Henrietta Lacks

Born on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, Henrietta, Lacks’ original name at her birth was Loretta Pleasant. Her family does not know when and why her name was changed from Loretta to Henrietta. Her father’s name was Johnny Pleasant and her mother’s name was Eliza Pleasant, née Lacks. She had nine siblings, including brothers Lawrence, John Randall II, Henry, and Charles, and sisters Gladys and Lillian.

In 1924, Eliza died while she was in labour with her tenth child. Lacks was only four years old then. Her father realised that he could not raise the children on his own. So, he relocated the family to Clover, Virginia, to find relatives who would take the children in. *Henrietta’s grandfather Henry Lacks accepted her responsibility and raised her in his two-story log cabin, which used to be the slave quarters on the plantation that was once run by Lacks’ white ancestors.

At the cabin, she shared her room with her cousin, David "Day" Lacks, who was about five years older than her. Most members of her family were involved in tobacco farming and Lacks also became a farmer at a young age. During this period, a relationship developed between her and Day Lacks and she became pregnant at 14 years of age.

Her son, Lawrence, named after one of her brothers, was born in 1935. Four years later, she gave birth to her daughter, Elsie.

Day Lacks and Henrietta eventually got married on April 10, 1941, in Halifax County, Virginia. That year, at the suggestion of a cousin named Fred Garrett, the couple quit tobacco farming to relocate to Maryland, where Day Lacks had found a job at Bethlehem Steel in Sparrow's Point.

It was not long after they had shifted their family to Maryland that Garrett was drafted into the military at the advent of the World War II. He gave his savings to Day Lacks as a gift, which enabled the latter to buy a house for his family at 713 New Pittsburgh Avenue in Turner Station. A venerable African American community dating back to 1888, Turner Station is now a part of Dundalk.

While in Maryland, Lacks gave birth to three more children: David "Sonny" Lacks Jr. (born 1947), Deborah Lacks Pullum (born Deborah Lacks; 1949–2009), and Joseph Lacks (1950).

Among her children, Elsie showed signs of developmental disabilities. According to her family, she was "different" or "deaf and dumb". In 1950, Elsie was institutionalized at the Hospital for the Negro Insane, the name of which was later changed to Crownsville Hospital Center. She would be there for the next five years before her death in 1955.

Several months before the birth of her last child, Henrietta Lacks felt a “knot” in her womb. She talked about the knot to her cousins and they accurately deduced that she was pregnant. However, she suffered a severe haemorrhage during the delivery which took place at the Johns Hopkins, which was the only hospital that took in black patients in the Baltimore area.

On January 29, 1951, she visited the hospital again. She was subsequently tested for syphilis by her personal doctor, but the results came back negative. A biopsy of the mass on Lacks' cervix was conducted by Dr. Howard W. Jones, who concluded after laboratory testing that she was suffering from a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix.

However, in 1970, researchers found that she actually had an adenocarcinoma. The misdiagnosis was quite common for the era and the treatment would have been the same.

After admitting her into the hospital, Dr. Jones began her treatment, which involved radium tube inserts. However, only after a few days, she was told that she could go home. Furthermore, the doctors asked her to come back for X-ray treatments. Two samples were cultivated from her cervix while she was undergoing the treatment but they never informed her about it. One of those samples was of cancerous cells, the other, of healthy ones.

Subsequently, physician and cancer researcher, George Otto Gey, who was working at Johns Hopkins at the time, got the samples. The cancerous cells were later dubbed as the HeLa immortal cell line and have been since extensively used in contemporary biomedical research.