks to HeLa cells, we have
drugs for herpes leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, Parkinson's disease, et cetera.
But um, it's uh, there's so much attached to that
(17:46):
that we need to pay attention to. But the cool
thing about Rebecca Sclute, who you know really really took
this story and broadcast it to the world, is that
she and just write her book and say, oh, I
got a bestseller. This is fantastic my life school thanks
(18:06):
Lacks family, she um established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to
at least pay some of it forward to the family. Yeah,
And as of January nine, the foundation had awarded thirty
six grants to members of Henrietta Lacks's immediate family, twenty
three for tuition and books, eight for medical and dental aid,
(18:28):
and two for other emergency needs. And Sclute says that
she first envisioned the foundation as one for education, but
it's helped family members get a lot of other benefits,
and some of those are a high tech hearing aid
from one of Henrietta's sons, truck repairs for another, new
teeth for a granddaughter, braces for a great granddaughter, tuition,
books and fees for five grandchildren and great grandchildren, and
(18:50):
a granddaughter was able to study nursing UM. And on
February eighth, two thousand eleven, Virginia State lawmakers did pass
a resolution honoring Henrietta Lacks, and the statute says, um,
it's quote an honor of all who have ever faced
discrimination and exploitation and her amazing legacy which is altered
medical research and care and relieved the suffering of untold millions.
(19:15):
And people may be wondering what Johns Hopkins has done,
if anything, uh, to sort of you know, make amends
basically for what happened to Henrietta and her family. They
have established a lecture series in her name, a ten
thousand dollar a year scholarship for students from an East
Baltimore High school, and a fifteen thousand dollar annual award
for community health groups. And many people connected to Johns
(19:39):
Hopkins have privately supported the family. So while it um,
it's a distressing tale, certainly, um, but it does have
a brighter ending than the beginning. Say that, because as
much as the family was, you know, abused and lied to,
and as unfortunate as it was that they never got
(19:59):
permission to take the cells from Henrietta, the fact remains
that her cells have benefited science and medicine, and you
know in so many different experiments. We have so many
different medicines now because of her UM and again UM,
if you want to learn more about it, highly recommend
(20:21):
the book UM, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by
Rebecca Scalute. That's s K l o O T. And
if you've read the book or UM, if you have
any thoughts on the subject, of course, you can send
us an email Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, and
we're going to get to a couple of your letters. Well,
(20:44):
we've got a couple of letters here for you about
mother's law. And the first one comes from Brad, who
kicks off his email by talking about how his wife
initially friend zoned him, which was funny, but guess what
now they're married, happy, ending to the friend zone story
see and friends that you can't get out of the
friend zone just goes to show, asked Brad, but he writes,
(21:05):
moving on to mother's in law, Mine is awesome. I
actually get along way better with her than with my
father in law, who's fine, just very said his way. Sometimes.
She's a librarian and very crafty, which works very well
with my love of reading and creating stuff. We live
across the country from her, and I actually wish that
they live closer so I could see her more than
once every year or two. My wife even jokes that
(21:27):
in a divorce, my in laws would take me and
let her go. I think that's adorable. Okay. I have
a slightly less adorable but still interesting letter from Liz
on mother in law's She says, I am blessed with
the marvelously sweet, kind and unobtrusive mother in law, while
my poor husband has a monster in law and the
(21:48):
person of my mother. She's meddlesome, opinionated, and any time
we visit, she orders him around like her own personal houseboy.
She's also incredibly clingy, resenting it if on our visits
we attempt to spend even a few minutes absorbed in
private tasks like reading, or if we try to go
out for a drink at night without her. My husband
once said to me that your mother is what God
had in mind when he created mothers in law. My
(22:10):
mother has been divorced from my father for fifteen years
and hasn't had any relationships since. My husband's parents, on
the other hand, were high school sweethearts and say that
they are more in love now than they ever have been.
So I wonder if the flavor of one's mother or
a monster in lawness, is it all related to one's
happiness in their own relationships. Perhaps mothers in law who
are satisfied in their own marriages don't find the need
(22:31):
to dissect or butt into their children's marriages. Mothers in
law who are not in happy relationships perhaps see their
children's relationships as a way to have a do over.
I'd be curious to know if anyone else has experienced
something similar, So y'all should write into our Facebook page
and tell Liz if you have had similar experiences. I
(22:52):
have a feeling there's some there's some meat to that theory?
Is meat to that theories? Phrase? Maybe I feel like
there's a pork chop curiot there sounds delicious. Well, while
I'm busy making up nonexistent phrases, you can feel free
to write us a letter mom Stuff and Discovery dot com,
or send us a message on Facebook like us stare.
