Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot is a science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; Columbia Journalism Review; and many other publications. She has explored a wide range of topics, including goldfish surgery, tissue ownership rights, food politics, and the perils of packs of wild dogs in Manhattan, and her essays have been widely anthologized. She is also a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine, and has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her debut book, took more than a decade to uncover and instantly became a New York Times best-seller. The book was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick for Spring 2010, and Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times: “Provocative…one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a long time … It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart.”

Skloot’s best-seller tells the story of a poor Southern tobacco farmer, Henrietta Lacks, whom scientists know as HeLa. She 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.

Rebecca Skloot takes audiences 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. Though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Skloot so brilliantly demonstrates, 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.

Skloot served for eight years on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, where she was a vice president and judge for their yearly book awards. In 2006, she launched Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle. She now blogs at Culture Dish, hosted by Seed Magazine.

Skloot holds a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She financed her degrees by working in emergency rooms, neurology labs, veterinary morgues and martini bars. She has taught in the creative writing programs at the University of Memphis and the University of Pittsburgh; she’s also taught science journalism in NYU’s graduate Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. She currently teaches writing workshops and gives talks on subjects ranging from bioethics to book proposals at conferences and universities nationwide.

Skloot divides her time between several cities she loves: Memphis, New York City, and Portland, Oregon. And she regularly abandons city life to write in the hills of West Virginia, where she tends to find stray animals and bring them home.