"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."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/obituaries/dr-roland-pattillo-dead.html