2023-08-02 16:38:59
The family of Henrietta Lacks, whose genome revolutionized modern medicine, has reached an agreement with Thermo Fisher, the biotechnology company that used the cells of this African-American without her consent, lawyers announced Tuesday.
“The parties are satisfied that they have found a way to resolve this matter out of court,” said lawyers for the Lacks family, Ben Crump and Chris Seeger, in a statement, according to a report by Agence France Press.
Terms of the settlement, reached nearly two years following a lawsuit was filed in the US state of Maryland, were not disclosed.
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc confirmed it in the same words as the family lawyers.
In 1951 Henrietta Lacks, aged 31, died of cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. During her attempts to cure her, cells were removed from her tumor and sent to a researcher without her knowledge.
The researcher quickly realized that his cells, renamed HeLa cells, were extraordinary because they might be grown in vitro, that is, outside the human body, and multiply infinitely.
This has allowed laboratories around the world to develop vaccines, especially once morest polio, cancer treatments and some cloning techniques.
Henrietta Lacks’s family didn’t find out regarding it until the 1970s and didn’t understand the scope until Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
“They have been using their cells for 70 years and the Lacks family has received nothing in exchange for this theft,” his granddaughter Kimberly Lacks denounced in 2021, when the family said they intended to file a complaint and accused Thermo Fisher Scientific of profiting. with the commercialization of cells.
This Tuesday Henrietta Lacks would have turned 103 years old.
The company did not respond to AFP inquiries on the matter.
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