Rebecca Skloot

August 25, 2011 Many colleges assign books that all incoming freshmen must read over the summer. A popular 2011 assignment is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, about a cell line taken without consent from a black woman with cervical cancer.

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On Talk of the NationPlaylist

March 18, 2011 In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died after a long battle with cervical cancer. Doctors cultured her cells without permission from her family. The story of those cells and of the medical advances that came from them, is told in Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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On Fresh Air from WHYYPlaylist

March 9, 2011 In fiction, Christopher Moore's goth teen countess returns, Ian McEwan merges marriage woes with climate change, and Lionel Shriver takes on the ailing health care system. In nonfiction, Deborah Amos describes the forced migration of Sunnis in Iraq, and Rebecca Skloot tells a story of immortality — of sorts.

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December 13, 2010 It was one of the most revolutionary tools of biomedical research: the immortal HeLa cell line. But few people know the cells belonged to a poor Southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks. Rebecca Skloot spent years researching Lacks and tells her story in The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.

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On Talk of the NationPlaylist

November 23, 2010 Some books aren't just great reads — they're great discussions, too. Critic Heller McAlpin picks the best literary conversation starters of 2010 — guaranteed to give you something to talk about.

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June 29, 2010 Bestsellerdom doesn't necessarily bring with it a promise of quality, so we've hand-selected five titles from the NPR Bestseller List: an acutely observed first novel with satiric punch, three works of fiction from established authors at the top of their game, and a startlingly powerful science thriller from a nonfiction newcomer.

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February 2, 2010 In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died after a long battle with cervical cancer. Doctors cultured her cells without permission from her family. The story of those cells — known as HeLa cells, in Lacks' honor — and of the medical advances that came from them, is told in Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Transcript

On Fresh Air from WHYYPlaylist

February 2, 2010 Things fall apart in Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag. A woman's gift to science yields medical miracles — and outrage — in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. What will America be like with one-third more people? A strangely optimistic answer in The Next Hundred Million. And a teenager traces down a tragic family mystery in The Girl Who Fell from the Sky.

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