Statue of Henrietta Lacks, whose cells shaped modern medicine, to be erected in Roanoke

Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman whose cancer cells helped pioneer multiple medical breakthroughs, will have a statue built in her honor in her birthplace of Roanoke, Virginia. 

The statue will go up where the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee used to stand, according to National Public Radio. The Lee statue was taken down in 2020 after being vandalized during the Black Lives Matter protests that summer.

“This historical moment, occasion, has been a long time coming,” said Ron Lacks, whose father, Lawrence Lacks, is Henrietta’s oldest and only living child, according to London’s Guardian newspaper.

The bronze statue will be erected in October 2023 and will be placed in Henrietta Lacks Plaza, which was formerly called Lee Plaza.

Lacks was living in Baltimore, Maryland, when she died of cervical cancer in 1951 at just 31 years old. Before her death, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took a sample from a malignant tumor on her cervix and sent it to the lab for review.

Scientists quickly discovered that Lacks’ cells were unique. While most other cells would age and die, Lacks’ cells doubled roughly every day.

Johns Hopkins Medicine said that her cells — dubbed “HeLa” cells in reference to Lacks’ first and last name — have been used for advancements in cancer treatments and gene mapping and played a major role in the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines. 

While the hospital system said it never made any money from the discovery, Lacks’ family members didn’t know that their relative’s cells were harvested until decades later and claimed that Johns Hopkins did it only because she was a poor Black woman, according to BBC.