Rebecca Skloot on the Hela Cell, at 5x15

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Rebecca Skloot on the Hela Cell, at 5x15

14 Jun 2010

Speakers: Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot is a freelance science writer and her talk focuses on her first book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the story of a poor, black tobacco farmer, Henrietta, and her extraordinary ‘HeLa’ cells. The book traces the story of the Hela cells; the first cells to be grown successfully inside a lab, and through this it explains much of the history of modern medicine and bioethics, as well as relating Henrietta’s story and that of her daughter Deborah. She ends her talk with a reading from her book depicting an emotional scene in which Deborah, in her mid-fifties, enters a lab and for the first time is actually able to see her mother’s cells, twenty five years after discovering her mother’s fate.