What Are 5 Things That You Now Know About Henrietta Lacks and Her Role in Science?
Story highlights
- A book published in 2010 brought frontward Henrietta Lacks' story
- Tissue removed from her neck led to significant scientific discovery
(CNN)Her story took decades to become known. It was 1 Henrietta Lacks never realized was coming.
Cells taken in 1951 from Lacks, who would dice later that aforementioned yr from an ambitious grade of cervical cancer, lived on and changed the world. Those cells, cut from her cervix by a surgeon without her noesis (not against protocol at the time), became the kickoff human cell line to reproduce outside the body. Known as HeLa cells, combining the outset two messages of her names, they multiplied. Her cells became an invaluable tool for researchers and transformed what's been possible in medicine.
Her cells brought u.s.a. the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization and factor mapping. They've immune for advances in cancer treatment, AIDS research, cloning, stem-cell studies and then much more than. They traveled to the moon to test the effects of zero gravity, and scientists accept sold and purchased them by the billions.
A New York Times all-time-selling book by Rebecca Skloot, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," introduced Lacks -- and what she did for medicine -- to the world in 2010. An HBO film past the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey, volition premiere Saturday at 8 p.thousand. ET. HBO and CNN accept the same parent company, Time Warner.
Lacks, a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, was but 31 when she died. She left backside a husband, five children and a legacy her descendants carry on.
"It'south been an amazing journey, but the most incredible aspect of it all is to watch the Lacks family have this experience and proceed this ride with them," Skloot, the book author, said days before the film's premiere. "They're going out and changing the world. This is their story now."
'Who we are'
Every bit a young girl growing up in Baltimore, Veronica Robinson, a smashing-granddaughter of Henrietta Lacks, heard murmurs about cells. What she overheard didn't register or make sense. She didn't understand that there was something special -- something different -- about her family unit until Skloot started coming around.
The book took 10 years to write. In the early years, Robinson, now 30, said she and others figured the author was working on some science book that would collect dust on bookish shelves. Along the way, that perception inverse.
"Rebecca took usa on a journeying and taught united states of america so much of who we are," Robinson said.
Her great aunt, the late Deborah Lacks (played past Winfrey in the picture show) worked closely with Skloot. The experience for Robinson'southward grandfather, Henrietta Lacks' son, was more than fraught. Lawrence Lacks was Henrietta's oldest and he had memories his sister didn't.
"He had to get back to the grave, dig up his mother again and relive that hurt," Robinson said. "Just we're stronger than ever and trying to proceed the family tight."
Robinson is amidst those who derive strength in continued service to the family unit legacy. She sits at tables and stands before audiences that would have been unimaginable to her bang-up-grandmother, who was treated in the "colored ward" of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Robinson serves on a National Institutes of Health board that oversees the HeLa genome sequencing data. She is the executive manager of the Henrietta Lacks HeLa Legacy Foundation, which helps support families undergoing medical crises and hopes to someday open a museum.
A split up foundation, The Henrietta Lacks Foundation, was established by Skloot to help support the Lacks family unit, which never benefited financially from the HeLa cells that brought others fame and fortune.
Merely as her great-grandmother'due south cells traveled to assist others, so has Robinson. She visits universities, libraries, conventions and corporations to share the story of Henrietta Lacks and her groundbreaking cells. In doing so, she fights to break downward barriers and inspire others.
"Sometimes bad things happen to good people so great things tin can happen," she said. "The Lacks family unit unknowingly became the family face up of medicine. We correspond people who don't ordinarily have voices."
Robinson, who once began nursing school, only left to help care for her grandmother, said she plans to return to schoolhouse soon. She'd similar to finish what she started, she said.
But that's non all.
Robinson said she plans to go through in vitro fertilization, an option made possible because of her great-grandmother, who not only saves lives but also gives life.
More than a cell
Already a registered nurse is Robinson's older sis, Victoria Baptiste, 35.
She'due south been intrigued by the medical field ever since she occasionally helped care for her great-gramps David Lacks, Henrietta's husband. He had diabetes, and she learned every bit a five-year-old girl how to give him his insulin.
"It gave me an inclination to help people," said Baptiste, who has two teenagers. "I had no thought virtually the legacy of Henrietta."
She was working as a medical assistant, before going to nursing schoolhouse, when the magnitude of her peachy-grandmother's contributions came to low-cal.
"It was mind-blowing," Baptiste said, and it merely solidified her career goals. "This is my path. This is what I'thou supposed to do."
On the task at University of Maryland Medical Center, she sees advocating for her patients as her biggest responsibleness. She wants patients to understand their options, get answers to their questions and be aware of what's happening to them.
When she speaks around the country with her sister and other family members, Baptiste often focuses on the importance of advocating for loved ones and, whenever possible, advocating for oneself.
She offers and encourages the kind of support she wishes her great-grandmother could have received.
"She wasn't just a cell," Baptiste says of Henrietta Lacks. "She was a adult female and a female parent before she was a HeLa jail cell."
A purpose and a vox
Long earlier the book or movie, the Lacks family was in the dark about the game-changing cells. In fact information technology took 20 years, after Henrietta Lacks' death, for them to acquire about the HeLa cells. Her contribution to the world was first a secret to them and then, for decades more, a complicated mystery.
Jeri Lacks Whye'southward father is David "Sonny" Lacks Jr., Henrietta'southward heart kid.
Whye, 47, grew up knowing her grandmother died of cancer, merely she didn't know what type. Later she'd hear that her grandmother's cells helped find the polio vaccine and that they "went upward into space," she said. Just information technology was Skloot's volume that opened her family's eyes and immune them to fully merits their rich history.
She's not the type to gravitate to public speaking, but Whye said she's been inspired to button herself and share what her family has learned. When she travels to speak in schools or at pharmaceutical companies, Whye likes to remind people that they all have purpose -- whether they know what it is correct at present or not.
Her grandmother, Whye learned, was caring, giving, hospitable. She looked out for others. Who Henrietta Lacks was in life was only magnified in death.
"She made the impossible possible," Whye said. "Her purpose was to save lives."
It was her aunt Deborah'southward purpose, in helping Skloot, to make sure Henrietta's story was known. Deborah died in 2009, before the volume was published. It's on the residue of the family to make sure the story is told and not forgotten.
"If she was living," Whye says of her grandmother, "I know she'd be proud of what'due south taking place."
The oldest of Whye's ii daughters is now in higher. In her biological science class, Skloot's book well-nigh Henrietta Lacks became a topic of discussion.
And merely like that, when Whye's daughter stood before her classmates to talk nigh her neat-grandmother, she began to ain the Lacks family story.
She gave Henrietta Lacks, and all she represents, the voice and recognition she deserves.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/21/health/henrietta-lacks-legacy/index.html
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