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The family of Henrietta Lacks has hired a prominent civil rights attorney who says he plans to seek compensation for them from big pharmaceutical companies across the country that made fortunes off medical research with her famous cancer cells.
An attorney for the Lacks family said a legal team is investigating lawsuits against as many as 100 defendants, mostly pharmaceutical companies, but they haven’t ruled out a case against the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
A Hopkins doctor collected a sample of cancer cells from the young mother without her knowledge or permission nearly 70 years ago. Those cells — the first to live outside the body in a glass tube — brought decades of medical advances.
Dubbed the “HeLa” cells, they have been used to develop everything from COVID-19 vaccines to sunscreen, attorney Ben Crump said. He said it’s an example of the long and troubling history of the medical exploitation of Black people in America.
“Never was that more apparent than with the tragedy of how they exploited Henrietta Lacks,” he said.
Crump, who represented the families of George Floyd...