The Root; Published By Angela Johnson
Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Wire (AP)
Decades after her death, the family of Henrietta Lacks continues to seek justice from the companies who use her biopsied cancer cells for medical research without consent.
Last week, the family settled for an undisclosed amount with Thermo Fisher Scientific. And on Thursday, with the help of high-profile civil rights attorney Ben Crump and co-counsel Christopher Seeger, the family filed a lawsuit in a Baltimore federal court against California-based biopharmaceutical company Ultragenyx.
According to a statment from their legal team, the Lacks family’s suit alleges that Ultragenyx “made a conscious choice to sell and mass produce the living tissue of Henrietta Lacks, despite the corporation’s knowledge that Lacks’ tissue had been taken from her without her consent by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The retrieval of her tissue is considered part of a conspiracy to harvest tissue for research from Black women without their knowledge or consent in racially segregated wards throughout the 1950s.”
And the Lacks family’s lawyers are putting other companies on notice, saying they plan to go after additional entities profiting at Ms. Lacks’ expense. Read more
