Title
Honoring and recognizing the life and legacy of Henrietta Lacks during Women's History Month and further commending the Lacks family for their advocacy in reaching historic settlements with pharmaceutical companies and helping to advance national conversations about medical ethics, racial equity, and patients' rights.
Body
WHEREAS, Throughout Women's History Month, we celebrate and uplift the achievements, resilience, and transformative contributions of women whose courage and sacrifice have shaped the course of history; and
WHEREAS, Henrietta Lacks was a devoted mother of five whose cervical cancer cells were taken and used without her consent in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital during treatment for aggressive cervical cancer; and
WHEREAS, The cells taken from Henrietta Lacks became known as the HeLa cell line and was the first immortalized human cells capable of continuous growth in laboratory conditions, revolutionizing biomedical research and becoming one of the most important tools in modern medicine; and
WHEREAS, HeLa cells have contributed to innumerable scientific breakthroughs, including the development of the polio vaccine, advancements in cancer and HIV research, genetic mapping, fertility treatments, and research essential to the development of COVID-19 vaccines that have saved millions of lives worldwide; and
WHEREAS, Despite the global and multibillion-dollar industries that grew from research using HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks and her family were neither informed nor compensated for decades, highlighting longstanding inequities in medical research and the urgent need for ethical reform and informed consent; and
WHEREAS, The Estate of Henrietta Lacks reached an undisclosed settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. to resolve claims that the company commercialized HeLa cells long after their origins were widely known; and
WHEREAS, The Estate also reached a confidential settlement with Novartis, resolving litigation alleging that the ph...
Click here for full text