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Worst-Case Scenario
In Mud, Microbes & Medicine, you share your life with readers from an early stifling marriage to your success in Hepatitis B research and your rise through biotech and global pharma leadership. Did writing the memoir change how you understand your own past decisions?
The pivotal episode in the book was one I had never told anyone about because I was both embarrassed and ashamed. In being open about it, I realized that it was an event that changed both the trajectory and the dynamics of my relationships with men. Other than that, having a psychiatrist mother and spending years seeing a psychiatrist—at my mother’s insistence—made many things pretty clear.
Your time in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) is both humorous and deeply serious. What did that experience teach you about the gap between expectation and reality?
I learned to always plan for the worst-case scenario and then be grateful and pleasantly surprised when the experience is more positive than what I expected. Furthermore, there is no need to plan for a best case since that always works out well.
How do you hope readers—especially those in science or at turning points in their lives—feel after finishing the book?
I hope they feel encouraged to explore and to ask questions until they are satisfied and fully understand the situation or the experiment. My professor step-father told me that when I could convey a complicated concept clearly and concisely, then, and only then, did I understand it. I also hope that they will have the courage to speak up until they find someone who will listen and consider what they’ve found without bias. In my experience, senior management is much more receptive to new and different ideas than is middle management.
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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.
