Person · 1920–1951
Henrietta Lacks
A Black tobacco farmer and mother of five whose cancer cells, taken without her consent in 1951, became the "immortal" HeLa line that transformed modern medicine.
Henrietta Lacks (1920–1951) was born in Roanoke, Virginia, raised on the family's tobacco farm in Clover, and later moved to Maryland. In 1951, dying of an aggressive cervical cancer, she was treated at Johns Hopkins, where doctors took a sample of her tumor without her knowledge or consent. Her cells — code-named HeLa — became the first human cells to survive and multiply indefinitely in a lab, and went on to underpin the polio vaccine, cancer and virus research, IVF, and gene mapping, generating enormous scientific and commercial value. Lacks herself died that October at 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave; her family learned of the cells only decades later and was long uncompensated. Her life, recovered in Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, has become central to debates over consent, race, and profit in medicine.