A historic financial settlement is reached in favor of the descendants of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman cancer patient whose cell line has been used non-consensually in medical research for decades and generated massive profits for pharmaceutical companies while the family received nothing. The settlement is reached with pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher Scientific.
A decade earlier, the family also reached an agreement with the National Institute of Health to regulate access to the cell line through a review board that includes two members of the Lacks' family.