What role did race play in Henrietta’s and her children’s experiences?
This is the story of how cells taken from a black woman without her knowledge became one of the most important advances in medicine and launched a multibillion-dollar industry, with drastic consequences for her family. It’s inextricably linked to the troubling history of research conducted on African Americans without their consent, and many people—particularly African Americans—are hungry to learn Henrietta’s story and how it fits into that history. For decades, the story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells has been held up as “another Tuskegee,” the story of a racist white scientist who realized a black woman’s cells were valuable, stole them from her, then got rich selling them—perhaps even withholding treatment for her cancer in order to be sure the cells would grow. But none of that is true. Henrietta got the standard cervical cancer treatment for the day, and no one knew her cells would be valuable. George Gey gave them away for free and never profited directly from them (they
