For decades, the story of Henrietta Lacks has carried a painful contradiction: cells taken from her body helped transform modern medicine, yet the Black woman behind them died poor and unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now, more than 70 years later, her estate has reached a settlement with pharmaceutical giant Novartis — ending a lawsuit that accused the company of profiting from a medical system that historically exploited Black patients like Lacks.
It’s the second settlement in a series of legal battles brought by the Lacks family, which argues that biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms built fortunes from Lacks’ cells while her descendants struggled with chronic illness and limited access to health care.
Terms of the agreement, announced Monday, were not publicly disclosed. But the case underscores a larger reckoning in American medicine: the long history of research practices that used Black bodies without consent — and the question of who benefits from the scientific breakthroughs that followed.
Dr. Uché Blackstock, a physician and health equity advocate, says the exploitation of Lacks was so pervasive that even she used HeLa cells during her medical training at Harvard Medical School without knowing their origins.
“I used those cells without knowing they came from Henrietta Lacks or that her cells were taken without consent,” Blackstock said.
The settlement with Novartis “is a step toward accountability and a reminder that medical progress should never be built on exploitation,” said Blackstock, an emergency physician, author and founder of Advancing Health Equity, a consulting firm.
The woman whose cells changed science
Lacks was just 31 when she died of cervical cancer in 1951.
A tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, she had moved with her husband to Turner Station, a historically Black community outside Baltimore, where the couple was raising five children. When she noticed a knot in her abdomen, Lacks sought treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital — at the time the only hospital in the region that treated Black patients.
Doctors there discovered a malignant tumor on her cervix. During a biopsy, physicians removed a sample of her cancer cells. Like countless other patients of the era, Lacks was never told the tissue would be used for research.
The birth of an “immortal” cell line
What happened next would change the course of medical science.
Unlike most human cells, which die quickly outside the body, Lacks’ cells survived and multiplied in laboratory dishes. Scientists soon realized they could reproduce them indefinitely, making them the first human cell line capable of continuous growth.
Known as HeLa cells — derived from the first letters of her name — the cells became one of the most important tools in biomedical research. They helped scientists unlock discoveries about cancer biology and genetic mapping and were instrumental in developing the polio vaccine.
Researchers later used them to study HIV, Ebola and tuberculosis, and the cells even traveled aboard early space missions. More recently, HeLa cells contributed to research behind COVID-19 vaccines.
The scale of their impact is staggering. By 2011, researchers estimated that more than 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells had been produced and used in over 60,000 scientific studies worldwide.
A family kept in the dark
Yet for decades, the Lacks family knew nothing about the role Henrietta’s cells played in science — or the profits generated by companies producing and distributing them.
That story became widely known after journalist Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, a bestselling book that explored both the science behind HeLa cells and the family’s struggle to understand how Henrietta’s tissue had reshaped medicine. Oprah Winfrey later portrayed Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks, in an HBO adaptation of the book.
The lawsuits filed by the Lacks estate argue that companies using HeLa cells benefited from a medical system that, during the Jim Crow era, routinely treated Black patients’ bodies as resources to be exploited without consent or compensation.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the family, said the settlements represent at least a measure of long-overdue accountability.
“For the family and her grandchildren, this is certainly justice because people said they would never realize any benefit or compensation from her immortal HeLa cells, even though these pharmaceutical companies were profiting billions and billions of dollars,” Crump told The New York Times.
But, he added, no settlement can undo what happened.
“If it was truly justice, none of this would have happened to Henrietta Lacks,” Crump said. “She wouldn’t have been the victim of medical racism at Johns Hopkins. But you can pray to get some measure of justice, to offer respect and dignity to the life that was taken.”
For the Lacks family — and for many advocates in Black communities — the settlements represent something beyond a financial agreement. They are another step in an ongoing effort to confront the legacy of medical racism and ensure that the people whose bodies advance science are treated with dignity, consent and fairness.
More than seven decades after her death, Henrietta Lacks’ cells are still alive in laboratories around the world — and her story continues to reshape the ethics of medicine.