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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Science
Staff and agencies

Immortal cells: Henrietta Lacks’ family settle lawsuit over HeLa tissue harvested in 1950s

Henrietta Lacks in a portrait from the 1940s
Henrietta Lacks in a portrait from the 1940s. Her family sued Thermo Fisher Scientific saying they had ‘not seen a dime’ of the money from the HeLa cell line cultured from her cervical cancer. Photograph: AP

Laboratory equipment maker Thermo Fisher Scientific has settled a lawsuit brought by the estate of Henrietta Lacks, a long-deceased cancer victim whose “immortal” cells have lived on to fuel biomedical research for decades, lawyers for the estate have said.

The story of Lacks, a young African American woman who died in Baltimore in 1951, was made famous in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which became a movie in 2017 featuring Oprah Winfrey.

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