What does the historic settlement won by Henrietta Lacks ’s family mean for others?

Last week, the family of Henrietta Lacks settled its lawsuit against the huge biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific over its claim that the company had been “unjustly enriched” by its use of her cells. Lacks was a Black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, soon after a doctor took a sample from her tumor without her knowledge or consent and created an immortal cell line, HeLa. No financial payments or other terms of the settlement were disclosed, and no judge ruled on the fundamentals of the unusual claim. But some have nevertheless hailed it as precedent setting. And the family ’ s lawyers have said they may go after other companies marketing the HeLa cells, which are widely used in medical research, or products based on them. Science Insider asked lawyer Lori Andrews of the Chicago-Kent College of Law for her thoughts about the outcome. Kent represented families in a high-profile “unjust enrichment” lawsuit 20 years ago involving cells from deceased children that led to testing for their rare, fatal genetic disorder, Canavan disease. In the Lacks case, the family’s lawyers argued that doctors’ failure to ask her permission to use her cancer cells reflected deep-seated racism then pervasive in human research. “The racial inequity which was so eloquently argued in the complaint … really I think carried the day,” Andrews says. She believes the settlement also reflec...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research