Authors Series
• Registration

Award-winning
science writer Rebecca Skloot discusses her new book

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

7 p.m. Tuesday,
February 16, 2010
at The Wistar Institute
3601 Spruce Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

• Free and open to the public.

•The Joseph Fox Bookshop will provide books for sale at the event.

About the Book: Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. 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, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years.  HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.  Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live, and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

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. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. 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.

About the Author: Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning writer, and a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW, and her writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Discover, Columbia Journalism Review, Prevention, and many others. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will be published by Crown, a division of Random House, February 9, 2010.