For my first trip I would receive a “super-dose” of ketamine intravenously while having my brain scanned in a 3-Tesla fMRI machine. Unless I was lucky, in which case it would be a high dose of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), lying between the large rings of a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner. This was the psychonautical equivalent of a three-star Anthology meal at the Fat Duck, or a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh by the Berliner Philarmoniker, if the meal were eaten standing up in an airplane toilet, the concert heard over the mêlée of Black Friday on Oxford Street.

Ketamine: special K.

“It’s a mong for end-stage burners,” said Palmer, techno DJ and medicinal gourmand. “I could play Abba and no one would clock it.”

“It’s a horse tranquilizer,” said my drug-naïve mum. “Those Thai soccer boys took too much and got stuck in a cave for days.” (She’d only heard about the Netflix documentary.)

“I think the rescue team gave them it to stop them panicking, Mum.”

“It’s a Swiss Army knife,” said an anesthetist colleague, “used off- label as an anti-inflammatory, for pain relief, for neuroprotection, as well as an anesthetic in surgery and critical care.”

I’d also read about anti-aging hacks in California “playing” with mega-doses that led to a complete collapse in space–time coherence, a few minutes stretching out to a “felt” century. I would be catheterized for the best part of an hour. It might be that the first human to live 5,000 years (me) had recently turned fifty and already had flattening arches and an arthritic hip.

These perspectives layered my ketamine “set”—my “priors,” to use the jargon of the neuroscientist, meaning the beliefs one holds before any experience has taken place, and the tendency for those beliefs to shape the experience itself.

The study was being conducted by Imperial College’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, an international leader, and one of the first groups to be established with seed money from the philanthropist/ investor/podcaster/author Tim Ferriss, of The Four-Hour Work Week, The Four-Hour Body and The Four-Hour Chef, fantasies of compression enabled, I imagined, by the 4,000 years he’d spent exploring these things in psychedelic space-time. I had just received the patient information sheet (PIS), following a two-hour interview with one of the research assistants that had covered my psychological history, my educational history, my relationship history, my drug and alcohol history. And this was just the pre-screen.

In the days to come I would have a formal clinical interview lasting several hours with a consultant psychiatrist. It made sense to be careful about who one loaded in the barrel of an MRI scanner and shot into unimagined realms. In most psychedelic trials there were general criteria for “healthy”: no history of suicidality, psychoses, bipolar, personality disorders or long-term drug addiction. And for this particular trial there were extra criteria: that I was both ketamine-naïve and hadn’t been near psychedelics in three months, the latter being why I had elected to make ketamine the first of my ten trips.

The PIS was long, detailing every stage of the investigation in language that was supposed to be accessible to the layman to ensure the study’s safe passage through the ethics committee. It didn’t begin promisingly: “Detecting synaptogenesis induced by Ketamine/ Dimethyltryptamine and motor learning using the tracer [11C] UCB-J in an integrated PET-fMRI paradigm.”

“The brain’s ability to reshape and make new connections during adulthood,” it continued, “is essential to our ability to learn new skills and form and access memories. This process, broadly described as neuroplasticity, can be disrupted by many different factors and is increasingly believed to be centrally involved in a number of mental health disorders and cognitive impairments.”

This related to the “synaptogenesis” part of the title. New experiences may be registered in the brain by the generation of dendritic spines which sprout, tree-like, on one end—the dendron—of the neuron. The language of neuroplasticity is infused with the metaphor of the tree: the sprouting is called “arborization” after the Latin; under high magnification the dendrites look like foliage.

New Age psychedelic therapists like the recently disgraced Françoise Bourzat take the metaphor a stage further, seeing in the images of tripping brains anatomical symbols of the plants or mycelial (fungal) networks that inspire them. To the more circumspect this might be no different from getting high and seeing the profile of Donald Trump’s quiff in wispy clouds.

Most neuroscientists would think of both as examples of pareidolia, the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous sensory pattern. Bourzat’s gloss on ancient human-plant synergy works less well for ketamine, which has no botanical basis but was developed in 1962 in a Detroit lab owned by a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer: a little more difficult to romanticize than Mazatec mushrooms and Amazonian vines.

