Henrietta Lacks Building Groundbreaking

Remarks as prepared

Thank you, Jeff [Kahn]. And good morning, everyone!

I am so pleased to be here with all of you this morning to break ground and begin to bring to life an endeavor we first envisioned together in 2018: the Henrietta Lacks Building.

[ pause ]

One day in 1974, a rookie reporter was in the bathroom of a medical school library in San Francisco. A strange line scrawled on the wall in felt-tip pen happened to catch his eye: “HELEN LANE LIVES.”

Who, he wondered, was Helen Lane?

He moved on to other things until, two months later, he unexpectedly encountered Helen Lane again. Flipping through Science magazine, he read that she was the source of the HeLa line of cells of uncommon strength that had revolutionized cell culturing and contributed to countless major medical breakthroughs. But the brief, highly technical paper offered nothing about who Helen Lane was.

Intrigued, he followed his reporter’s nose to Baltimore to interview the author of the Science paper.  And there, he heard a name he had never encountered in any of his research about HeLa cells.

“That was her real name,” the scientist replied when he inquired. “I don’t think anyone is quite sure how everybody got to calling her Helen Lane.”

And so, in Michael Rogers’s 1976 article for Rolling Stone, the world learned the real name of the woman whose cells had so dramatically advanced medical research.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks.

[ brief pause ]

As this audience now knows well, Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old mother of five when she sought treatment for cancer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Additional tissue samples were taken, as was common practice for all cancer patients at the time, and sent to the lab of Dr. George Gey, who found in those samples the first “immortal” human cell line we now know as HeLa cells.

This extraordinary cell line became the basis of medical advances from the development of the polio vaccine, to the study of leukemia and other cancers, to the fight to stem the scourge of the AIDS virus. Yet for decades, even as Johns Hopkins and other major research institutions relied on HeLa cells, the identity of the woman behind the cells was largely unknown, including to her own family.

Today we are taking one more concrete step to ensure that Henrietta Lacks’s name—her real name—will be as immortal as her cells.

We take this step because it matters that we know who Henrietta Lacks was. She was a beloved mother, now grandmother and great-grandmother, who was known for her vibrant style. She was a person willing to lend a hand to anyone she knew, and many she didn’t. She was these things every bit as much as she was the genesis of discoveries that have transformed the landscape of modern medicine and nurtured the flourishing of the whole human family.

We take this step because it matters that we think deeply about what her story tells us about the world in which she lived. Her legacy is not only the HeLa cells that have birthed so many revolutionary treatments, but the birth of rigorous new standards of ethical practice that consider the whole patient and their loved ones.

And we take this step because what we learn from reflecting on her story must guide the future we build and how we build it.

When the Henrietta Lacks Building rises from the ground where we stand today, it will be a vibrant, multidisciplinary site of learning and dialogue. It will serve as an entryway to the community around our East Baltimore campus and extend the capacity of the Berman Institute of Bioethics. It will galvanize programs that facilitate community-oriented medical research and nurture the next wave of progress in the study and promotion of research ethics.

And it will rise on a truly collaborative foundation. Through the vision of Victor Vines and his team, and the invaluable input of members of the Lacks family and our community partners over many years and through our advisory group, this building will serve as a site of discovery and a portal that deepens our connection to our neighbors and this city.

So, to all who helped bring this moment to fruition, thank you. And thank you especially to the members of the Lacks family for their generosity of spirit and for trusting us to carry forward their mother and grandmother’s legacy in this way.

We look forward to a building that does justice to the name it will bear—a name no longer lost to history, but proudly proclaimed in tribute to the woman herself: Henrietta Lacks.

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