International Women's Day

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel]

My Lords, many of you will have heard of HeLa cells, but perhaps not. HeLa cell lines are human cancer cell lines that were first grown in 1951 and which, 60 years later, are still growing in laboratories worldwide. They have been and still are used for research into finding cures for diseases. Research using HeLa cells has led to the development of vaccines for polio and the treatment of cervical cancer, to name only two areas. The cells are also used to treat diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, leukaemia and many others. Some 18,000 patents have been registered using modified HeLa cell lines, and have provided industry with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. Several Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists who used HeLa cells for research. Each and every one of us has benefited from cures for and the prevention of disease as a result of research on HeLa cells.

HeLa cells are so called because they were originally obtained from Henrietta Lacks—without her consent. She died at the age of 31 from an aggressive form of cervical cancer in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. She was a black woman descended from slaves. She was born in poverty, lived in poverty, was uneducated and, being black in the southern USA, was treated as an inferior human being. A few months before her death, she attended Johns Hopkins Hospital because she felt a growth and was suffering pain. The doctor who saw her took two specimen samples of tissue from her growth—one was for pathology diagnosis, the second he passed to a scientist carrying out research in growing human cells outside the body. Most cells obtained from other tissue samples died after a few days, but not Henrietta Lacks’ cells. Their number doubled within 24 hours and kept doubling, even in subsets, every 24 hours. They have been doing that ever since for the past 60 years. Tons of HeLa cells have been grown in laboratories worldwide over the past 60 years. Henrietta Lacks was recognised last year by a tombstone near where she might have been buried—no one knows exactly where she is buried.

It is time for humanity to pay back the debt to Henrietta Lacks. How? Every two minutes in the world a woman dies of cervical cancer. More than 500,000 women develop cervical cancer every year, the majority in countries in Africa and Asia. To a majority of young girls in the world, a cervical cancer vaccine to prevent that disease is not available because it is too costly for those countries to buy and set up programmes such as those we have here. There is an opportunity for us to do so today, and the Minister, without any cost to the UK Government, could launch a UN fund to which we should all contribute—including the industry, which has made billions of dollars in revenue. We should launch a global Henrietta Lack fund to treat women with cervical cancer and prevent it developing.