Henrietta Lacks, without consent, an unknowing miracle worker

When the Catholic Church raised concerns about the development of coronavirus vaccines and their connection to “morally compromised” cell lines from aborted fetuses, I thought of Henrietta Lacks.

That’s puzzling, I know, but the issue of morally acceptable vaccines got me thinking about the moral and ethical issues surrounding the unauthorized harvesting and use of the cells of Henrietta Lacks.

Let me tell you about her. She was a young Black wife and mother of five who went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where doctors discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. The year was 1951. The hospital was one of the few that treated poor Black people.

A sample of her cancer cells from a biopsy was sent to a tissue lab, where a prominent cancer and virus researcher discovered that Mrs. Lacks’ cells were unlike any of the others he had seen. While other cells died, her cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.

Mrs. Lacks was 31 when she died in October 1951, but her cells, known in scientific circles as “HeLa” – the first two letters of her first and last names – have been called immortal. 

The New York Times wrote in a long overdue 2018 obituary – one of the “overlooked” who had not previously been favored with a remembrance – that her cell line “has been at the core of treatments for hemophilia, herpes, influenza, leukemia, and Parkinson’s disease as well as the polio vaccine, the cancer drug tamoxifen, chemotherapy, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization.”

So it is that Henrietta Lacks, who was buried in an unmarked grave, lives on.

Her cells had been harvested “without compensation or consent,” the Times noted. “There are thousands of patents involving her cells. Millions of dollars in profits have been made.”

Mrs. Lacks’ story did not become widely known until 2010, when Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published.

What does her life have to do with the coronavirus vaccine and questions about how it was manufactured?

I noticed that though the Catholic Church is concerned about morality issues related to the manufacture of certain coronavirus vaccines, the Vatican emphasizes the importance of being vaccinated for the sake of the individual and the community at large. Saving a life just happens to be the right thing to do.

I wondered whether there was any way to rationalize the way Henrietta Lacks was used, though I’ve been told it was common practice at the time.

Dr. Kevin Sneed, senior associate vice president, USF Health, and dean of the Taneja College of Pharmacy, said he couldn’t comment about whether it was common practice at that time to take cells without a patient’s permission or knowledge.  

“However,” he said, “obviously, during that time, there was an expectation that people who were doing science would avail themselves of people of color to complete their own research.”

There can be no justification for what happened to Mrs. Lacks, he said.

“The actual fact of the matter is that we should respect every individual for their autonomy to make a decision about what happens to their bodies. So, while medical breakthroughs have been achieved because of Henrietta Lacks, we still have to make sure that we never go back to having a lack of informed consent and research integrity ever again. And bringing this high level of awareness, the family is due to receive financial benefits of that research,” he said.

“I think acknowledgement of what happened in the past is a great start and it creates a pathway forward towards healing.”   

I talked to the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and a senior analyst at Religion News Service, about Henrietta Lacks. “Clearly she was used without her permission,” he said. “People who do bioethics have discussed that expectancy, the right to privacy, the right to be informed. That requires your permission to do that.”

Reese, a former columnist at the National Catholic Reporter and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church, spoke more extensively about the church’s vaccine quandary.  

A February statement by the Archdiocese of New Orleans ruled the Johnson & Johnson vaccine “morally compromised as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing.”

Pfizer and Moderna, however, do not rely on cell lines from abortions in the manufacturing process and therefore are acceptable, the archdiocese said.

Reese said the statement “caused a lot of confusion” among Catholics. “The Vatican, in a perfect world, would prefer a vaccine that did not use these cell lines, but in the world we live in, Catholics can certainly use these vaccines without any qualms of conscience.”

The Vatican’s doctrinal office has, in fact, given permission for Catholics to take vaccines such as Johnson & Johnson’s when no alternative is available, but warned that it’s not considered “a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses.”

Dr. Michael Teng, associate professor at USF Health and a virologist, addressed the issue of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“The vaccine is made in a cell line that was derived from a voluntary abortion in 1985. What they did was use the fetal tissue and grow cells. Over the last 35 years, they have been able to grow these cells constantly in the lab,” Teng explained. “The vaccine is made by putting the genetic instructions for making the vaccine into the cells. The cells then produce the vaccine, which is then purified.”

The result, Teng said, is that no cells or DNA from the aborted fetal tissue are in the vaccine. 

A similar process has been used in the manufacture of the AstraZeneca vaccine, he said, which used fetal tissue from an abortion in the Netherlands in the 1970s.

Teng said neither Pfizer nor Moderna used embryonic cells in their vaccine production, though embryonic cells were used to test vaccine efficacy.

He pointed out that use of cells from aborted fetal tissue is not new. “For a long time, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines were produced in cell lines derived from aborted fetal tissue,” Teng said, adding that’s not so anymore, though it is for hepatitis A and rabies vaccines.

A moral conundrum for some, and I think of Henrietta Lacks and the medical breakthroughs her cells have brought the world. 

For its part, Johns Hopkins plans to name a new multidisciplinary building in honor of her. There’s an annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture and scholarships are given in her name. In 2018, at the announcement of the building to honor her grandmother, Jeri Lacks said it was a proud day for her family.  

“Important lessons have been learned from Henrietta Lacks’ experience,” Dr. Paul Rothman, dean of the medical faculty for the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine, said then. “We have a responsibility to our patients in the care we deliver as well as when we partner with patients to pursue important scientific questions.”

Last year, as Americans reckoned with the Black Lives Matter movement, the journal Nature reported that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a major biomedical research organization, announced a six-figure gift to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation.

The foundation gives grants to those “who have unknowingly been part of historic medical-research studies, and to their families who did not benefit from that work,” the journal said. Grants have included educational and medical expenses for members of the Lacks family and support for the families of the Black men who were part of the horrific Tuskegee syphilis trials.

Still, there is no balm.

Stories like the one about Henrietta Lacks, ingrained in the consciousness of Black people, continue to engender mistrust of the medical system, which professionals like Sneed are working to allay. Perhaps our consciences should be pricked, not just by a vaccine’s origins, but other medical breakthroughs.