Confidential Settlement for Family of Henrietta Lacks Over Thermo Fisher's Use of Cells Taken in 1951

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old Black mother of five, sought treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, one of the few hospitals that would treat Black patients. During her care, doctors took samples of her tumor without her knowledge or consent. She died months later, but her cells did something no human cells had done before: they survived and multiplied indefinitely in the laboratory. The resulting "HeLa" line became the workhorse of modern biomedical research, contributing to the polio vaccine, cancer treatments, IVF, gene mapping, and COVID-19 vaccine development. Her family learned of the cells' existence only in the 1970s and, as her story became widely known through Rebecca Skloot's bestselling book, the Lacks family remained uncompensated while companies built products and profits on her cells.

In October 2021, seventy years after the cells were taken, the estate of Henrietta Lacks filed suit in federal court in Baltimore against Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the world's largest biotech companies, which sold HeLa-derived products. The estate's legal team paired Ben Crump, the country's most prominent civil rights litigator, with Chris Seeger and Chris Ayers of the mass-tort powerhouse Seeger Weiss. Rather than a conventional personal-injury theory, the suit pleaded unjust enrichment: Thermo Fisher, it argued, had made a deliberate choice to keep commercializing a cell line it knew had been taken from a Black woman without consent, and should disgorge the profits.

Thermo Fisher moved to dismiss, arguing the claims came decades too late. The estate countered that the company's ongoing sales made the enrichment a continuing wrong, a theory with implications far beyond one family. The case survived long enough to put that question squarely before the court, and the parties entered mediation.

On August 1, 2023, the day Henrietta Lacks would have turned 103, the parties announced they had settled on confidential terms. Crump and Seeger stood with several generations of Lacks descendants outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore to declare that, for the first time, the family had been compensated in connection with the cells taken from her. The amount was not disclosed, but both sides said they were pleased with the resolution.

The settlement's significance runs beyond the Lacks family. It demonstrated a viable legal path, unjust enrichment against current commercial users, for perhaps the most famous case of nonconsensual tissue use in medical history, reshaping the conversation around bioethics, informed consent, and the commercialization of human biological material. The team subsequently pursued the same theory against other companies profiting from HeLa cells, reaching later resolutions with Novartis and Viatris, confirming that the Thermo Fisher settlement was a template rather than a one-off.