Lawrence Lacks Sr., whose mothers cells were taken without consent, dies at 88

Lawrence Lacks Sr., the last-surviving child of Henrietta Lacks, a hospitalized Black woman whose cancer cells were taken by a doctor without her knowledge and consent in 1951 and were later used in medical experiments — prompting questions about racism and scientific ethics — died Aug. 26 at the Baltimore VA Medical Center. He was 88.

The cause was complications from liver disease, said his son Ron Lacks.

Mr. Lacks, one of Henrietta Lacks’s five children, lived to see his family’s first legal settlement, on Aug. 1, with a biotechnology company that had allegedly profited over the use of the “HeLa” cell line, so called for the first two letters of her first and last names.

The cells have been used in medical breakthroughs over the past seven decades, including on research to develop vaccines for polio and the coronavirus as well as cancer treatments and in vitro fertilization.

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Henrietta Lacks had been a Virginia tobacco farmer with her husband before they moved to Turner Station in Baltimore County in 1941. After she noticed vaginal bleeding, she entered a segregated ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital and was diagnosed with cervical cancer. A doctor reportedly took a sample of her tumor — an invasive procedure — without asking or informing her.

The doctor then gave the sample to a prominent cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who soon discovered that her cells, unlike most, could be reproduced in a laboratory setting, enabling them to be studied indefinitely by scientists.

Henrietta Lacks died at the hospital on October 1951, at age 31. Ron Lacks said his father, who left school at 16 to care for his ailing mother and four younger siblings, was so “traumatized” by seeing the effects of the radiation on his mother “that he didn’t talk about her for years.”

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Mr. Lacks, who went on to a career as a locomotive engineer, recalled Hopkins researchers reaching out to him and other relatives to provide blood samples without making clear they were being used to research Henrietta Lacks’s cells. The family’s medical histories were published in research papers without their knowledge.

A chance encounter by a relative with a medical researcher in the 1970s led the family to start to uncover the truth of what was happening with the cells. The family tried to investigate, Ron Lacks said, but lawyers were either reluctant to take a case that involved a powerful institution like Hopkins or told the family that the statute of limitations had expired.

The story came to wider prominence in 2010 when Rebecca Skloot wrote “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” a book about Henrietta Lacks and her impact on science. The book was adapted into an HBO film in 2017 starring Oprah Winfrey as Deborah Lacks, a daughter of Henrietta.

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No legal challenges were filed until 2021, when the family hired civil rights lawyer Ben Crump to explore lawsuits against biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies that profit from HeLa cells. The first of those cases, against Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific, was settled on undisclosed terms.

The family filed another lawsuit (which remains ongoing) against Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical.

According to a Hopkins publication, “Johns Hopkins has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line. Rather, Johns Hopkins offered HeLa cells freely and widely for scientific research. ... Though the collection and use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells in research was an acceptable and legal practice in the 1950s, such a practice would not happen today without the patient’s consent."

Lawrence Lacks was born in Clover, in rural southern Virginia, on Feb. 6, 1935, and moved with his family to Baltimore County when his father found work at Bethlehem Steel Corp.

After completing his GED, Mr. Lacks served in the Army and worked for various railroads before retiring about 30 years ago as an Amtrak engineer.

— The Washington Post contributed to this report

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