Henrietta Lacks (née Loretta Pleasant) was born in Roanoke, Virginia; she later became the unwitting source of the HeLa cell line.
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, to a poor African American family. After her mother died giving birth to her tenth child, Henrietta was sent to live with her grandfather on a tobacco farm in Clover, Virginia, where she was raised alongside her cousin (and future husband) David 'Day' Lacks.
Her early life was shaped by the realities of the segregated American South, where Black families like the Lackses labored on land once worked by their enslaved ancestors. Henrietta received little formal education, leaving school early to work the tobacco fields, a common circumstance for rural Black families of the era.
Though she could not have known it, Henrietta's birth marked the beginning of a life that would, through profound injustice, alter the course of modern medicine. Her cells—taken without her knowledge decades later—would become the foundation of the HeLa cell line, one of the most important tools in biomedical research history. Her story has since become emblematic of the intersections of race, poverty, medical ethics, and scientific progress in twentieth-century America.