Henrietta Lacks . Photo credit: NBC News
Cloning of Human Cells
In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first line of immortalized human cells obtained from an African-American woman without her consent. Henrietta Lacks was suffering from terminal cervical cancer when her cells were secretly extracted and used to clone a cell line called HeLa, which has the capacity to reproduce under specific conditions.
Reports indicate that the source of the immortalized cell line was kept a secret for many years, with Lacks’s family only learning about its existence in 1975. What’s worse, the family was never compensated for the unlawful extraction of the cells. Despite its controversial origin, HeLa continues to influence numerous medical researches across the world.
