Henrietta Lacks - Getting the credit she never knew was due

CBS Sunday Morning had the story of Henrietta Lacks, as told by Rebecca Skloot.  Once thing not mentioned during the interview, is Ms. Skloot or the publisher going to compensate the family from some of the profits?

CBS has not put the show video online and who knows, maybe they won't.  http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/sunday/main3445.shtml

The book and research into this poor, unrecognized woman is truly amazing.  As she was dying of cervical cancer in 1951, doctors took some of her cancerous cells to study.  No permission ever given, which was the norm back in those days.  Besides, she was just a grand daughter of slaves who would end up in an unmarked grave.

The cells were propagated by George Otto Gey without Lacks' knowledge or permission (neither she nor her family gave permission) when she died in 1951.[2]  and later commercialized, although never patented in their original form. Then, as now, there was no requirement to inform a patient, or their relatives, about such matters because discarded material, or material obtained during surgery, diagnosis or therapy, was the property of the physician and/or medical institution.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

Notice that the Wikipedia entry for HeLa has no picture of Lacks.  She does have her own entry with photo but the entry about the life that lives on basically speaks to her issue as a legal one.  Perhaps that is right for the Wikipedia, I'd like to see her photo on that page and will try and add it later.

 

Henrietta Lack's cells have continued to live on and be sold for medical research.  They have led to many cures and helped millions, she and her family are just now beginning to get some recognition by history because one Rebecca Skloot has made this her life mission.

From the New York Times 2001 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/17/arts/cells-that-save-lives-are-a-mothe...

Cells That Save Lives Are a Mother's Legacy
By REBECCA SKLOOT
Published: November 17, 2001

Deborah Lacks closed her eyes as a young cancer researcher opened the door of his floor-to-ceiling freezer. She stood clutching the ragged dictionary she uses to look up words like ''DNA,'' ''cell'' and ''immortality.'' When the icy breeze hit her face, she opened her eyes slowly, and stared into a freezer filled with tiny vials of red liquid. ''O God,'' she gasped, ''I can't believe all this is my mother.''

Fifty years ago, when Deborah Lacks was still in diapers, her 30-year-old mother, Henrietta Lacks, lay in a segregated ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The resident gynecologist sewed radium to her cervix in an attempt to knock out the cancer that was killing her. But before he finished, and without telling her, he took a small sample of her tumor and sent it downstairs to Dr. George Gey (pronounced guy), head of tissue culture research at Hopkins. Dr. Gey had spent almost 30 years collecting cancerous human cells and trying to make them grow, but until Ms. Lacks came along, they never did. Though Henrietta died a few months after her radium treatments, her cells are still living today........

For anyone interested, here is what looks like a historical mystery.