Mud, Microbes, and Medicine

How a Curious Anthropologist Got to the Boardroom

Elizabeth Reed Aden

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9798896360391
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Black-and-White Figures
• Color Plates
• Foreword by William W. Donner, PhD
• Prologue: Freedom
• Chapter One: Culture Quakes (Santo and Penn)
• Chapter Two: M-Day—Landing on Avunatari Beach (Malo)
• Chapter Three: A Dilemma Dissipates
• Chapter Four: Island- and People-Hopping
• Chapter Five: A Leap of Faith
• Chapter Six: Two Many Men and Just One Woman
• Chapter Seven: I Get Around
• Chapter Eight: From Crushing Blow to Gushing Flow
• Chapter Nine: Plan B Is for Blood
• Chapter Ten: Drop by Drop
• Chapter Eleven: Writing—Four Ways
• Chapter Twelve: Alone and Adrift—Casual Sex Is a Bad Buoy
• Chapter Thirteen: Christmas Chasm
• Chapter Fourteen: Changes—A Wrong Leads to a Rite
• Chapter Fifteen: Revisions, Revelations, and Respect
• Chapter Sixteen: Milestones and Millstones
• Chapter Seventeen: You Can Go Home Again
• Chapter Eighteen: Changes in Latitudes and Attitudes
• Chapter Nineteen: Infection Connection
• Chapter Twenty: Politics, Profits, Schemers, and Scammers
• Chapter Twenty-One: Audacious Advances in Academia
• Chapter Twenty-Two: War Zone Escapades
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Independence and Insurgents
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Detours off the Express Lane
• Chapter Twenty-Five: White Cells, Red Cells, and the Blues
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Career Paths—This Way, That Way, Another Way
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Family Matters
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Just Say Yes to Drugs
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: It’s Basel, Not Basil, Not Basal
• Chapter Thirty: From Berkeley to Basel
• Chapter Thirty-One: Beyond Drugs and into New Medical Frontiers
• Chapter Thirty-Two: How Incredibly Strange to Be Seventy
• Chapter Thirty-Three: Malo—Reflections and Reminders
• Epilogue
• Appendix I: The Geography
• Appendix II: HBV Epidemiology and Biology
• Appendix III: Epidemiology Observation Formats: Written and Checklist
• Appendix IV: Interactors with Infant by Stage of Development
• Appendix V: Serology and Epidemiology Results—Development of Chronic Carriers
• Bibliography
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Looking for your next great read?