Live Science: Did you see yourself as a character in the story when you were writing it, and did that change when you became involved with the film adaptation? And together, they paint this really rich picture. I didn't want the movie to be a Cliffs Notes version of the book - my hope was that it would be a companion piece, that it and the book would exist in a way that added to each other. There are things in a movie that visually would convey a very powerful message, that would take me many pages to convey in a book, and would feel very different. One thing about film is how much can be conveyed in a split second between two characters where nothing is said - or just a facial expression on a really good actor - and the emotions that can evoke. There's a lot in the book that couldn't be in the film - I had 400 pages to flesh out the whole story - but the things you can show on a page are definitely different than what you can show on the screen. Skloot: There are things movies can do that books can't do, and vice versa. ![]() Live Science: Are there parts of Henrietta's story that emerge more clearly in the film, because it's a more visual medium? This is one of the only known photos of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in Baltimore, Maryland in 1951, when she was 31 years old. And during filming, me and over one dozen Lacks' family members visited various locations on set, and they would let us watch. I provided audio tapes from my research process so the actors could listen to characters for their scenes. We talked with actors - several members of the family and I spent time with Oprah. I didn't want the movie to add to that, to fictionalize in a way that would add to lack of clarity about who she was and what her legacy was. Part of the story of Henrietta and her family is the misinformation that was put into world - with the family not involved, her name incorrect, various stories that weren't true. I thought it was really important that the story stick as close to the facts as possible without being overly fictionalized. One of the reasons I was comfortable doing the movie with HBO in the first place was they were open to having me and the family involved. ![]() I've read drafts of the script, offered feedback on it as it evolved, helped with research and developing characters along the way. Rebecca Skloot: I'm a consultant on the film - so are some of the members of the Lacks family - and I've been involved from the beginning. ![]() Live Science: What was your role in the process of adapting your book to the HBO movie? It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine of scientific discovery and faith healing and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. Made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells-taken without her knowledge in 1951-became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa.
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