Neuroplasticity has for decades been one of the most popularized areas in neuroscience, long predating the current interest in psychedelics. “Rewiring” has become part of the vernacular of life coaches, football managers, schoolteachers and mobile apps. (One might describe its recent ubiquity as the “Joe Dispenza Effect,” after the chiropractor-turned-neuroplastic guru.)

Plasticity is seen as a “hack” allowing us to acquire new skills and knowledge, change old patterns or “priors,” re-think ourselves. (Today Joe’s tweet reads: “To create a new personal reality—a new life—we must create a new personality. We must become someone else.”) This mode of understanding makes it inevitable that plasticity and psychedelics are saddled together: two “new” instruments of improvement, passwords for the near-limitless possibilities of self-transformation, couched in the sexy-sounding language of neuroscience.

Keen to learn something of what might be about to happen to my brain, I run a Google search for “evidence of imaging of synaptogenesis.” It yields little. A few lead-in adverts (dictated by the engine’s plastic algorithm) for how to train your brain to give up sugar or “speak proper grammar,” then a low-res black and white clip lasting a few seconds that resembles the beginnings of cinema: dendrites like tiny forks of lightning across a night sky, appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again, until they stabilize. This was arborisation alright, but in larval jellyfish.

In clinical neurology, the field I work in, there’s a different emphasis on neuroplasticity. It’s understood not as “growth” or “transformation,” but as the mechanism of repair or compensation after devastating injury. The tone is different too, of course: more circumspect, less certain, at least as far as hard evidence goes. The effects of plasticity are seen clearly on brain scans taken at different intervals after a traumatic injury, for example, but its mechanisms, and the extent of its capacity to restore the injured brain, remain vague. At present there are no commonly used drug interventions with the power to significantly promote it.

But it remains a term in daily use. Every trauma patient will, after they are sufficiently reoriented in space and time, be given a basic lesson in the brain’s ability to heal itself: that the restoration of lost speech, a paralyzed leg, amnesia, an altered personality, depend on old pathways being restored, or compensatory pathways being forged. Some patients make complete recoveries, many don’t. Most clinicians cite two years as the length of the window in which such changes might be seen in the adult brain. A few make it longer, three to five years; a few are more conservative, confining the window to eighteen months.

In the absence of detailed evidence, this becomes a matter of convention rather than science. It’s also clinically strategic, something to give the patient and her family hope, the motivation to rehab, to keep emotional devastation at bay for as long as they remain “in” the window. In this context plasticity is often more a matter of faith than science. It’s also a way of distracting everyone (including the clinicians) from the terrible reality of how little can be done medically for the patients, how a significant percentage of their recovery remains in the lap of the gods. Then the window closes.

The PIS continued, “In depression, connections between regions involved in cognitive, emotional and memory processing appear to be weaker, and the brain’s ability to form new connections in these regions also seems to be reduced.”

Imperial is now widely known for psychedelic imaging in the field of mental health. Since the first wave of research there in the Fifties and Sixties, advanced neuroimaging technologies have been developed which can map the effects of psychedelics on specific areas of the brain.

One of them is the default mode network, a collection of structures in the mid-brain associated with mind-wandering, remembering the past and planning for the future—all those self-referring thoughts that demand their thinking. Another is the salience network: interconnected regions of the brain that select which stimuli are deserving of our attention. Some kind of dysregulation in these networks is thought to be associated with the experiences of “meaninglessness,” the negative appraisals of self and mental rigidity that are symptomatic of clinical depression.

To date, much of the neuroimaging research has depended on observing general changes in levels of activation across these networks following psychedelic treatment. Plasticity, which happens at the level of individual neurons, has been inferred rather than observed directly. The Imperial study I was being screened for aimed to take this a stage further. Combining fMRI imaging, which offers the precise location of activated areas, with PET scans, which allow any changes to be tracked across time, the intention was to observe synaptogenesis as it was happening. As per the PIS, “there is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that ketamine’s antidepressant action may stem from temporary enhancement of neuroplasticity in important areas.”

