Henrietta Lacks’s Family Settles Suit With Novartis Over Use of Her Cells; The New York Times, February 27, 2026

 Michael Levenson , The New York Times; Henrietta Lacks’s Family Settles Suit With Novartis Over Use of Her Cells

"The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, which were known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.

In August 2024, more than 70 years after Ms. Lacks died at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her family filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland that accused Novartis, which is based in Switzerland, of amassing substantial profits through the use of the HeLa cell line."