(23:14):
While you're at it, you can follow us on Twitter
at mom Stuff Podcast. You can even follow us on
Tumbler at stuff. I've never told you dot tumbler dot com.
And if you want to learn more about Henrietta Lacksta
cells HeLa cells, you can read how HeLa cells Work
at our website, it's how stuff works dot com. For
(23:37):
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And as part of our celebration
of Black History Month, we wanted to talk about a
woman whose name has come up in a number of
(00:24):
listener emails that we have gotten requesting that we talk
about her, and someone who we absolutely need to talk about,
not just because it's Black History Month, but because we
have her to think for a lot of modern medical
conveniences and practices, and that is Henrietta Lax. Yeah, who
(00:48):
was Henrietta Lax? Caroline? Henrietta Lax was a black woman
from Virginia who in nine one was diagnosed with terminal
server call cancer stage one epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix.
She had felt for a couple of years uh and
not in her lower stomach, but she didn't go to
(01:11):
the doctor. And one day after after bleeding, she she
did go to Johns Hopkins, which was the only medical
facility in the area who would treat black people, and
when she saw the doctor, they found that she had
the cervical cancer and that it was growing incredibly fast.
Once she was diagnosed. She actually died six months later. Yeah,
(01:33):
she was only thirty one years old. And um, she
came from a very poor background. She was raised by
her grandfather on a tobacco farm. She was a granddaughter
of slaves. She married David Lax, had the five kids,
and died from the cervical cancer. But before she died,
a sample was taken from that those cervical cancer of
(01:59):
the cervical cancer cells um. And the thing about cervical
cancer at the time was that the pap smere had
just been created, and cervical cervical cancer was incredibly difficult
to diagnose and with pretty much any patient, any female
patient who was being admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital at
the time. They were having samples taken because a team
(02:21):
of doctors, doctor George Gay and Margaret Gay, they were
husband and wife team. They wanted tissue cultures of the
cervical cells because they were looking for a line of
human cells that would live indefinitely outside the body in
order to study cancer. And the incredible thing about what
(02:42):
happened with the sample from Henrietta Lacks was that it
did not like almost all of the other previous samples.
Dr Gay had taken quickly die in culture. For the
most part um normal cells grown outside the body um
would divide about fifty times and then they die. And
(03:02):
doctors had figured out how to grow cells outside the
body in nineteen o seven. So you know this is
they've been trying to figure this out for a while.
And then all of a sudden, Henry Alax's cells grow
like crazy. Yeah, they were doubling every twenty four hours.
And doctor Gay could not believe his eyes. He he
(03:24):
actually started sending the HeLa cells as they became known
to any scientists interested in cancer research. So all of this,
like we said, he never asked Henriette A. Lax. He
never told her this was going to happen. They just
took a sample of the cancer cells and her healthy
cervical cells, and once they saw how fast they reproduced
(03:45):
and that they were so strong, they figured they had
hit the jackpot. Yeah. In October four ninety one, Henriette A.
Lax dies. The same day this doctor Gay goes on
national television holding vial of HeLa cells and says, quote,
it is possible that from a fundamental study such as this,
(04:06):
we will be able to learn why a way in
which cancer can be completely wiped out. So the you know,
at this point, they don't care about Henrietta lacks, like
the whole thing of patient privacy and bioweapics that does
not exist in medical practice at the time. All they're
looking for is a way to use these cells that
(04:27):
are reproducing an incredible rate, to inject them with different
strains of cancer or inject them with different viruses, just
essentially to see how they operate. And because HeLa cells
are so incredibly vibrant and grow so much, they've become
used around the world for an insane amount of experiments
(04:51):
that lead to enormous breakthrough is one of the first
huge breakthroughs. For instance that HeLa cells were used for
was a polio vaccine. Yeah, incredible. Well, the family finally
gets involved twentysothing years later. They did not find out
that lacks of cells are being used all over the
world until nine, by which point the HeLa cells had
(05:13):
become standard reference cells and few molecular scientists hadn't worked
with them. So after gay success with the cells, all
of a sudden, culturing cells becomes suspiciously easy, and there's
this doctor who starts spreading what they just think is
a rumor at the time that Henrietta cells had basically
(05:34):
infected every other culture, and it turns out that they
kind of had. Her cells had traveled through the air
on hands or on the tips of pipe's overpowering any
cell cultures they encounter because all of a sudden, you know,
like Christen said earlier, it was so hard to keep
these cells alive in the lab, and now all of
a sudden, they're having a lot of luck with it.
