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I would say she recognized as the women who transformed modern medicine

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Even though she died when she was 31 years old in 1951 . Her cells still impact the world. But her contribution is being honored today because the U.S. senate passed the henrietta lacks enhancing cancer research act legislation introduced by senator Chris Van Hollen

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Her contribution is being honored today in many ways. One way they honor is every year they have a memorial lecture just in her honor.

-Amiyah Watson

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Her cells helped the scientist know that cervical cancer can be caused by HPV

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She is a African American who cells were the source of HeLa cells

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She is recognized for scientists using her cells many years after she die

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She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30.

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Henrietta Lacks was a Black tobacco farmer who had cervical cancer and had a piece of her tumor stolen and was used as a polio vaccine and was also used to make more medicines and vaccines to cure .

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#6 - How has learning the knowledge of their grandmother's cells changed their family's outlook and trust of others in the medical and related professions?

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#6 - How has learning the knowledge of their grandmother's cells changed their family's outlook and trust of others in the medical and related professions?

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Currently living grandchildren of Henrietta Lacks and their history of learning about what was done to her.

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Henrietta Lacks: Preserving Her Legacy | David Lacks & Veronica Robinson | TEDxFoggyBottom

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#4 - How Has She Been Recently Recognized?

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#4 - How Has She Been Recently Recognized?

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Oprah Speaks To Tell Story Of Henrietta Lacks, The Woman Who Changed Medicine | NBC Nightly News

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#5 - How have Henrietta Lacks' cells been used in medicine and what advancements have been made because of them?

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#5 - How have Henrietta Lacks' cells been used in medicine and what advancements have been made because of them?

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Quick facts about Henrietta's cancer cells, now referred to as "HeLa cells."

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The immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks - Robin Bulleri

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#2 - How is her contribution being honored today?

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#2 - How is her contribution being honored today?

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In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Upon examination, renowned gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. At the time, The Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of only a few hospitals to treat poor African-Americans.

As medical records show, Mrs. Lacks began undergoing radium treatments for her cervical cancer. This was the best medical treatment available at the time for this terrible disease. A sample of her cancer cells retrieved during a biopsy were sent to Dr. George Gey's nearby tissue lab. For years, Dr. Gey, a prominent cancer and virus researcher, had been collecting cells from all patients - regardless of their race or socioeconomic status - who came to The Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer, but each sample quickly died in Dr. Gey's lab. What Dr. Gey would soon discover was that Mrs. Lacks' cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, Mrs. Lacks' cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.

Today, these incredible cells - nicknamed "HeLa" cells, from the first two letters of her first and last names - are used to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans. They have been used to test the effects of radiation and poisons, to study the human genome, to learn more about how viruses work, and played a crucial role in the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines.

Although Mrs. Lacks ultimately passed away on October 4, 1951, at the age of 31, her cells continue to impact the world.

Although these were the first cells that could be easily shared and multiplied in a lab setting, Johns Hopkins has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line. Rather, Johns Hopkins offered HeLa cells freely and widely for scientific research.

Johns Hopkins applauds and regularly participates in efforts to raise awareness of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks. Having reviewed our interactions with Henrietta Lacks and with the Lacks family over more than 50 years, we found that Johns Hopkins could have - and should have - done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks' family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests. Though the collection and use of Henrietta Lacks' cells in research was an acceptable and legal practice in the 1950s, such a practice would not happen today without the patient's consent.

We are deeply committed to the ongoing efforts at our institutions and elsewhere to honor the contributions of Henrietta Lacks and to ensure the appropriate protection and care of the Lacks family's medical information.

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In 1951, a young mother of five named Henrietta Lacks visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Upon examination, renowned gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. At the time, The Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of only a few hospitals to treat poor African-Americans.

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#3 - How do people view her sacrifice and contributions today?

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#3 - How do people view her sacrifice and contributions today?

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2250449-genetic-privacy-we-must-learn-from-the-story-of-henrietta-lacks/

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A street mural memorial to Henrietta Lacks in Oak Park, Illinois

MedSci / Alamy

Today is the 100 th anniversary of the birth of Henrietta Lacks, commonly referred to as "the mother of modern medicine". Her cells have been used in experiments in laboratories around the world but were cultivated without her consent. Eventually, her story led to the rewriting of the rules around ethics in healthcare. As the dawn of an era of personalised medicine begins, the lessons from her story are more important than ever.

Lacks, an African American tobacco farmer from Virginia, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951. Her doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore obtained a biopsy from her cervix for diagnosis  and treatment. A small part of her tissue was taken to the tissue culture laboratory without Lacks's knowledge or consent - a common practice at the time.

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Nobody had yet been able to keep human cells alive for a long period of time outside the body. However, George Gey, who was head of the tissue culture laboratory, found that Lacks's cells survived and replicated. Nearly seven decades later, these so-called HeLa cells have now lived more than twice as long outside Lacks's body than inside.

Lacks died a few months after her cancer diagnosis, but her cells continue to be used for research. They have been vital to studying diseases, including covid-19, as well as for developing vaccines and IVF, to name a few examples. They have also become the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry. There are more than 17,000 patents involving HeLa cells.

Henrietta Lacks. Her cells have been used all over the world in medical research

Bridgeman Images

Gey supplied the cells to scientists nationally and internationally without making a profit himself, though he gave no credit to Lacks. Her family weren't even aware of the existence of the cells until 1973, when researchers at John Hopkins approached her children for blood samples to learn more about the HeLa cells.

