(§1*) “Forewords & Reflections”
[*Excerpt from Where Does A Body Begin? (2025) by MeltdownYourBooks]
Where Does A Body Begin? was published in the final weeks of 2023, and the principal writing was completed between late 2022 and mid-2023, but some pieces date to 2021, perhaps earlier. Though presented as contiguous, it's more appropriate to think of it as a Frankensteinian work–whether it evokes Boris Karloff or an actual assemblage of rotted, disjointed parts I leave to the reader. Originally based on a series of essays written in 2022 with the less catchy, but perhaps more accurate title of Capitalism’s Ontology of the Gene, this book took form entirely by accident. As I was writing the third part of the series, I began to feel the scale ballooning, and more importantly, the content was suffering from the constraints of online essay publishing. This, in conjunction with a period of inactivity in my PhD studies and the appearance of a publisher with whom I was interested in working, sparked an unexpected flame, the thought that I could write a book.
I had never written a book, and I had never thought what doing such a thing would entail. What was important about that idea was the opportunity to draw a throughline through the many things I had written over the past few years, both published and unpublished, which had been an outlet for the frustrations of a working scientist (considering the time away from my studies to write, it maybe a partially-working scientist).
These essays, fragments, notes, and messages were laid out in a reasonable progression, as I hoped to find that each piece would complement another, locking together like puzzle pieces. This took just a few hours, but accounts for around a third of the text. I recall in my early conversations with Becoming Press, after presenting the first draft, that they told me the text was far too short to actually be printed. I hadn’t even considered it, and I was frankly deeply embarrassed. Looking back, I’m surprised the second comment wasn't about the absurd textual density and overuse of footnotes. Another third of the text was added over the months as connective tissue to join ideas together without introducing new concepts. I don’t know much about other people’s writing process, so I can’t speak to the commonality of this collage approach, but it provides meaningful context.
Written at various universities over the Biden administration, the COVID-19 pandemic and post-emergency, and a time of substantial biomedical industry growth, this wide spread of time and place situate this work. The book was primarily aimed at my immediate scientific peers who were overly optimistic about the potential of private research, and at their belief in the impartiality and apolitical dimensions of science, and for a lay audience that was encountering dialogue on politics of science for the first time under the banner of Dr. Fauci and vaccine hesitancy. Much of this book exists as a warning about the fundamental changes begotten by private infiltration into public research, and on the inherently political character of science.
Trump, in the fashion of Napoleon III (1848-1870), accelerated these secretive contradictions into a full-blown crisis in the short months following inauguration, a farce in his favor. Though I was tempted to create a foreword consisting of just one sentence, ‘I told you so,’ this crisis merited overcoming jokes. This text, though woefully inadequate for the current world and deeply flawed in execution and content, is prescient. With this foreword, I am afforded the rare opportunity to hone exactly which parts are so prescient and set them up as key in the mind of the reader, before you read the following bricolage, to take idle musings written before the crash and turn them into a concrete theoretical tool.
To that end, I needed to sort out what exactly that tool should be. If I had been given some god-king position in science (or just biological research) in 2020, what would I have done? Taking those changes as the goal, what would I advocate for in this real moment?
Hypotheticals like this evoke an overwhelming anxiety in myself and remind me why I write essays instead of policy, but they are a common pastime of scientists since Trump. The head of my department shares ‘what he would do’ at any available instance; there is rarely a conversation which avoids it. As in any job, when things are going badly, what ‘corporate’ is doing is a major discussion topic. Anecdotally, having explained my book to American scientists in the final years of the Biden administration, and after the start of the NIH freeze, reception has significantly improved. The idea of talking about science instead of just doing it has re-emerged in the consciousness of a sector which has been on autopilot for a very long time.
So, what is to be done?
Where Does A Body Begin? starts with an anecdote about the University of Colorado, which was then deepening its ties to the expanding private industry park on campus. The anecdote was not intended as a history of the University, or even a summary of University strategy concerning biotech (I even made some errors in my history in the first edition), but as a personal experience to situate a discussion of the ties between public and private research in contemporary biology. The Anschutz campus, however, provides a vignette of biomedical thought in the US over the past century, a history that proves useful for exploring the book’s primary themes.
Originally, Anschutz Medical Center was a rather unremarkable military hospital, Fitzsimons General Hospital, founded in 1918 with a focus on tuberculosis. The hospital was almost abandoned during the early austerity of the Great Depression due to financial strangulation, if not for the intervention of the Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration within Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Appropriated for an immense $4 million in 1937, construction began on the largest building in Colorado and the largest yet built by the US Military. The hospital was completed just five days before WW2, and as the war’s casualties began to swell, the campus rapidly expanded to become the largest hospital in the world. After the war, and following the introduction of public health measures which curtailed tuberculosis, the need for this sprawling complex slowly eroded, and the hospital struggled to validate its existence. By 1995, the campus was listed for decommission by the federal government.
The State and the City of Aurora, however, had come to depend on the thousands of jobs created by the hospital and searched for ways to keep the campus operational. This was split into two initiatives, one heralded by the University of Colorado, which wanted to expand its cramped medical program closer to the state capital of Denver, and the other led by the Fitzsimons Innovation Campus, to serve as a private research park for health and life science companies. In the thirty-plus years following CU’s move and the opening of FIC, the situation has changed dramatically. The ballooning biotech industry has become a major fixture of Colorado’s economy, resulting in a perpetually-expanding FIC campus, and the CU healthcare system (UCHealth) has become the number-one employer in the state, employing over 25,000 people, following a period of exponential growth underpinned by the integration of acquired hospitals, aggressive debt collection, illegal price inflation, and falsifying records to secure federal funds.
