Henrietta Lacks was 31 when surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital took a sample of her cervical tumor in 1951, and nobody asked her first. She died that October. The cells taken from her never stopped dividing, and they became the first human cell line to grow indefinitely in a laboratory, used in research for three-quarters of a century since.
Seventy-five years on, her name is on a lecture series and on a research building. Her grandson Ron Lacks, who is the executor of her estate, says the family is still not consulted about either. On Thursday, October 8, 2026, four days after the anniversary of her death, he wrote that he had asked for a book table at the 16th annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture and had been refused. “Johns Hopkins is holding the Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture this Saturday. I asked for a book table. They said no,” he wrote. “After all these years, the Estate is still not consulted about events held in her name.”
He went further than the table. “I am her grandson and the executor of her Estate. What do you all think about that?” he wrote. And then: “They are waiting for family members that give a damn to die.” He said his father died three years ago.
Johns Hopkins Medicine describes the relationship differently. “Johns Hopkins Medicine is honored to work closely with the Lacks family every year on this impactful symposium,” said Kim Hoppe, the institution’s vice president of public relations.
Hopkins began the annual lecture in 2010, the year Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks drew new attention to the case, and it broke ground in 2024 on a multidisciplinary research building named for her on its East Baltimore campus. It has said it never sold the cells and never profited from them, and it was not a defendant in the estate’s cases. Several family members attended the lecture on Saturday, October 10, 2026.
The money has moved without Hopkins in it. The estate reached its first major settlement, with Thermo Fisher Scientific, in 2023. It reached agreements with Novartis in February 2026 and with Viatris in March 2026. A case against Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical is still open.
So two things happened in the same week. A building is going up in East Baltimore with her name on the front of it. Her grandson asked for a table at a lecture with her name on it, and was told no.
