#1 NEW
YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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, 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.
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.
The author
Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science
writer, whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The
Oprah Magazine; Discover; and others. She has worked as a correspondent for
NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW, and is a contributing editor at
Popular Science magazine and guest editor of The Best American Science Writing
2011.
She is a former Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle and has taught creative nonfiction and science journalism at The University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University.
Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than ten years to research and write, and became an instant New York Times bestseller.
She has been featured on numerous television shows,
including CBS Sunday Morning and The Colbert Report. Her book has received
widespread critical acclaim, with reviews appearing in The New Yorker, Washington
Post, Science, Entertainment Weekly, People, and many others.
It won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Wellcome
Trust Book Prize, and was named The Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com, and a Best
Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York
Times; Washington Post; US News & World Report; and numerous others.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is being translated
into more than twenty languages, and adapted into a young adult book and an HBO
film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot lives in Chicago but
regularly abandons city life to write in the hills of West Virginia, where she
tends to find stray animals and bring them home.
She travels extensively to speak about her book. For more
information, visit RebeccaSkloot.com, where you will find book special
features, including photos and videos, as well as her book tour schedule, and
links to follow her and The Immortal Life on Twitter and Facebook.