Re: “Commentary: Henrietta Lacks settlement is bigger than one family’s victory” (Aug. 6, Page D1):
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, I did tissue culture to study cancer, first in high school at Roswell Park Hospital in Buffalo, New York, then in college at St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
HeLa was the staple cell line, but we tried to acquire other immortal cell lines to better understand and manage cancer; economic value was never mentioned and, as with HeLa cells, any success would have been freely shared with other scientists.
As I presume with Henrietta Lacks, a sterile cup containing a portion of a tumor arrived in the lab labeled with name, sex, age and organ or anatomic location. We placed some in fixative for histologic classification and some in artificial media.
All vials were labeled with a combination of the first two letters of the first name and the first two letters of the last name. If I had been the source of a specimen, the vials would have been labeled “RoLu.” The process was blind racially and socioeconomically.
Robert Luke
Scarborough
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