BioCentury
ARTICLE | Politics & Policy

NIH, Lacks family reach agreement on HeLa cell data

August 7, 2013 11:38 PM UTC

NIH and the descendants of the woman whose tissue sample gave rise to the immortal HeLa cell line have reached an agreement on the use of genomic data derived from the line, according to a blog post by NIH Director Francis Collins. The tissue sample that led to the HeLa line was obtained from Henrietta Lacks without her consent in 1951 during a biopsy for cervical cancer. Earlier this year, German scientists published the genomic sequence of a HeLa cell line, though the sequence was removed from a public database after outcry from the Lacks family. ...