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.

Editorial Review

No Editorial Review Currently Available

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.

“Oh, please,” I replied. “I am done with this!”

Penis envy was neither novel nor interesting. My mother, who was also a Freudian psychiatrist, had gratuitously psychoanalyzed me and my friends for the past ten years. I didn’t need a husband doing exactly the same thing. At twenty-one, I wanted to go out with friends and have fun. I wanted life to be enjoyable. Furthermore, I thought life should be enjoyable. But I felt trapped by his expectations.

I’d married at nineteen because it seemed like a good idea. My mother was married at that age and had me two years later. Paul was cute, from a prominent family, and starting his internship—all in all, a good catch. Then we moved from Berkeley to Cincinnati, and he started his psychiatry residency and brought Freud home.

One evening, when all the Ohio universities were closed for the remainder of the spring semester after the Kent State massacre in 1970, we had Paul’s fellow psychiatry residents over for dinner. During dessert, Paul took a telephone call. Once he left the room, I said, “I had the most amazing dream last night. It was so vivid and real. Would you like to hear about it?”

“Yeah, tell us,” the residents enthused. Their eyes were fixated on me.

I chose that moment to savor another spoonful of ice cream and slowly withdrew the spoon from my mouth. “Snakes. I was asleep in my bed and then aroused from my slumber by these big gray-and-orange snakes coming out from under my bed and slithering . . .”

I had their attention. There is nothing Freudians love more than someone sharing their inner thoughts. I was making it all up, throwing in everything I had absorbed over the years and embellishing my “dream” with symbols I knew they would relish.

“Tell us more, Betsy!” they begged.

“Well, there were dragons, too. They were eating the snakes when out of the cave came  . . .” I paused for effect. “Do you want to know more?”

Of course they did. I piled it on until Paul returned.

In the psychiatry department, divorce was a career-killing move for a young resident. The rationale was, “If you can’t control your wife, how can you counsel other people?” Divorce was thought of as a serious character defect. My “dream,” shared with his colleagues, was my parting gift to him.

“She was totally out of it!” they’d say, and then add under their breath, “Definitely neurotic, maybe even psychotic.” They would tell everyone that I was crazy, and what a relief it was for Paul to be rid of me.

A few days later, I returned to California. I found a lawyer who served Paul with divorce papers, but not until I made sure I was financially secure. Just before we were married, I’d hit the jackpot when my great-aunt Maybelle died.

My maternal grandmother had been the only one of her siblings to have children. Her father had invested every spare cent he earned into buying stock in the fledgling company where he worked. The American Telephone & Telegraph Company’s (AT&T) stock did well over the ensuing seventy years. On the death of his last surviving child, Maybelle, his portfolio was put in a trust to be shared equally between my mother’s and my uncle’s children.

On my twenty-first birthday, I received a quarter of my inheritance, including a lump sum of $10,000, which I considered a fortune.

“If you deposit that check into our joint account, it will prove you love me and are committed to our marriage,” Paul had said.

“I love you, but my mother says it is my separate property,” I replied.

“If you don’t share it, I’ll think that means you plan to leave me.”

“I don’t plan to leave you.” So I proved it by putting the money into our joint account.

Upon leaving Paul and arriving in San Francisco, I created a new bank account, in my name only, and transferred my inheritance into it. Then I called Paul, with twenty-four hundred miles between us, and courageously announced, “I’m getting a divorce.”

A day later, he called back. “I checked our joint account. You robbed it. You stole ten thousand dollars.” He was angry and called me a thief. If taking your own money back to escape a marriage that gave you nothing made you a thief, then, sure, that was me!

At twenty-one, I had the freedom and the resources to explore and see where life and opportunity would lead. I didn’t know where it would take me. I was ready to step into the unknown on my own.

Join me on this adventure.

Chapter One: Culture Quakes (Santo and Penn)

From the air, Espiritu Santo, the largest island in New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), seemed like an endless deep-green mass, a wealth of different types of trees. Wooded and seemingly impenetrable, there were groves of coconut trees, banyan trees, mangrove swamps, and countless types of incredible, dense foliage.

The white landing strip was made from crushed coral, and as we approached, I could see people shooing cows away from the grass adjacent to the runway—for sure, I wasn’t in the United States anymore! It was gloriously sunny. Outside of the terminal, casually dressed people waited for the six of us to disembark. There was no bustle at this tiny airport. A small concrete structure provided shelter if it was raining, and there was no baggage claim.

The last to depart the small twin-engine death trap, I stepped off the Islander and collected my stuff. My hosts were waiting for me on the airport apron. In my elegant khaki Safari Barbie ensemble, wearing my red backpack and clutching my brown canvas shoulder bag filled with tetracycline, I made my way to meet John and Karen. John was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania doing archaeology fieldwork on Malo Island. I feigned my best American-in-paradise persona but tripped as I walked toward the couple.

“Hi. It’s so good to meet you!” I gushed. I studied Karen and then congratulated her. “You’re pregnant!” I exclaimed. “How lovely!”

“No,” she informed me. “I’m just fat.”

I smiled my way through it but died inside. Not a good start, Betsy, not a good start.

The situation was defused when John suggested that we all go for lunch. We took a taxi into town to La Fief, a casual French restaurant. The first course served was a green salad.

“I’m not supposed to eat salad,” I told them, thinking of the many health warnings I’d been given before my trip began—don’t eat uncooked vegetables, never touch unpeeled fruit, never drink the water, and remember, ice contains water.

“Don’t worry. It’s fine,” John replied. “You can eat everything—ignore the scaremongering. Trust me.”

They were alive and looked healthy, so I did. All the rules went out the window with that first bite of crisp butter lettuce coated in oil and vinegar. I ate the salad; I ate everything that was put in front of me and waited for the diarrhea to arrive within the next twenty-four hours. It didn’t—I had taken my cue from the “locals” and survived.

Culture Shock 101

How and why did I spend the summer of 1973 on a remote island in Melanesia, followed by seven additional trips over the following forty-six years? This die was cast when I opened a letter from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dear Miss Dickie:

I am happy to be able to inform you that we can offer you admission to the PhD program in Anthropology in this department starting in September 1971 without financial aid.

The eldest of four children, I am the sole daughter of my parents, each of whom was married four times. My three brothers and I span twelve years, have three different fathers, and grew up in two separate homes, but we share a common stepfather. Complicated? I’ve just begun. My maternal lineage is graced with high achievers. Great-grandmother Mary won the title of Checker Champion of Boston. Her daughter Minnie passed the Massachusetts Bar in 1921. Minnie’s daughter Marilyn, my mother, was one of three women to graduate from the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine in 1956. Then there is me. Grad school was a long shot.

[more follows….] view abbreviated excerpt only...

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?

Weblinks

»	Author's website
»	Reader's favorite Book Review
»	Literary Titan book review
»	For the Love of the Page Blog

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

There are no user reviews at this time.
Rate this book