Hello and welcome to the Double X Book Club for Thursday, June 17th. This is Hannah Rosen. I am the co-editor of Double X. I'm here in the Washington studio with her friend Margaret Talbot from the New Yorker who is joining us today.

Hi there. And we have Emily Bazelon, the other editor of Double X and a Slate Editor in New Haven.

Hi, Emily.

Hey, guys.

Today we will be discussing the immortal life of Henrietta Lax, which is written by science

reporter Rebecca Sclute, who's a sometimes slate writer.

And this is a book about a woman named Henrietta Laax, who is the source of what are known as

Heela cells, which are used to do a lot of scientific research.

And it's kind of an amazing story about the life of Henrietta Lax and also scientific experimentation.

They have used these cells for years and years in scientific research, but they never really

told her family.

So what author Rebecca Sclute does is track down various members of her family and thus unfolds an amazing scientific

story and also a human story. I will just start by saying I thought this was a like a masterful

work of nonfiction. I mean, there are, you know, we know the nonfiction masters like, you know,

say Michael Lewis. His books are always very artfully constructed or sort of Susan Orleans in which they're very sort of beautifully written. This, I think, works on the strength of its reporting. But the way she unfolds the story, I mean, the way she tracks down members of the family, I thought was really quite masterful. Emily, do you want to say a little bit about kind of how the reporting unfolds and what

happened, sort of how the book is structured and what we discover along the way?

So Rebecca, I know her just a little bit.

I guess we could call her scloot throughout this.

Yeah, go ahead.

Rebecca.

Rebecca starts by telling us that in high school, her biology teacher first mentioned

the notion that there

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