Buckeye Book Community 2012-2013
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

About The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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, in vitro fertilization, 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.

Skloot takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 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. It’s a story 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’re made of.

David Lacks and Rebecca Skloot to visit campus!

David "Sonny" Lacks
October 2 at 7:30 p.m.
Mershon Auditorium

Rebecca Skloot
October 17 at 7 p.m.
Mershon Auditorium

Registration and tickets

First-year students: register on the success series webpage beginning August 20.
General public: We are currently out of tickets for the Rebecca Skloot lecture. If you would like to be put on a wait list for tickets, please send your request to Daniel MacKenzie at mackenzie.35@osu.edu. Please include how many tickets you would like for the event.

About the author and the book
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. 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. She has worked as a correspondent for WNYC’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. She and her father, Floyd Skloot, are co-editors of The Best American Science Writing 2011.

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. 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 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. News and World Report. It was named The Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. 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. It has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviews appearing in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Science, and many others.

Skloot lives in Chicago but she regularly abandons city life to write in the hills of West Virginia, where she tends to find stray animals and bring them home.

Additional links:

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks official webpage: rebeccaskloot.com
• The Henrietta Lacks Foundation: henriettalacksfoundation.org
• Follow Rebecca Skloot on Twitter: @RebeccaSkloot
• Follow the Buckeye Book Community on Twitter: @BuckeyeBook
• Follow First Year Experience on Twitter: @OhioStateFYE

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