![]() She smuggled “pets” into the house, including a rat that she hid in her closet. As a young girl she opened a surgery ward in her bedroom for her stuffed animals. Skloot’s love affair with creatures great and small runs deep. But as she worked on the Lacks project, a separate book idea never entirely receded, Skloot said, one that combined her passion for science with another obsession: animals. Her father’s illness - what turned out to be a virus that had attacked his brain - fueled her interest in science and research and her obsession with Lacks. “There I was, as a kid, just sort of watching this happen to my father and being in the room for all of it.” It was a traumatic experience for a loving daughter. With her new driver’s license, Skloot took him to weekly appointments where doctors would test his stamina by making him run to the point of collapse on a treadmill, or check his balance by having him crawl around on all fours. Looking for answers, he enrolled in a clinical trial. “He just became this stationary, what seemed to be a dying person in our living room,” recalled the author, who is currently researching a new book as a visiting scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. ![]() Skloot was born to write.”Īs a 16-year-old, around the same time she learned about Henrietta Lacks’ cells, Skloot saw her father decline from marathon runner to “completely incapacitated,” unable to walk, with almost no memory. A Times reviewer called it “one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time … it feels like the book Ms. race relations, and part history of cell technology, “Henrietta Lacks” struck a deep cultural nerve. Part detective story, part family saga, part portrait of U.S. The book took her more than 10 years to research and write and she still crisscrosses the country to talk about it, often alongside members of the Lacks family. The book shot up The New York Times best-seller list soon after it was published, in 2010, the success a reflection of its astonishing story and of Skloot’s attention to detail and drive to get the facts right. ![]() In 1988, when Rebecca Skloot first heard the name of the woman whose cancerous cells had become “immortal,” thriving in research labs around the world long after killing their host, little did she know she had found the story of her life - or one of them, as it turns out.īy now, many know Skloot as the author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” The book paints a vivid picture of Henrietta’s life, and recounts how her diseased cells, taken without her knowledge or consent, helped advance some of the greatest breakthroughs in medical science long beyond her death in 1951. ![]()
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