(05:55):
And so basically to accept or reject this whole chaos theory,
they needed the family, and it just so happened that
the family had just learned about Henrietta cells being you know,
in labs and used around the world. So the family
had been calling Johns Hopkins. Nurses and doctors went to
the Lax family in Virginia gathered blood samples from the
(06:18):
children that would determine important information about Henrietta, like her
blood type that they could use to study her cells.
The family, however, thought they were being tested for cancer
for the same genes that Henrietta had, and the doctors
never got back to them about the tests. So this
is like ethics one oh one awful all around on
all sides. Yeah, and not to mention um. You know,
(06:40):
at this point the Lax family, uh still is not
wealthy by any means. Um. A lot of them couldn't
afford to even go to a doctor at that point,
Um and the hell of cells had made a lot
of people very rich because by that point the vials
of their mother's cells are being sold for twenty five
(07:01):
dollars a vile and um listen, listen to this quote.
One scientist estimates that if you could pile all the
HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more
than fifty million metric tons, an inconceivable number given what
an individual cell weighs. Another scientists calculated that if you
could lay all HeLa cells ever grown into ind they'd
(07:21):
wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more
than three hundred and fifty million feet. And that is
coming from the book The Immortal Life of Henry Henrietta Lax,
written by Rebecca Sclute, who was a science writer who
spent ten years uncovering the mystery of HeLa cells and
trying to to speak to the Lax family about their mother,
(07:45):
find out what they could about who this woman was,
who essentially is responsible for an incredible number of medical breakthroughs.
But it took Sclute so long to even get in
contact with the Lax family because they felt that they
had been so taken advantage of by the medical community
(08:06):
and by other journalists who had come in and just
wanting to um kind of sensationalize the whole thing and
continue to to use them while they, you know, just
didn't didn't know. They had no idea that that there
that their mothers and their their wife, their grandmother's cells
had even been taken from her in the first place. Right, Yes,
(08:26):
sclutes book definitely won't help the portion of the public
who don't trust physicians and scientists already. Um Ruth Faden,
who's the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Bioethics Institute said,
and that this was in that Johns Hopkins magazine article
that Kristen mentioned, said that the story is a sad
commentary on how the biomedical research community thought about research
(08:49):
in the nineteen fifties. But she says it was not
at all uncommon for physicians to conduct research on patients
without their knowledge or consent, and even now, I mean
there are pieces of all of us kind of floating
around places. Well, it was so um uh eye opening
as well too when you when you think about the
(09:10):
mentality of where these doctors were coming from. They they
were it wasn't a bad thing that they were looking
for a cure for cancer, but a lot of times,
you know, maybe that pursuit of science overlooked the human
side of things. Um. The lab assistant Mary Cuba Sek,
who was the person who actually took the took a
(09:30):
sample from Henrietta Alax after she had died. Um She
says that she she walked in and saw Alex's corpse
and noticed red tonnail polish on her, and she told
Rebecca Scleute, who was that author of the Immortal Life
of Henrietta Alax. She told Scout that when I saw
those tonails, I nearly fainted and I thought, O ge
s She's a real person. And that's why the story
(09:54):
is so important, is because there is a a human
side to it. I mean. On on the plus side
of things is thanks to HeLa cells, we do have
the incredible ripple effect of things, including the modern field
of virology, biological supplies industry, blood type identification, genetic hybrids, cloning,
live cell transport, space biology. HeLa cells were the first
(10:17):
to go up in space nanotechnology, bio ethics, the HPV
vaccine um and speaking of ethics, Carolina in nineteen sixty six,
listen to this, after a scientist injects HeLa cells into
unwitting test subjects to see how cancer grows, a National
Institute of Health investigation leads to the institution of medical
review boards of for informed consent by patients. And that
(10:42):
came from Wired magazine, an infographic over there by Aaron
Biba talking about ethics and just the whole industry of
what has come out of basically is stealing too strong
word taking these women's cells without permission. UM In nineteen
fifty or uh, the for profit distribution of HeLa cells began.
(11:05):
That's also when the microbio Biological Associates begins mass producing
the cells. And nowadays it's big business. We have genetic medicine,
genomic science, and bioengineering that are becoming bit bigger fields.
And while John's Hopkins specifically has never sold licensed or
patented HeLa cells, a number of commercial firms do. UM
(11:28):
In that article, the Johns Hopkins magazine article that we
talked about. Uh. They point out that the term bio
bank has entered the lexicon. For instance, this is basically
a living database of human cells used for research, um
and they've been created, they're they're everywhere now, and they've
been created by a wide range of groups, everything from
disease advocacy groups to commercial research companies and academic centers
(11:53):
and back in so I'm sure it's even higher now.
