She is donating a portion of her book’s proceeds to the Foundation. Skloot founded the non-profit public charity, The Henrietta Lacks Foundation. She has published more than 200 featured stories and essays in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Discover, and New York magazine. A freelance writer specializing in narrative science writing, Skloot studied at college biological sciences for her bachelor’s degree and creative nonfiction for her master of fine arts degree. Rebecca Skloot’s first book is our common reading. The book is one of the best-selling new books of 2010, and appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list for more than two years, reaching the number one position. In May 2010, it was announced that Home Box Office (HBO) with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and producer Alan Ball plan to create a film version of the story. It has won numerous award and has been used for common readings at many universities. Skloot’s book covers the lives of Lacks’ five children and raises issues about racism, scientific ethics, poverty, and cancer, among others. HeLa cells were used to test the first polio vaccine in the 1950s, and since have been used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and more.
Cervical cancer cells were taken frin her prior to her death at 31 in 1951 without her knowledge for use in scientific research. Published in 2010, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a non-fiction book about a woman of the same name and her immortal cell line known as HeLa, derived from the first letters of her names. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-is 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 are made of. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review
“The story of modern medicine and bioethics-and, indeed, race relations-is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”- Entertainment Weekly.
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