HBO executives announced today that they have purchased the rights to Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 hit book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
According to the press release, Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball will serve as producers on the feature-length film adaptation of the book.
From The Washington Post‘s review of Ms. Skloot’s non-fiction tale:
Rebecca Skloot, an accomplished science journalist, became curious about Lacks at age 16 when a biology instructor shared her name and skin color but nothing else. Skloot’s book is the result of a decade of research that took her to a Lacks family cemetery where black descendants are buried atop white slaveholder relatives, to depressed Baltimore neighborhoods, to Johns Hopkins’s world-class medical research center and to Crownsville Hospital Center in Maryland, formerly the Hospital for the Negro Insane.
Skloot’s vivid account begins with the life of Henrietta Lacks, who comes fully alive on the page with her “walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips” — a woman who loved dancing and, in the words of her cousin Emmett Lacks, was the “sweetest girl you ever wanna meet.” Skloot goes on to reveal the complex emotional, scientific and legal issues that Lacks’s life engendered. Her cells lead a life of their own, from Gey’s research lab in Baltimore to the Tuskegee Institute and the for-profit venture Microbiological Associates (which became a part of the companies Invitrogen and BioWhittaker).
