Introduction

For fans of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Lab Girl, an arresting memoir that chronicles a young woman’s journey from remote island research to Big Pharma and the boardroom.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Aden, a twenty-something anthropology student, is clinging to academia as a safety net—until she’s offered a grant to spend the summer on a remote island in Melanesia, famously home to cannibals. Adventure calls, and Betsy doesn’t hesitate. Once she arrives, though, reality hits: no running water, no electricity, and no Western medicine. Inspired by her experiences, Betsy returns to school with a new perspective and changes her field from cultural anthropology to biomedical anthropology. Driven by a new purpose, she returns to Melanesia for two years to study the transmission hepatitis B and sets up an ingenious field laboratory to collect and test blood samples.

Back at home, resourceful and determined Elizabeth successfully navigates the complicated “boys club” of academia. She explores teaching and advertising and finds a fit in biotech from which she builds a career in Big Pharma. That choice, along with her tenacity and willingness to take risks, propels Elizabeth on a meteoric rise to the senior executive suite in a large Swiss company and into the boardrooms of scrappy biotech companies.

With electric detail and candid honesty, Mud, Microbes, and Medicine is a testimony of resilience and resolve in the face of challenges so large and unimaginable, you will wonder how Elizabeth’s story could even be true.

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Excerpt

Prologue: Freedom

“Betsy, you have penis envy,” Paul informed me, quite seriously, one evening. Throughout the early days of our marriage, he constantly told me I was doing something wrong or what I said was stupid. This was the last straw. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

First Impressions
1. The book opens with a young woman escaping a stifling marriage and landing on a remote Pacific island with very little idea of what she's gotten herself into. What was your first reaction to Betsy as a protagonist? Did you like her immediately, or did she grow on you?
2. Reviewers have called this book "eight delightful books fused into one." By the time you finished, which of its many stories — the anthropology, the child-rearing, the science, the corporate world, the political history of Vanuatu — surprised you most? Which did you enjoy the most?
3. The memoir uses humor throughout—how does this affect your engagement with serious topics?


Safari Barbie Meets Melanesia
1. Betsy's arrival in the New Hebrides has been described as a "culture shock"—she was unprepared for the physical and human reality of the island. What was the funniest or most cringe-worthy moment of her naïveté? Did it remind you of any fish-out-of-water experience in your own life?
2. Would you have taken the same leap into such an uncertain, physically challenging environment? Why or why not?
3. Betsy learns that fieldwork requires something clinical training doesn't teach: the patience for trust to be developed in order to solve a problem at a deeper, non-superficial, level.. Has there been a moment in your own life where you had to earn your way into understanding something, rather than simply study your way in?
4. What did you learn about the hepatitis B virus that surprised you?


The Science of Paying Attention
1. What did you learn about the hepatitis B virus that surprised you?
2. The hepatitis B breakthrough—understanding that transmission was happening through intimate everyday caregiving behaviors—came from watching how people actually lived, not from laboratory analysis alone. What does that discovery suggest about the limits of conventional scientific method? Does it change how you think about medical research? Did it change how you think about global health, scientific research in developing countries?
3. The book makes the argument that science without cultural context is blurry. Can you think of examples from your own experience — in healthcare or elsewhere — where the "official" answer missed something obvious to anyone actually watching people's lives?
4. Betsy's "Lessons Learned" sections end each chapter. Did you find them interesting? What lesson from the book would you add that she didn't?

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