The campus itself was renamed in 2006 after oil billionaire Philip Anshutz in 2006, who converted his father’s drilling company into a multi-industry empire, and who donated $91 million in 2006, a record-breaking $120 million in 2018, and a further $50 million in 2023. Phil, a notable christian conservative, is mostly known publicly for advancing christian media and donations made to conservative think-tanks, including Heritage Foundation (authors of the highly scrutinized Project 2025). It's an open secret that there are certain things which are not pursued by the campus, lest they scare the golden goose, but his donations fund the ceaseless campus expansion. It was here that my original anecdote sits.
The story of this campus is the story of the health sciences in the West in miniature. The public health initiatives of the early 20th century, peaking with the Keynesian reformations of the 1930’s, slowly emaciated until they were blended into private industry ventures by the onset of the 21st century, just in time for the exponentially growing and extracting healthcare industry of the contemporary moment.
If I was handed control of biomedical science, it would be difficult to disentangle the hundred-year history at the bedrock of even this singular research campus. There are vested interests in the workings of this campus that range well outside ‘science,’ and they are not limited to the players in our Anschutz story: public policy, war, philanthropy, commerce.
As someone who creates computational methods and programs for researchers, and as someone who uses methods developed by other scientists, it is not just the scientific rigor or methodological quality that influences scientists' decision to use a particular tool for their investigations. Ease of use, social precedent, and aesthetics are deeply implicated as well, and make our work much more complicated. When making a new method, there are often discussions on ‘how do we convince people to use something new?’ and ‘how can we make this easy for novices to use?’ not to mention making ‘professional’ figures, logos, and websites. Expand this complexity to a medical campus employing thousands, and it becomes daunting to change the ways in which science is done here. The social reasons for everything that scientists do, and the organizations they have made, are deeply connected to their historical development, and it’s not immediately clear at any vantage point what's connected to what. Pulling on one thing may show hundreds of downstream tensions.
This has been the primary complexity of the Trump funding cuts to NIH and NSF. It’s not just a change in the funding of federal agencies that conservatives want, it’s a fundamental change to the system and its values. This amazingly complex system has struggled to adjust, yes, but the solutions unravel in unexpected and counterproductive ways (to this administration). If it were as simple as firing every ‘woke’ scientist, this would have been done by a conservative anti-intellectual decades ago. Money flowing through federal grants are only one source for academic funding, but they are also fundamentally linked to other aspects of academic research institutions. Cuts don’t just hit the intended ‘bad’ research, since universities build strategies around all the grants they receive (including for admissions and the creation of new departments) and balance research goals with many things not directly related to federal funding (outreach, PR, private donors, state funding, internal directives, etc). Additionally, universities can’t just ‘cut’ researchers for a variety of reasons (tenure, research that appeals to students, financial need to fill labs/departments/teaching positions); universities are not fashioned like companies and therefore are not prepared for quick employee turnover. Shooting down a particular kind of scientist pulls everyone down with them. Science is a dense cobweb of things, and there's no way to clear a portion of it without utterly destroying the whole web. To evoke a charged example, the Nazi curtailment of certain kinds of science and scientists mostly achieved a crippling of the center of global science and academia.
The second problem, perhaps the bigger one, is that contemporary scientists are essentially professional grant writers and funding hounds. Their entire professional role has become searching for funds, and so they are highly trained to obfuscate, mask, reposition, and diversify their research to avoid whichever ‘woke’ word cuts are directed at. At my program, a department for the re-positioning of investigators hit by cuts turned HIV researchers into general infectious disease investigators (and so on). If Trump’s cuts are undone by his successor, these researchers, who have not gone anywhere, will likely slot right back into their previous work. I do not say this to belittle the immense harm that Trump’s cuts do, but to emphasize that the system of science is not so simple as federal purse strings. While you can make wide-ranging claims of changing universities and enact financial sadism on an entire field, none of this has effectively changed how science is done. The primary effect of Trump’s cuts has not been a change in the policies of academic institutions, but a contraction in their growth. This is where I struggle with the god-king hypothetical.
What I hope becomes apparent is that my frustrations don’t boil down to ‘more money to this field and less money to that one’ or ‘more public research funding and less private funding.’ In fact, this book’s thesis, if it has one, is that science is a central organ of society, one that creates and distributes power but which is so deeply connected to all its other organs as to blur the line where one begins and another ends. Scientists who are unaware of this will find themselves in the storm of the comings and goings of all those other organs. They will find themselves part of a scientific apparatus that is more than capable of cutting HIV research or creating exorbitant designer medications for the sake of extractive health care. They will be, and in fact are being used, because their ignorance is an abdication of their control over the system at large.
What was most striking to me about the NIH cuts was not that Trump so aggressively targeted minority-focused research, but that so many scientists would react by proclaiming it a ‘politicisation’ of science. Wasn't the point of doing research on racial disparities, queer health, or public health to influence and enact political change? Now that the door is wide open, let’s talk about ‘politicisation.’ Let’s see where politics begins and science ends. Where exactly does the body begin?