The name of Henrietta Lacks will be forever memorialized in an East Baltimore building named in her honor. Ground was broken on Monday, with members of the Lacks family, leaders of Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine, and elected officials present to bear witness.Lacks was a Baltimore County woman diagnosed with cervical cancer in the 1950s. She was treated at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, but treatment was not successful, and she died in October 1951. Without her knowledge or consent, however, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital had given samples of her cancerous cells to a researcher, who discovered her cells had a unique capacity to reproduce and survive rendering them essentially immortal.Lacks was a Black woman, and Hopkins hospital was one of the few that treated Black people at the time. But the result of that treatment yielded a different sort of racial injustice that impacted her family for decades.Her cells were shared widely and were the basis of myriad advancements in modern medicine, including the fields of cancer, immunology, and infectious disease. Most recently, HeLa cells were used in the research to develop vaccines against COVID-19.For decades after her death, her cells were used without her family’s consent by companies who profited from them through scientific research. Yet the scientists would reveal her name publicly, distribute her medical records, and make money without passing any of the profits back to the Lacks descendants. Over the last decade, many scientific and medical organizations have begun working with the Lacks family to attempt to remedy that harm.Johns Hopkins is one of those institutions. While Hopkins never sold or profited from HeLa cells, they did offer the cells for research. On their own website, they write,“Johns Hopkins applauds and regularly participates in efforts to raise awareness of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks. Having reviewed our interactions with Henrietta Lacks and with the Lacks family over more than 50 years, we found that Johns Hopkins could have – and should have – done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks’ family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests. Though the collection and use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells in research was an acceptable and legal practice in the 1950s, the laws protecting research subjects have evolved. We at Johns Hopkins have been supportive of legal changes since 1951 that protect research subjects, and we are compliant with these requirements, including those related to informed consent.”At the groundbreaking, Theodore DeWeese, dean of the medical faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, focused on Henrietta Lacks, the person, not the unwitting cell donor.“Today is not about those immortal cells, as important as they are,” DeWeese said. “Today is about immortalizing the name of the woman from whom those cells came. It is about ensuring that her name and her unknowing role will always be remembered by all of the students, by all the residents, by all the other trainees, by the faculty, the staff who walk into the building that’s going to rise on this plot of ground.”The new 34,000-square-foot building will be on the east Baltimore campus adjoining Deering Hall, the home of the Berman Institute of Bioethics. It will support programs of the Berman Institute, Johns Hopkins University, and the School of Medicine. There will also be classroom space, flexible programming space, and space for community use.“Today we make a concrete commitment to ensure that Henrietta Lacks’ name will be as immortal as her cells,” said Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels. “When the Henrietta Lacks Building rises, it will be a vibrant, multidisciplinary site of learning, discovery, and dialogue that will facilitate community-oriented medical research and nurture the next wave of progress in the study and promotion of research ethics. We look forward to a building that will do justice to Henrietta Lacks’ transformative legacy, and we offer our heartfelt thanks to the members of the Lacks family for their generosity of spirit in lending this building her name.”Among Lacks’ descendants who were present at the groundbreaking was her great-granddaughter JaBrea Rodgers.“Today we recognize not just her cells, but her humanity,” Rodgers said. “My great grandmother was a mother, a wife, and a friend. While we cannot change the injustices of the past, we can however ensure her legacy is known and celebrated. As we look to the future of this building, let it serve as a symbol not only of scientific advancements, but of the ongoing journey towards recognizing the humanity behind every discovery.”