His mother, Henrietta Lacks, was a Black mother of five dying of cancer when her cells were extracted without her knowledge and later used in medical experiments.
Mr. Lacks, one of Henrietta Lacks’s five children, lived to see his family’s first legal settlement, on Aug. 1, with a biotechnology company that had allegedly profited over the use of the “HeLa” cell line, so called for the first two letters of her first and last names.
The doctor then gave the sample to a prominent cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who soon discovered that her cells, unlike most, could be reproduced in a laboratory setting, enabling them to be studied indefinitely by scientists. A chance encounter by a relative with a medical researcher in the 1970s led the family to start to uncover the truth of what was happening with the cells. The family tried to investigate, Ron Lacks said, but lawyers were either reluctant to take a case that involved a powerful institution like Hopkins or told the family that the statute of limitations had expired.
No legal challenges were filed until 2021, when the family hired civil rights lawyer Ben Crump to explore lawsuits against biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies that profit from HeLa cells. The first of those cases, against Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific, was settled on undisclosed terms.The family’s lawsuit against Thermo Fisher said the company “made staggering profits in the tens of millions of dollars by using the HeLa cell line — all while Ms.
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