Their mother's cells had become a major boon to medical science and Lacks and her family did not receive any compensation or recognition. Lacks's story came to wider public attention in 2010 with the publishing of  Rebecca  Skloot's  book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

However, the controversy didn't end there. In 2013, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, published the HeLa genome without the consent of the Lacks family, which could have revealed private genetic information about her descendants. Eventually, a compromise was reached called the HeLa Genome Data Use agreement. Now, two members of the Lacks family sit on the US National Institutes of Health working group that grants permission to access HeLa sequence information.

This sort of agreement should be a blueprint for other genetic data. We are moving towards personalised medicine becoming the norm, in which treatments are tailored to people's genetics. This approach has the potential to greatly improve how we treat disease, but it also relies on researchers having access to large amounts of genetic data from different samples. With that comes issues around privacy and consent, for both the individual and their family. In every case, there needs to be communication and transparency between researchers and donors.

Lacks's compelling case was a turning point in the field of bioethics. Most countries now have specific rules and laws around informed consent and privacy to help protect patients. That is a testament to the many ways in which Lacks has transformed modern medicine.
Maninder Ahluwalia is a lecturer in biomedical sciences at Cardiff Metropolitan University

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Genetic privacy: We must learn from the story of Henrietta Lacks

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Today is the 100 th anniversary of the birth of Henrietta Lacks, commonly referred to as "the mother of modern medicine". Her cells have been used in experiments in laboratories around the world but were cultivated without her consent. Eventually, her story led to the rewriting of the rules around ethics in healthcare.

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Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are "immortal"-they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research-though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.

Who was Henrietta Lacks?
She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. No one knows why, but her cells never died.

Why are her cells so important?
Henrietta's cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.

There has been a lot of confusion over the years about the source of HeLa cells. Why?
When the cells were taken, they were given the code name HeLa, for the first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. Today, anonymizing samples is a very important part of doing research on cells. But that wasn't something doctors worried about much in the 1950s, so they weren't terribly careful about her identity. When some members of the press got close to finding Henrietta's family, the researcher who'd grown the cells made up a pseudonym-Helen Lane-to throw the media off track. Other pseudonyms, like Helen Larsen, eventually showed up, too. Her real name didn't really leak out into the world until the 1970s.

How did you first get interested in this story?
I first learned about Henrietta in 1988. I was 16 and a student in a community college biology class. Everybody learns about these cells in basic biology, but what was unique about my situation was that my teacher actually knew Henrietta's real name and that she was black. But that's all he knew. The moment I heard about her, I became obsessed: Did she have any kids? What do they think about part of their mother being alive all these years after she died? Years later, when I started being interested in writing, one of the first stories I imagined myself writing was hers. But it wasn't until I went to grad school that I thought about trying to track down her family.

How did you win the trust of Henrietta's family?
Part of it was that I just wouldn't go away and was determined to tell the story. It took almost a year even to convince Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, to talk to me. I knew she was desperate to learn about her mother. So when I started doing my own research, I'd tell her everything I found. I went down to Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta was raised, and tracked down her cousins, then called Deborah and left these stories about Henrietta on her voice mail. Because part of what I was trying to convey to her was I wasn't hiding anything, that we could learn about her mother together. After a year, finally she said, fine, let's do this thing.

When did her family find out about Henrietta's cells?
Twenty-five years after Henrietta died, a scientist discovered that many cell cultures thought to be from other tissue types, including breast and prostate cells, were in fact HeLa cells. It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. It became an enormous controversy. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down Henrietta's relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the family's DNA to make a map of Henrietta's genes so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which weren't, to begin straightening out the contamination problem.

So a postdoc called Henrietta's husband one day. But he had a third-grade education and didn't even know what a cell was. The way he understood the phone call was: "We've got your wife. She's alive in a laboratory. We've been doing research on her for the last 25 years. And now we have to test your kids to see if they have cancer." Which wasn't what the researcher said at all. The scientists didn't know that the family didn't understand. From that point on, though, the family got sucked into this world of research they didn't understand, and the cells, in a sense, took over their lives.

How did they do that?
This was most true for Henrietta's daughter. Deborah never knew her mother; she was an infant when Henrietta died. She had always wanted to know who her mother was but no one ever talked about Henrietta. So when Deborah found out that this part of her mother was still alive she became desperate to understand what that meant: Did it hurt her mother when scientists injected her cells with viruses and toxins? Had scientists cloned her mother? And could those cells help scientists tell her about her mother, like what her favorite color was and if she liked to dance.

Deborah's brothers, though, didn't think much about the cells until they found out there was money involved. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah's brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother's cells, and that the family didn't get any of the resulting money, they got very angry. Henrietta's family has lived in poverty most of their lives, and many of them can't afford health insurance. One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially. It consumed their lives in that way.

What are the lessons from this book?
For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind. For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies-they're just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they're usually left out of the equation.

And for the rest of us?
The story of HeLa cells and what happened with Henrietta has often been held up as an example of a racist white scientist doing something malicious to a black woman. But that's not accurate. The real story is much more subtle and complicated. What is very true about science is that there are human beings behind it and sometimes even with the best of intentions things go wrong.

One of the things I don't want people to take from the story is the idea that tissue culture is bad. So much of medicine today depends on tissue culture. HIV tests, many basic drugs, all of our vaccines-we would have none of that if it wasn't for scientists collecting cells from people and growing them. And the need for these cells is going to get greater, not less. Instead of saying we don't want that to happen, we just need to look at how it can happen in a way that everyone is OK with.

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Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are "immortal"-they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists.