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Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer, and author of the New York Times Bestselling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It tells the story of HeLa -- the first immortal human cell line ever grown in culture (pictured in the blog's banner) -- the woman those cells came from, and the family she left behind. The book has been featured on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, CBS Sunday Morning, The Colbert Report, and many others. To see those segments and find information, reviews, book special features, and more, visit her website. Skloot is also a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine; she's worked as a correspondent for WNYC's RadioLab, and PBS's Nova ScienceNOW. Her writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Discover and others.
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July 8, 2010
Category: Housekeeping • News
Please redirect your browsers to Culture Dish's new home, where we've just put up the inaugural welcome post. There you will find an RSS to subscribe to so you can follow Culture Dish wherever it goes next (which we very much hope you'll do).Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 3:37 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
July 7, 2010
Category: Bioethics • Housekeeping • News • Personal
As I said yesterday on Twitter, a big conflict of interest and transparency problem has arisen on ScienceBlogs. Like several other bloggers here, I'm now on a hiatus, however like like David Dobb's and Blake Stacy's, my hiatus from ScienceBlogs will be permanent. I've been contemplating a move from ScienceBlogs for a while for several reasons, but PepsiGate has sealed the deal for me. Several of my ScienceBlogs colleagues have summed up the situation well, including PZ Myers, GrrlScientist, and Brian over at Laelaps. For a full recap of the issue and other ScienceBloggers' responses, see this post from today's Guardian. For a clear explanation of the ethical problems that make it so I will no longer be affiliated with Science Blogs, see this from the Knight Journalism Tracker: "ScienceBlogs Trashes its Bloggers' Credibility."Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 1:13 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 2, 2010
Category: Book Related • HeLa • HeLa FAQs • Publication News and Followups • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 10:32 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 1, 2010
Category: Bioethics • Book Related • Women and Science
A press release landed in my inbox today with this headline, which raised my eyebrows (as it was obviously intended to do): "First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb." It starts with this quote from Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University bioethicist: "This is the first we know in the history of medicine that clinicians are actively trying to prevent homosexuality." The release was announcing the publication of a piece at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum titled, "Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? -- it was written by the same authors that started quite a stir recently over one researchers use of vibrators in follow up exams with young girls to test whether their clitorises worked after he'd surgically altered them. Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 4:50 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 31, 2010
Category: HeLa • Publication News and Followups • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks • Women and Science
Anyone interested in Henrietta Lacks and the grave marker finally placed on her long unmarked grave this weekend should click here immediately for a beautiful post by scientist David Kroll, who attended the unveiling ceremony. It's filled with beautiful photos of the day, and a tribute to all Henrietta's cells did for science. His photo below shows Henrietta's new headstone in much sharper detail than the one I posted yesterday with the text of the inscription. Visit his post for many more photos of the ceremony, the graveyard, and Henrietta's family.
Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 3:19 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 29, 2010
Category: Bioethics • HeLa • Publication News and Followups • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks • Women and Science
Today is a very exciting day: Henrietta Lacks (aka HeLa) has been lying in an unmarked grave since her death in 1951. Today, thanks to Dr. Roland Pattillo at Morehouse School of Medicine, who donated a headstone after reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her grave is finally marked. Below, a snapshot of some members of the Lacks family beside the new marker for Henrietta, and the marker for her daughter, Elsie, which was also unveiled today. Dr. Roland Pattillo is pictured at the far left:
Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 4:39 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 13, 2010
Category: Bioethics • Book Related • HeLa • Publication News and Followups • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Things have been a bit quiet here as I finished up my crazy
four-month-long book tour, and there's much to catch up on. First, some big news just in: Oprah,
Alan Ball, and HBO are going to be making a movie version of my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This news has gotten quite a bit of
coverage on Twitter and elsewhere, with me fielding questions about the movie,
and various folks voting on who should play which character in the film (not
that I have any control over such things, but it's still fun to think about).
The combination of Oprah, Alan Ball, and HBO is nothing
short of a dream team for me.
I've always been a huge fan of everyone involved, and I think HBO is the perfect home for this movie. Several
people have asked why I went with HBO instead of a big screen major
motion picture version, and there are several reasons. HBO makes some of the best and smartest movies
out there these days, particularly when it comes to complex true stories that
mix science, ethics, and real human stories. Check out You Don't Know Jack, the recent HBO film starring Al Pacino as Jack Kevorkian,
and Temple Grandin starring Claire Danes, to name just a few of the most recent examples. It was very important to me that the
film find a home that would do justice to the family's story, the
science, and the scientists -- I have no doubt HBO, Oprah, and Ball will do
just that. And the Lacks family and I will be involved along the way: We'll be consulting on the film. As Ball said in a recent interview
about the HeLa movie, "This is going to be a journey that we'll all remember for the rest of
our lives." I'm very excited for it.
Photo captions: Pictured above left: Oprah.
Pictured above right: Alan Ball.
Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 9:05 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 6, 2010
Category: Bioethics • Book Related • HeLa • HeLa FAQs • Science Writing • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks • Women and Science
I'm posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog. In my last FAQ post, I told the story of how I first learned about HeLa cells at sixteen. A related question I often get has to do with this one sentence in the book's prologue: "I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler's class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost."
Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 9:17 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 5, 2010
Category: Bioethics • Book Related • HeLa • HeLa FAQs • Science Writing • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks • Women and Science
I mentioned a while ago that I'll be posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog. Posted by Rebecca Skloot at 2:22 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
PZ Myers 07.29.2010
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Ed Brayton 07.29.2010
