Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot is an American journalist, teacher and author specializing in narrative science writing. Her articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine and Discover, and she has contributed to Radiolab and PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW. With Floyd Skloot, she edited The Best American Science Writing 2011.

Her work brings scientific history into close contact with individual lives. Skloot writes lucidly about medicine while keeping questions of consent, ownership, privacy and racial inequality in view. That approach defines her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which took more than a decade to research and write.

Published in 2010, the book traces how cells taken from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge became the HeLa cell line, a crucial tool in medical research. It also follows the experiences of Lacks’s family, especially her daughter Deborah. The book received the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the young-adult category and was adapted as a 2017 HBO film starring Oprah Winfrey, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Rose Byrne.

Start with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It is Skloot’s defining work and a strong example of reported nonfiction that makes complex science understandable without losing sight of the people whose bodies and histories made that science possible.