Litigation focused on scientific breakthroughs and profits made on cells extracted without Lacks’s consent.

Descendants of Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman whose cells have been central to decades of important scientific breakthroughs, settled litigation with a biotechnology company that had allegedly profited from the cells despite knowing that they were extracted from her without her consent, attorneys for both parties said.

Terms of the litigation, filed against Thermo Fisher Scientific, were not released.

The parties released the same statement:

“Members of the family of Henrietta Lacks and Thermo Fisher have agreed to settle the litigation filed by Henrietta Lacks’ Estate in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The terms of the agreement will be confidential. The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment.”

A settlement conference had been scheduled for Monday, according to federal court records.

The litigation had accused Thermo Fisher of using Lacks’s cells without approval from or payment to her family members — thus depriving them of billions of dollars and “the knowledge that a loved one’s body has been treated with respect.”

The dispute originated in what the lawsuit called a “racially unjust medical system.”

“Her cells were robbed from her body,” one of the family’s attorneys, Ben Crump, said at a news conference Tuesday morning, what would have been Lacks’s 103rd birthday.

Lacks was only 31 and an East Baltimore mother of five when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. While being treated in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a doctor took a sample of her tumor without her consent and gave it to a research team.

The team soon discovered the cells in her sample had a remarkable ability to grow outside the human body, opening up a universe of medical research. Johns Hopkins shared the “HeLa” cells with other researchers; vaccines for polio to covid-19 were developed with these cells, as were cancer treatments, in vitro fertilization.

Neither Lacks nor her family knew any of this. She died soon after her diagnosis on Oct. 4, 1951.

In 2013, German scientists sequenced Lacks’s genome.

For decades, they struggled to carry on without their mother. One of her daughters, Elsie, who was disabled, was institutionalized and died at 15 years old in 1955. In the 1970s, two decades after Lacks’s death, members of her family started getting strange phone calls from researchers requesting blood samples. Their medical histories were published in research papers without their knowledge. One night, at a dinner party, a guest asked family members if they were related to the source of the famous HeLa cells. That’s how they found out cells from their mother were still alive all over the world.

The family’s saga was recounted in the best-selling book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Lacks’s daughter Deborah Lacks Pullum worked closely with author Rebecca Skloot and was played by Oprah Winfrey in the movie of the same name. Lacks Pullum died in 2009.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/08/01/henrietta-lacks-settlement-cells/