Henrietta Lacks

She shared a room with her nine-year-old first cousin and future husband, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002).

Like most members of her family living in Clover, Lacks worked as a tobacco farmer starting from an early age.

She fed the animals, tended the garden, and toiled in the tobacco fields.

She attended the designated black school two miles away from the cabin until she had to drop out to help support the family when she was in the sixth grade.

Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant; August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951) 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.

Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, to Eliza Pleasant (née Lacks) (1886–1924) and John "Johnny" Randall Pleasant (1881–1969).

She is remembered as having hazel eyes, a small waist, size 6 shoes, and always wearing red nail polish and a neatly pleated skirt.

Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but she was nicknamed Hennie.

When Lacks was four years old in 1924, her mother died giving birth to her tenth child.

Unable to care for the children alone after his wife's death, Lacks's father moved the family to Clover, Virginia, where the children were distributed among relatives.

Lacks ended up with her maternal grandfather, Thomas "Tommy" Henry Lacks, in a two-story log cabin that was once the slave quarters on the plantation that had been owned by Henrietta's white great-grandfather and great-uncle.

In 1935, when Lacks was 14 years old, she gave birth to a son, Lawrence Lacks.

In 1939, her daughter Elsie Lacks (1939–1955) was born.

Both children were fathered by Day Lacks.

Elsie had epilepsy and cerebral palsy and was described by the family as "different" or "deaf and dumb".

On April 10, 1941, David "Day" Lacks and Henrietta Lacks were married in Halifax County, Virginia.

Later that year, their cousin, Fred Garrett, convinced the couple to leave the tobacco farm in Virginia and move to Turner Station, near Dundalk, Maryland, in Baltimore County, so Day could work in Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point, Maryland.

Not long after they moved to Maryland, Garrett was called to fight in World War II.

With the savings gifted to him by Garrett, Day Lacks was able to purchase a house at 713 New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turner Station.

Now part of Dundalk, Turner Station was one of the oldest and largest African-American communities in Baltimore County at that time.

Living in Maryland, Henrietta and Day Lacks had three more children: David "Sonny" Lacks Jr. in 1947, Deborah Lacks (later known as Deborah Lacks Pullum) in 1949 (died 2009), and Joseph Lacks (later known as Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam) in 1950.

Henrietta gave birth to her last child at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in November 1950, four and a half months before she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

Zakariyya believes his birth to be a miracle as he was "fighting off the cancer cells growing all around him".

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.

On January 29, 1951, Lacks went to Johns Hopkins, the only hospital in the area that treated black patients, because she felt a "knot" in her womb.

She had previously told her cousins about the "knot" and they assumed correctly that she was pregnant.

But after giving birth to Joseph, Lacks had a severe hemorrhage.

Her primary care doctor, William C. Wade, referred her back to Johns Hopkins.

There, her doctor, Howard W. Jones, took a biopsy of a mass found on Lacks's cervix for laboratory testing.

Soon after, Lacks was told that she had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix.

Around the same time, Elsie was placed in the Hospital for the Negro Insane, later renamed Crownsville Hospital Center, where she died in 1955 at 15 years of age.

Historian Paul Lurz says that it is possible that Elsie was subjected to the pneumoencephalography procedure, where a hole was drilled into a patient's head to drain fluid from the brain, which was then replaced with oxygen or helium to make it easier to see the patient's brain in X-rays.

Both Lacks and her husband were Catholic.

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.

In 1970, physicians discovered that she had been misdiagnosed and actually had an adenocarcinoma.