A quick search of the literature suggested that most of the “growing” evidence was indeed inferred rather than directly observed, based on changes to larger patterns of brain activation or to neurochemistry. The only other evidence comes from animals: a couple of studies reported growth of dendritic spines in rats. But there are limits to translating rodent psychiatry: however grim it might be to spend your entire, brief life confined to an environmentally impoverished cage, the rat cannot be meaningfully diagnosed with depression or other human mental health conditions.

The lack of direct evidence reflected something of how provisional and callow much of the neuropsychiatric research on psychedelic therapy was. Even so, the current study was groundbreaking, using state-of-the-art technology in a clinically relevant area of investigation, and at the “hard science” end, compared to the vast majority of therapeutic research. It would also be eye-wateringly expensive: running scanners over multiple sessions with all the adjacent tests and staffing requirements meant the cost, even with a cohort of fewer than ten volunteers, would run into the high six figures.

The finance and science of psychedelic medicine are complexly entwined. In 2013 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated a variant of ketamine a “breakthrough therapy” on account of its apparent ability to reverse the acute symptoms of “treatment-resistant” depression. This led to a pharmaceutical arms race, the details of which were explained to me by Josh Hardman, founder of Psychedelic Alpha, one of the most reliable sources of financial information and commentary on the nascent psychedelic “sector.”

“Ketamine has been used ‘off-label’ for a number of years in the treatment of depression,” he told me, “but according to the calculus and playbook of pharma there’s little ‘defensibility’ in these cases: it’s not patented in any meaningful way for these uses, so there was no prospect of digging a meaningful IP moat around it.”

This changed in 2013 when the pharmaceutical company Janssen decided to use what Hardman called a “textbook procedure from the pharma playbook” to bring a variant of ketamine to market with patent protection. It chose one variant, s-ketamine (or “esketamine”), and partnered it with a specific drug-delivery mechanism, in this case a nasal spray. They then sought and achieved patent protection from the relevant government body on the intranasal administration of esketamine in treatment-resistant depression, under the trade name Spravato.

In other words, certain design choices that had little to do with empirical evidence allowed them regulatory exclusivity on their variant and permitted them to market it as a “new chemical entity.” This type of “innovation,” commonplace in the broader pharmaceutical industry, is, Hardman suggests, now entering the psychedelic sector.

But Janssen ran into significant problems with the health economics of its “invention,” as the price was forced up to $6,785 for a month of treatments twice a week. “Remember,” explained Hardman, “ketamine, unlike other psychedelic interventions, is associated with ‘temporary’ changes in neuroplasticity; meaning that its prescription has a different economic model than ‘one-off’ treatments.” Then, he went on, there was the fact that there was little long-term evidence for its efficacy. “Some experts, like former FDA reviewer Erick Turner, were flagging that even the more short-term data showed only modest efficacy and raised some concerns over patient safety.”

These factors have meant that even if Janssen is able to convince healthcare systems that it has a product with a novel mechanism of action, the cost and lack of evidence make it very difficult to produce a convincing economic case for a health authority, especially in the U.K., where NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) has a cost-effectiveness requirement for recommending treatments for the NHS. Meanwhile, Hardman told me, Canada had flat-out refused to grant Spravato data protection, the Canadian court finding that it did not warrant the designation of “novel compound.”

Such limitations do not obtain in the U.S. The FDA’s initial approval of esketamine involved loosening its definition of “treatment-resistant depression.” Previously this diagnosis had been restricted to those who had tried two classes of antidepressant medication (there are several, including SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics). It changed this to mean any two different pills: i.e., it could be the same class of antidepressant, as long as over the course of their depression history the patient had taken two different brands. Given the whims of prescribers and patients, this sets a very low diagnostic threshold.

Despite this, the initial FDA approval remains, and much of the subsequent clinical research has adopted the same criteria for treatment-resistant depression. Even with such low-hanging fruit, Hardman told me, Spravato has not quite been the blockbuster Janssen had hoped for, though it remains lucrative by most standards, just not by pharma standards: by 2029, Global Data predicts, it will generate world sales of approximately $383 million.

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Excerpted from Ten Trips: The New Reality of Psychedelics by Andy Mitchell. Used with permission of the publisher, Harper Wave. Copyright 2023 by Andy Mitchell.

