ABOUT THE BOOK

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.

Made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

On September 19, 1972, Rebecca Skloot was born to Floyd Skloot and Betsy McCarthy in Springfield, Illinois. Skloot, an award winning narrative science writer, earned her B.S. in biological sciences f

rom Colorado State University and an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh. A creative writing teacher and a science writer contributing to various publications, Skloot became well-known after her New York Times bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published. She founded The Henrietta Lacks Foundation and continues to be actively involved as president. Rebecca Skloot cur

rently lives in Chicago, Illinois, but she travels frequently to give talks on various subjects and to write in her West Virginia home.