More than 70 years after doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells without her knowledge, a lawyer for her descendants said they have reached a settlement with a biotechnology company they sued in 2021, accusing its leaders of reaping billions of dollars from a racist medical system.
Tissue taken from the Black woman’s tumor before she died of cervical cancer became the first human cells to be successfully cloned. Reproduced infinitely ever since, HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even Covid-19 vaccines.
Despite that incalculable impact, the Lacks family had never been compensated.
Doctors harvested Lacks’ cells in 1951, long before the advent of consent procedures used in medicine and scientific research today, but lawyers for her family argued that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has continued to commercialize the results well after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.
Attorney Ben Crump, who represents the Lacks family, announced the settlement late Monday. He said the terms of the agreement are confidential.
“The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement,” Crump said in a statement.
Hi! My mum and I had a conversation in the car where I mentioned how funny I found this bit, because I had read it as Anathema thinking that she had, in fact, just been run over by a very campy gay couple, and a campy gay couple wouldn't harm her. But my mum read this as Anathema, who she thought could feel that Crowley was a demon, realizing that she was also in the presence of an angel, and an angel wouldn't harm her. And I guess I just wanted to know which was the intended message?
The version that Terry and I had in mind when we wrote it was the former.
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