Lacks’s estate is asking Thermo Fisher to pay back the full profits gained over 70 years of using her cells without consent
The estate of Henrietta Lacks sued a pharmaceutical company on Monday, accusing it of selling cells that doctors at Johns Hopkins hospital took in 1951 without her knowledge or consent.
The cells taken from Lacks, a Black woman who died of cervical cancer, are known has HeLa cells and have been reproduced ever since, used in scientific and medical innovations including the development of the polio vaccine and gene mapping.
