Officials in Roanoke, Virginia, announced this week that the city will put up a bronze statue of Henrietta Lacks next year, in a plaza that used to house a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Lacks was originally from Roanoke; she died in 1951 when she was just 31, in Baltimore, from cervical cancer. While she was being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the only hospitals that admitted Black patients, a gynecologist took a sample of Lacks's cancer cells without her permission or knowledge, and sent them to a lab. Unlike most of the cell samples collected at the time, Lacks's cells kept living and dividing, which meant they could be cultured and reproduced over and over again for use in medical research.

Would have been nice if someone had thought to ask Lacks or her family for consent, but it was the '50s and the medical establishment wasn't especially concerned with "informed consent" for women cancer patients (at the time, doctors might tell a woman's husband the diagnosis but withhold it from the patient herself). White researchers took even fewer ethical considerations if the patient was a poor Black woman. But wow, how about that cell line, called "HeLa" cells, for the first letters of Lacks's first and last names.

Lacks's life, the history of the HeLa cells, and the ethical mess were the subject of Rebecca Skloot's 2011 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and if you somehow haven't come across it you really should try to fill that gap in your reading as soon as possible. Skloot's book led to posthumous recognition finally going to Lacks and to her family. HeLa cells have been widely used in medical research, were the first human cells to be cloned, were used to map the human genome, and were also used in developing the vaccines for polio and for COVID-19.