What can the legacy of Henrietta Lacks teach us about medical AI?

In the 1950s, Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman from Baltimore being treated for cervical cancer, and cells from her treatment were cultured and sort of disseminated and propagated without her explicit consent.

This led to a cell line that was used for biology, for biomedical research, and as well as commercial applications.

The relevance to what this looks like in terms of medical AI is that that incident is really a legacy of thinking through what consent looks like, what research on identifiable or de-identified data looks like.

I think the thing that really was interesting to us is what could we learn between that incident and the modern scope of generative AI, large language models, and how these are being incorporated fairly rapidly into clinical medicine.

In the 1950s, Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman from Baltimore being treated for cervical cancer, and cells from her treatment were cultured and sort of disseminated and propagated without her explicit consent.

This led to a cell line that was used for biology, for biomedical research, and as well as commercial applications.

The relevance to what this looks like in terms of medical AI is that that incident is really a legacy of thinking through what consent looks like, what research on identifiable or de-identified data looks like.

I think the thing that really was interesting to us is what could we learn between that incident and the modern scope of generative AI, large language models, and how these are being incorporated fairly rapidly into clinical medicine.