Rebecca Skloot
1 book analyzed
Biography
Rebecca Skloot (born 1972) is a science journalist who first heard the name Henrietta Lacks in a community college biology class in 1988, when her teacher mentioned HeLa cells almost as an afterthought. The name haunted her for years. She began formal research in 1997 and spent a decade reporting — winning the trust of Deborah Lacks, accessing medical records, interviewing scientists, and learning cell biology from scratch. The book took ten years to write and was rejected by publishers before becoming a New York Times bestseller in 2010. Skloot used proceeds from the book to establish the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which provides educational and health funding to the Lacks family and others whose biological materials have contributed to science.