This phenomenal New York Times bestseller 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. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance. 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, and more. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Post by Curator of Education & Engagement, Laurel Lamb. Watch video testimonials at Readers Talk.The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Share your story and join the conversation on the HeLa Forum. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I've read in a very long time …It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart.” See the press page of this site for more reactions to the book.
Dwight Garner of the New York Times said, "I put down Rebecca Skloot's first book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," more than once. It has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviews appearing in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Science, and many others. It has won numerous awards, including the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and two Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year and Best Debut Author of the year. News and World Report it was named The Best Book of 2010 by and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. The Immortal Life was chosen as a best book of 2010 by more than 60 media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, O the Oprah Magazine, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, People Magazine, New York Times, and U.S. She has been featured on numerous television shows, including CBS Sunday Morning, The Colbert Report, Fox Business News, and others, and was named One of Five Surprising Leaders of 2010 by the Washington Post. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot's debut book, took more than a decade to research and write, and instantly became a New York Times best-seller. You can read a selection of Rebecca Skloot's magazine writing on the Articles page of this site. She and her father, Floyd Skloot, are co-editors of The Best American Science Writing 2011. She has worked as a correspondent for WNYC’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. She specializes in narrative science writing and has explored a wide range of topics, including goldfish surgery, tissue ownership rights, race and medicine, food politics, and packs of wild dogs in Manhattan. Rebecca Skloot is an award winning science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine O, The Oprah Magazine Discover and many other publications. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? - Tom Nissley
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Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution-and her cells' strange survival-left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive-even thrive-in the lab. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible.