Henrietta Lacks to be further immortalized with portrait at Baltimore City Hall

On the wall in City Hall next to the Board of Estimates room are tributes to great men in Baltimore's history: Portraits of Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall, Kweisi Mfume and Dr. Ben Carson, among others. Now a woman is about to join them. Today, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake plans to dedicate a portrait to hang there of Henrietta Lacks — the Turners Station woman whose cells have led to groundbreaking advances in medicine. "We have so many people in our city who have stories that are untold or certainly not remembered in the way that I think they should be," the mayor said. "She's one of those people. ... I'm proud to get to shine a light on some people whose impact has been enormous." Dr. Eva McGhee of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science is donating the portrait to the city. More than 60 years ago, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took Lacks' cells after she died from an aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951. The so-called HeLa cells, which were the first to live outside the body in a glass tube, have become ubiquitous in labs across the country and are the most widely used human cells that exist today in scientific research. Vaccines, cancer treatments and in-vitro fertilization techniques were all a result of Henrietta Lacks' cells. Lacks' story garnered national attention after Rebecca Skloot wrote a best-selling book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," which is being made into a movie by Oprah Winfrey. lbroadwater@baltsun.com twitter.com/lukebroadwater