, but lawyers for her family argued that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has continued to commercialize the results well after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.
"The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement," Crump said in a statement. Lacks was 31 when she died and was buried in an unmarked grave. A poor tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, she was raising five children when doctors discovered a tumor in her cervix and saved a sample of her cancer cells collected during a biopsy.
"The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history," the complaint reads. "Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism."