Roland A. Pattillo, a gynecologic oncologist who had been treating and researching female cancers for decades, had long been haunted by the curious case of Henrietta Lacks, a young, impoverished Black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 yet whose cells lived on and made medical history.
They were known as the HeLa cell line, and they had been used to develop the polio vaccine, treatments for H.I.V. and other landmark medical advances. Like most medical researchers, Dr. Pattillo had known about the HeLa cells since he was a graduate student. As it happened, he had also been a fellow in the Johns Hopkins lab in Baltimore that had first cultured them, one of the few Black doctors working there in the late 1960s.
But unlike many other scientists, Dr. Pattillo was keenly focused on the fact that there was a human being behind those cells, and that she had left a family behind. For years he had wanted to honor her contributions to science.
In the early 1990s, when he arrived at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, a historically Black institution, to help start its residency program and direct its gynecology oncology department, Dr. Pattillo organized a symposium on the HeLa cells and dedicated it to Henrietta Lacks.
The topic that first year — it is now an annual event — was disparities in the survival rates of Black and white cancer patients. He successfully petitioned the mayor of Atlanta to name the date of the first conference, Oct. 11, 1996, Henrietta Lacks Day. And he was determined to involve her family in the event.
