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Rebecca Skloot’s debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took 10 years to write, but it rights some historic injustices, she says

Tell me about Henrietta Lacks, the inspiration for your book.

She was a poor African-American tobacco farmer from southern Virginia. In 1951 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Without her knowledge, her doctor took a piece of her tumour and sent it to George Gey, who was head of tissue culture research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Gey had been trying to grow human cells for decades and it had never worked. Henrietta’s cells became the first immortal cell line ever grown in culture, which means they live indefinitely in laboratories as long as you feed them and keep them warm. Henrietta died a few months later.

What, apart their immortality, made Lacks’s cells so important to medicine?

The cells, called HeLa, were used to develop the polio vaccine and went up with the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. They were the first cells to be cloned. Her genes were some of the first ever mapped. The scientific landmarks just go on and on.

Weren’t there ethical problems in using Lacks’s cells?

No one told Henrietta’s family the cells had been taken until the 1970s, when scientists went to her family, wanting to do research on them, to learn more about the cells. The book traces the history of modern medicine and bioethics, but also the story of her family struggling with the aftermath of discovering what happened to her cells.

One of the judges at last week’s prize ceremony described your book as being the story of “right versus right”, rather than “right versus wrong”. Can you explain?

That’s a great description. On the surface, it’s easy to hear the story and think: oh, the evil scientists who took cells from this woman without asking and did bad things to her family later. But it’s much more complicated than that. The science that was done with these cells was incredibly important, and in 1951 when the cells were taken from Henrietta without her permission, that was absolutely standard procedure. Researchers didn’t know in the 1950s what you could learn from someone’s cells. They didn’t know they would eventually be worth billions of dollars.

What was important to me in writing the book was telling all the sides of the story, showing that there are human beings behind every biological sample in the lab, but also showing there are human beings behind the science too.

Are you taking Henrietta’s story further?

There’s a film about her just getting off the ground. One of the producers is Oprah Winfrey. I’m a consultant on the movie and so are Henrietta’s remaining children. They’re really excited.

Your father, , is an acclaimed writer. Is there rivalry between you?

[Laughs] Oh no. There couldn’t be less of a sense of rivalry. It’s like the family business. We love to talk shop. He could not be more excited by it all.