This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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If you buy HeLa cells, who profits? Has the Lacks family ever seen any of the financial benefits from HeLa cells for sale? How did companies like Microbiological Associates make money while the Lacks family struggled?
HeLa cells for sale show the potentially high profit from the cells taken from Henrietta Lacks. HeLa cells’ price does not include any royalty for the Lacks family.
Learn about the inequity of HeLa profits, including how HeLa cells for sale are for commercial profit and not the Lacks family.
Learning About HeLa Cells for Sale
In 1975, a Rolling Stone reporter writing a story on the widespread contamination of cell lines with HeLa reached out to the family. He discovered that their understanding of HeLa was piecemeal at best and tried to explain cell science to them as well as he could.
At the time, no one besides Deborah was too disturbed by their mother’s cells’ wide spread. But that changed when Rogers’ story was published and the Lackses discovered that HeLa cells were not only distributed for free by nonprofit institutions but there were also HeLa cells for sale by commercial firms.
HeLa Cells’ Price and Profits
This revelation caused Sonny and Lawrence to believe that Hopkins and George Gey had gotten rich selling their mother’s cells. The truth, however, was that Gey was a terrible businessman and never rich at all: He patented neither the HeLa cell line nor the roller drum he created to culture cells—either of which would have made him a multimillionaire—and at times had trouble making payments on his modest house. And Hopkins has issued multiple statements asserting the institution has received no financial reward from HeLa cells for sale.
Microbiological Associates and Others Profit When You Buy HeLa Cells
Other entities, however, have made fortunes on HeLa cells for sale. Microbiological Associates, one of the first commercial cell culture companies and earliest sellers of HeLa, was later incorporated by two of the largest biotech companies in the world. One of these companies companies that incorporated Microbiological Associates, Invitrogen, sells HeLa-derived products for anywhere from $100 to $10,000 per unit. And if you go to ATCC, which still exists, you can buy HeLa cells’ cultures for $256 per vial.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks summary :
- How Henrietta's cells became used in thousands of labs worldwide
- The complications of Henrietta's lack of consent
- How the Lacks family is coping with the impact of Henrietta's legacy
