Henrietta Lacks: The Conflict

and Compromise around HeLa

Cells usage

Sydney Wisnosky and Zak Khera

Senior Division
Group Website
Process Paper: 477 words
 We chose to focus our Conflict and Compromise Project on the theme of Henrietta Lacks
due to our interest in learning about medical research. Soon after Rebecca Skloot published The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, one of our mothers obtained a copy for herself and
became deeply entertained in the novel. Since its publication, the novel went global and
Henrietta Lacks’ legacy has become more well known. When deciding on a topic, we chose to
direct our attention to an event that would provoke our personal research interests along with
following the historical time period requirements. Researching previous medical treatments and
standards have helped us develop a deeper understanding of medicine and the impact HeLa cells
have had on everyone’s lives.
We conducted our research by looking through our school’s databases, which provided
many primary sources to deepen our understanding of Henrietta Lacks’ contributions. The Gale
Group database had many articles which went in depth about different topics of Lacks’ life, cells,
contributions, and her relatives reactions. We read through many scientists’ discoveries on HeLa
cells, and watched an important interview regarding new standards for studying these cells.
Additionally, one of the most helpful sources we got our information from was Rebecca Skloots’
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She interviewed many of the Lacks family members and
got insider information that no other source could obtain. The novel went in depth and followed a
timeline from the time Lacks was admitted into The John Hopkins Hospital, to the time the
National Institute of Health made compromises with her family.
We selected our presentation category as a website because we felt that this was the most
effective way to present the information we had gathered. The website allowed us to organize the
different categories of Lacks’s life with visuals and content that could easily be integrated to our
research. We created the website using Weebly, a service that both of us had experience using. In
Weebly we copied our research into text boxes and inserted photos and quotations to make it an
ideal location to find information about Henrietta Lacks.
Our project relates to the NHD theme of “Conflict and Compromise” because the use of
Lacks’s cells without consent was a major controversy. Lacks’s cells were taken from her body
by Dr. George Gey, who profited a great deal from this, and used in varieties of medical and
scientific studies. Neither she or her family were aware of this, yet her cells were already being
mass produced in distribution centers around the country. Lacks’s descendants also had their
private information released to the public and were constantly being contacted by researchers.
Compromise finally came about when the family reached a deal with NIH to put stricter
regulations on who could obtain the cells, requiring an application stating what the cells will be
used to study.