But back in, the Rand Corporation estimated that there were
three hundred and seven point one million human tissue samples
stored in various repositories throughout the US well. And one
of the most controversial aspects of the Henriette lect story
is the fact that her cells profited so many people
(12:16):
in these these new biomedical industries that popped up, and
yet her family didn't benefit monetarily from it at all.
But at the same time, Uh, there's an article in
Johns Hopkins magazine about this, talking about how, uh you
get into very dice a territory when you open up
(12:37):
the potential for people to profit from their own cell
or their own tissue samples and donating their own like
say blood or organs or any you know, because then
you create a market, and then you might create a
difficult network where things might get backlogged because you have
to process payments and pay people and um. It seems
(13:01):
like the bigger issue is more a thing of patient
privacy and also how the Henrietta Lack story is just
one chapter as well in African American patients in particular
in the United States being taken advantage of by the
medical community. There are a number of dark chapters in that.
(13:23):
For instance, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was initiated in
nineteen thirty two, which took place among four hundred men
who intentionally were not treated for cyphilis just to see
what would happen just among like four hundred black men.
And they were tartted because they were in a you know,
more vulnerable community who who wouldn't have had as much
of a say in things. Yeah, men wanted to researchers
(13:45):
wanted to observe how the disease progressed differently in black people.
In its late stages, the men were actually told they
were being treated for bad blood, but they never received treatments.
So not only are these men being exploited, but they
were also lied to and in nineteen seventy where there
was a ten million dollar settlement where the government agreed
to provide lifetime medical benefits and burial burial services to
(14:06):
all of the living participants. But that's not all. I mean,
it goes way back. We've talked about Jay Mary and
Sims in our gynecology episode, he did gynecological surgery and
experiments on enslaved black women. Uh. And in eighteen fifty five,
escaped slave John fed Brown recalled that the doctor to
(14:30):
whom he had been indentured actually produced blisters on his
body to see how deep my black skin went. So
there was just this idea of performing experiments and surgeries
on black people because they were the other. Yeah, they
weren't as valued as say a white patient. And um,
A lot of this is detailed in Henrietta Washington's book
(14:51):
Medical Apartheid. Um. She also talks about how, uh, black
Floridians in the early nineteen fifties were deliberately exposed to
storms of mosquitoes carrying allow fever and other diseases and
experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA. I mean,
it's it's horrific when you when you start to just
itemize these things. And in a way, the Henrietta Lax
story is far more benign because it was a tissue
(15:15):
sample that was being taken from you know, all the
patients who were coming in with cervical cancer at the time.
Um um and it but it just it speaks to
so many different things like privacy violations, not just the
money but also privacy violations. For instance, in nineteen seventy,
Science published a paper detailing an analysis of blood drawn
(15:37):
from Debora Lax was Henrietta's daughter, and forty three genetic
markers found in the lax Is DNA that could not
happen today that kind of information um would not be
would be illegal to publish. Well in the Lax family
was abused again because someone gave Henrietta's medical records to
(15:59):
journalist Michael Gold, who quoted them in his So yeah,
I just this family has been through a lot. And
you know you mentioned earlier the danger in the question
of payment for for these tissues and organs and cells,
(16:19):
and the ethicist argument is basically the common good model.
So no, we definitely shouldn't be paid for our tissues
because in their model the payoff is not in dollars,
but in better medicine in the future. So you don't
ate your blood now, you don't ate your tissues now,
and in the future will have better medical care. But
Fade and Ruth Faden, who we mentioned earlier, says that
(16:40):
there's a problem with that. She says that in the
absence of guaranteed access to a decent level of medical care,
the moral justification for that structure breaks down, and that yeah,
and and that medical care access is an important point
in the Lack story because one thing that Rebecca's sclute
brings up over and over again, not just in the book,
(17:00):
but in her interviews about the book um was how
the family had medical needs that they weren't able to
attend to. The reason why Henrietta Lax died so quickly
following her diagnosis of terminal cervical cancer was because she
could not even afford to go to the nearest charity hospital,
(17:21):
which was Johns Hopkins at the time. And so you
wonder if, uh, you know, what would happen if if
there were broader healthcare access for everyone. I mean, again
on the upside, like thanks to HeLa cells, we have
drugs for herpes leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, Parkinson's disease, et cetera.