I’m going to give you the bad news first. The distances between stars are so large that they might be impossible to routinely cross. Sure, maybe you send robot probes that reach their target in two hundred years (and then you need another century or so for a message to get back). But the possibility that you, I, or anybody else can pop around to the best vacation planets in the galactic empire may simply be excluded by the laws of physics.

Or maybe not.

This is the kind of landscape we have to deal with when we try to navigate the question of aliens and interstellar travel. We absolutely, positively know the distances between the stars. We also know for certain that the universe imposes a speed limit when it comes to crossing those distances. What we need to do next is imagine, based on what we know about the structure of reality, how aliens might get around those limits.

If UFOs are spaceships from other star systems, then how might they (or us in the future) cross the great interstellar voids? The first thing we need to address this question is an understanding of just how big, big, biggity-big space really is (to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams). Yeah, I know you think you know how big space is, but trust me, it’s bigger. Every time I have to deal with these kinds of distances in my research, my capacity for freaking out at the scale of the cosmos (even our wee corner of it) is entirely and forcefully renewed.

Astronomers measure interstellar distances in light-years, which, I know, is confusing. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year and spans six trillion miles. That’s a six with twelve zeros after it—6,000,000,000,000 miles. You have probably walked a mile and driven thousands of miles. All this takes you through only the first three zeros. The other nine require a heroic feat of imagination. If you’re looking for a familiar comparison, it’s the same as traveling all the way around the Earth hundreds of millions of times. Imagine how many connecting flights and pointless waits getting stranded in O’Hare Airport that would imply.

Another way to understand a light-year is to consider the distance from the Sun to the edge of the solar system. If the Milky Way galaxy is our local city of stars, then the solar system is the house we were born in, and Earth is one room in that house. In 2006 we launched the fastest space probe ever developed, New Horizons, and sent it to Pluto, which can stand in for the edge of the solar system. The distance to Pluto is about one thousand times shorter than a light-year. Our solar system, where all human activity on planets and in space has played out, is a tiny fraction of a light-year across.

And here’s the real point to ponder: even though New Horizons was hurtling through space at 36,000 miles per hour, it still took about ten years to reach Pluto. From that factoid, we can conclude that it would take New Horizons at least twenty thousand years to travel a single light year. That’s a very long time, but it still doesn’t even get us all the way to interstellar distances. There’s nothing much out there at one light-year away. The Oort Cloud, where most of the solar system’s comets live in cold storage, extends out to around a light-year, so even out at this distance, you’re still technically in the solar system.

You have to travel around three more light-years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. A journey by New Horizons to that star would take around eighty thousand years, and most stars are way, way farther away than Alpha Centauri. The Milky Way galaxy is about a hundred thousand light-years across. Even if we stay in our local neighborhood, the distance to the nearest interstellar Starbucks has to be measured in hundreds or thousands of light-years. That would be tens of millions of years of travel time for our fastest space probes.

All of this serves to confirm that, yes, space is frackin’ big. If UFOs really are interstellar visitors, then these are distances they must routinely cross. These are also the distances we must learn to cross if we are to become an interstellar species, aliens to someone else.

Any attempt to traverse those distances runs into a fundamental fact about the universe. Nothing can travel faster than light speed. This is not just a fact about light. It’s a fact about the very nature of physical reality. It’s hardwired into physics. The universe has a maximum speed limit, and light just happens to be the thing that travels at it. Actually, any particle without mass (like light) travels at light speed, but nothing anywhere can travel faster.

This speed limit is so fundamental that it’s baked into the existence of cause and effect. The finite speed of light is what forces effects to come after causes like dishes shattering only after they get knocked off tables.

There may, of course, be more physics that we don’t know about that’s relevant to this question of interstellar travel. Still, this speed-of-light thing is so important to all known physics that if you want UFOs to be spaceships, you can’t get around it by just saying, “Oh, they’ll figure it out.” You gotta work harder than that.

