![]() CNN has reached out to the company for comment. Thermo Fisher Scientific generates annual revenue of approximately $35 billion, according to its website. And yet Thermo Fisher Scientific treats Henrietta Lacks’ living cells as chattel to be bought and sold.” “Black people have the right to control their bodies. “Thermo Fisher Scientific’s choice to continue selling HeLa cells in spite of the cell lines’ origin and the concrete harms it inflicts on the Lacks family can only be understood as a choice to embrace a legacy of racial injustice embedded in the US research and medical systems,” the lawsuit says. According to the lawsuit, there are at least 12 products marketed by Thermo Fisher that include the HeLa cell line. The lawsuit claims that with this wide recognition, there is no way that Thermo Fisher Scientific can say it didn’t know the history behind its products containing HeLa cells and points to a page on the company’s website that acknowledges the cells were taken without Lacks’ consent. The US House of Representatives has recognized her nonconsensual contribution to cancer research, and John Hopkins holds an annual lecture series on her impact on medicine. It was the subject of a best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” which was published in 2010, and a subsequent movie of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey. While the origin of HeLa cells was not clear for years, Lacks’ story has become widely known in the 21st century. Lacks’ tissue was taken from her without her consent by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a racially unjust medical system.” ![]() It argues that the company is “making a conscious choice to sell and mass produce the living tissue of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, grandmother, and community leader, despite the corporation’s knowledge that Ms. The cell line, now known as HeLa cells, gave scientists the ability to experiment and create life-saving medicine like the polio vaccine, in-vitro fertilization and gene mapping and helped move forward cancer and AIDS research.īut the lawsuit alleges that Thermo Fisher Scientific is knowingly profiting from the “unlawful conduct” of the Johns Hopkins doctors and that its “ill-gotten gains rightfully belong to Ms. Lacks died later that year from cancer at the age of 31. With the sample, a doctor at the hospital was able to create the first human cell line to reproduce outside the body. Lacks, a Black woman diagnosed with cervical cancer, had tissue taken from her cervix without her consent during a procedure at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. for unjust enrichment from the nonconsensual use and profiting from her tissue sample and cell line. ![]() The family of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells have been used for groundbreaking scientific research for decades, filed a lawsuit Monday against Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. ![]()
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