But um, it's uh, there's so much attached to that
(17:46):
that we need to pay attention to. But the cool
thing about Rebecca Sclute, who you know really really took
this story and broadcast it to the world, is that
she and just write her book and say, oh, I
got a bestseller. This is fantastic my life school thanks
(18:06):
Lacks family, she um established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to
at least pay some of it forward to the family. Yeah,
And as of January nine, the foundation had awarded thirty
six grants to members of Henrietta Lacks's immediate family, twenty
three for tuition and books, eight for medical and dental aid,
(18:28):
and two for other emergency needs. And Sclute says that
she first envisioned the foundation as one for education, but
it's helped family members get a lot of other benefits,
and some of those are a high tech hearing aid
from one of Henrietta's sons, truck repairs for another, new
teeth for a granddaughter, braces for a great granddaughter, tuition,
books and fees for five grandchildren and great grandchildren, and
(18:50):
a granddaughter was able to study nursing UM. And on
February eighth, two thousand eleven, Virginia State lawmakers did pass
a resolution honoring Henrietta Lacks, and the statute says, um,
it's quote an honor of all who have ever faced
discrimination and exploitation and her amazing legacy which is altered
medical research and care and relieved the suffering of untold millions.
(19:15):
And people may be wondering what Johns Hopkins has done,
if anything, uh, to sort of you know, make amends
basically for what happened to Henrietta and her family. They
have established a lecture series in her name, a ten
thousand dollar a year scholarship for students from an East
Baltimore High school, and a fifteen thousand dollar annual award
for community health groups. And many people connected to Johns
(19:39):
Hopkins have privately supported the family. So while it um,
it's a distressing tale, certainly, um, but it does have
a brighter ending than the beginning. Say that, because as
much as the family was, you know, abused and lied to,
and as unfortunate as it was that they never got
(19:59):
permission to take the cells from Henrietta, the fact remains
that her cells have benefited science and medicine, and you
know in so many different experiments. We have so many
different medicines now because of her UM and again UM,
if you want to learn more about it, highly recommend
(20:21):
the book UM, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by
Rebecca Scalute. That's s K l o O T. And
if you've read the book or UM, if you have
any thoughts on the subject, of course, you can send
us an email Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, and
we're going to get to a couple of your letters. Well,
(20:44):
we've got a couple of letters here for you about
mother's law. And the first one comes from Brad, who
kicks off his email by talking about how his wife
initially friend zoned him, which was funny, but guess what
now they're married, happy, ending to the friend zone story
see and friends that you can't get out of the
friend zone just goes to show, asked Brad, but he writes,
(21:05):
moving on to mother's in law, Mine is awesome. I
actually get along way better with her than with my
father in law, who's fine, just very said his way. Sometimes.
She's a librarian and very crafty, which works very well
with my love of reading and creating stuff. We live
across the country from her, and I actually wish that
they live closer so I could see her more than
once every year or two. My wife even jokes that
(21:27):
in a divorce, my in laws would take me and
let her go. I think that's adorable. Okay. I have
a slightly less adorable but still interesting letter from Liz
on mother in law's She says, I am blessed with
the marvelously sweet, kind and unobtrusive mother in law, while
my poor husband has a monster in law and the
(21:48):
person of my mother. She's meddlesome, opinionated, and any time
we visit, she orders him around like her own personal houseboy.
She's also incredibly clingy, resenting it if on our visits
we attempt to spend even a few minutes absorbed in
private tasks like reading, or if we try to go
out for a drink at night without her. My husband
once said to me that your mother is what God
had in mind when he created mothers in law. My
(22:10):
mother has been divorced from my father for fifteen years
and hasn't had any relationships since. My husband's parents, on
the other hand, were high school sweethearts and say that
they are more in love now than they ever have been.
So I wonder if the flavor of one's mother or
a monster in lawness, is it all related to one's
happiness in their own relationships. Perhaps mothers in law who
are satisfied in their own marriages don't find the need
(22:31):
to dissect or butt into their children's marriages. Mothers in
law who are not in happy relationships perhaps see their
children's relationships as a way to have a do over.
I'd be curious to know if anyone else has experienced
something similar, So y'all should write into our Facebook page
and tell Liz if you have had similar experiences. I
(22:52):
have a feeling there's some there's some meat to that theory?
Is meat to that theories? Phrase? Maybe I feel like
there's a pork chop curiot there sounds delicious. Well, while
I'm busy making up nonexistent phrases, you can feel free
to write us a letter mom Stuff and Discovery dot com,
or send us a message on Facebook like us stare.
(23:14):
While you're at it, you can follow us on Twitter
at mom Stuff Podcast. You can even follow us on
Tumbler at stuff. I've never told you dot tumbler dot com.
And if you want to learn more about Henrietta Lacksta
cells HeLa cells, you can read how HeLa cells Work
at our website, it's how stuff works dot com. For
(23:37):
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
how stuff works dot com
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