I think it’s important to be encouraged and get involved. And you have to encourage people to pay attention to the medical world because it’s important to everybody, everybody is going to be affected by a disease, it touches us all. We don’t want it to be forgotten.ĭL: It’s black history, it’s women’s history, it’s world history. SL: Henrietta was a young woman, uneducated, African American, and she made such a major contribution to science and medicine. What do you see as the importance of telling this story? Our family took the time to walk through these doors and educate ourselves, and now we take the role of educating people about Henrietta Lacks, the HeLa cells, and the medical community in general. I tell people that before the book I was strictly an IT person, and this book opened doors that I gladly walked through. When she passed away, my daughter and her dad cemented the relationship with Rebecca, and we began communicating, and we began speaking engagements-I didn’t want to, but Deborah said if anything happens to her to make sure this continues to go on, and I wanted to honor her request.ĭL: My role would be as an educator, trying to get young people into medicine and research. SL: When Deborah was alive and and Rebecca was writing the book, Deborah said to me, ‘Shirley, if anything ever happens to me I want you to make sure that this continues.’ I said, ‘OK, Deborah,’ not expecting anything to happen to her. What roles do you play in this legacy, in telling this story? Roland Pattillo at the Morehouse School of Medicine, and once they got that bond going, Deborah found out all the information she wanted to know about her mother, and all the contributions her mother had made to the world through HeLa.īefore Deborah passed away it brought closure, the fact that she had found out what she wanted to know about her mom, and the rest of the family went on from there to try to keep the legacy of Henrietta alive. Shirley Lacks: Deborah met Rebecca Skloot through Dr. She never really knew her mother, so she wanted to find out everything she could. How did your family learn this story?ĭavid Lacks: It took 25 years before the family would learn about Henrietta Lacks’ cells, and another several decades later my aunt went on a journey with Rebecca Skloot to learn about these cells and her mother. Shirley and David Lacks sat down before the event to talk about Henrietta’s legacy and why her story needs to be told. “Instead of being the last people to know for the last 61 years, we are going to be the first to know,” he said during the seminar.
David Lacks Jr., Henrietta’s grandson, now represents the family on the National Institute of Health panel that reviews applications to conduct research using HeLa cells. Shirley Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter-in-law, continues Deborah’s work to share the family’s legacy. She died in 2009, a year before Skloot’s book was published. Lacks’ daughter, Deborah, traveled the country with Skloot to learn more about her mother and the HeLa cell line.
The seminar was moderated by George Annas, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of health law, policy & management. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot had been selected as this year’s SPH Reads book, to be read and discussed by students, faculty, and staff, and the conversation continued with this standing-room-only event. On February 21, David Lacks Jr., Henrietta’s grandson, and her daughter-in-law, Shirley Lacks, visited SPH as part of the 2016-2017 Diversity and Inclusion Seminar Series. Known as HeLa, that cell line led to major medical advances including the development of the polio vaccine, and have survived into the present as part of a multimillion dollar industry of which her family was unaware for decades, and from which they never received compensation. Her cells, taken in several samples from her tumor, were used in research without her knowledge or consent to create the first “immortal” cell line. Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman who died in 1951 from cervical cancer.
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