Speaker David 'Sonny' Lacks

Cuyahoga Community College will host David “Sonny” Lacks at 6:30 p.m. March 29 in Room 112.  Lacks is touring the country talking about his mother, Henrietta Lacks, and her contributions to modern medicine.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951. The HeLa cell line has become a crucial tool of modern medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.  It is the oldest and most commonly used human cell line in the world.

Lacks will shares what it meant to discover that his late mother’s cancer cells were being used in laboratories around the world without the family’s permission. He also discusses several issues including the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics and the legal battles over “informed consent.”