#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "The story of modern medicine and bioethics-and indeed race
relations-is refracted beautifully and movingly."-Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION
PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE "MOST INFLUENTIAL" (CNN)
"DEFINING" (LITHUB) AND "BEST" (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF
ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS • WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times
Book Review • Entertainment Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Financial Times • New York •
Independent (U.K.) • Times (U.K.) • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews •
Booklist • Globe and Mail 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 which 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 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. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown buried in an unmarked grave.
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. Over the decade it took to uncover
this story Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta's
daughter Deborah. 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? 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.