Now let’s dig into the problem. Given these insane interstellar distances, how can we extrapolate from the physics we do understand to see how those aliens (or us in the future) might cross the cosmic void. We have a few possibilities:

Generation Ships: Depending on their biology, the life span of our hypothetical aliens might be shorter than the centuries-long journey required for slow sub-light-speed travel between stars. This is certainly the case for us. If you are awake the whole trip, you’ll be dead by the time you get there. One way around this dead-on-arrival dilemma is to have children along the way. You’ll still be dead, but your kids or grandkids or great-great-grandkids’ offspring will make it.

Generation ships (also called century ships) are one way that interstellar travel might be possible. Those ships would have to be pretty big, though, to carry an entire colony of space travelers. It would be hard to miss one of these if it pulled into orbit. Also, you might imagine that those grandkids would be pretty pissed off about having to spend their entire lives on a smelly space cruiser. Maybe the kids are the ones erratically flying the UFOs; that could explain a lot.

Cryosleep: Another obvious answer to the dead-on-arrival dilemma is to hibernate. Cryosleep technology would basically “freeze” the body’s metabolism (or at least slow it way down) for the duration of the journey. In spite of being a staple of science fiction, no one has come close to getting this to work for higher animals like mammals.

Still, it is the kind of solution that doesn’t require new physics to magically exist (maybe just new biology). Also, if “post-biological” machine-based life is really a thing (as we’ll explore later), then maybe some aliens switch to silicon-based digital form and this question of long timescales is not even an issue anymore.

Light sails: While no one has ever been blown down the street by a ray of sunlight, photons (light particles) do exert a force—a push—on matter. If you could extend a large enough sheet of material in space, you could use the Sun to propel you through space. The idea of such solar sails has been around for a long time, but in 2016 Philip Lubin of the University of California-Santa Barbara proposed using very powerful giant lasers rather than the Sun, to provide the light for interstellar sailing.

With a large enough ground-based laser, you could accelerate a sail in space (and a ship tethered to it), up to nearly the speed of light. This way you could cross the distance between nearby stars in years or decades rather than thousands of centuries.

The billionaire philanthropist Yuri Milner was so taken with this idea that he gave $100 million to development of a project called Breakthrough Starshot. It’s a long-term effort with a thirty-year timeline, because that’s how hard the technology will be to develop. The hitch for UFOs using this tech is that you need another giant laser in the target star system to slow you down if you want to stop and visit.

Wormholes: If the speed of light limits how fast you can travel through space, then the best solution for interstellar travel might be avoiding the through part of the problem. That possibility was one of the gifts Einstein gave us with his general theory of relativity (GR). In relativity, space is not an empty void. Merged with time into a single entity called space-time, it is like a flexible fabric that can be bent, stretched, and folded.

Wormholes are a kind of space-time tunnel that uses this folding to join two widely separated regions of space together. While such wormholes (a.k.a. Einstein-Rosen bridges) are most definitely allowed in GR, they are unfortunately unstable. Once a wormhole is formed (by whatever means, natural or otherwise), it will almost instantly slam closed. If aliens wanted to use wormholes to build a kind of galactic transit system, they would need to find something physicists call exotic matter. This is stuff that has true antigravity properties, that literally pushes space apart.

If aliens had and could control exotic matter, they could force the two mouths of a wormhole open and connect two distant parts of a galaxy. Before you get too excited, there’s a big hitch here. Exotic matter isn’t real. It’s just a term you can add to the GR equations. Include that term into formulas, and it changes how they behave. Hooray! But that doesn’t mean the term represents anything that actually exists in the universe. Still, that antigravity term is possible within the framework of relativity’s physics equations, so if exotic matter is more than a physicist’s pipe dream, maybe it could serve as the means for fast interstellar travel.

Warp Drives (aka Hyperdrives): Warp drives—or hyperdrives or frameshift drives or whatever you want to call them—are a staple of science fiction. If you want your characters to easily travel around the galaxy, just put a warp drive on their ship, and no one will ask any questions. If aliens could build a warp drive, they would once again be using the “fabric-of-space” idea from Einstein’s GR. The drive doesn’t push you through space from one place to another. Instead, it creates a “warp bubble” that stretches and then relaxes the space-time around you. You don’t travel through space faster than light; you warp and unwarp space itself faster than light.

While nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through space, space (i.e., space-time) can move at whatever speed it likes. The nice thing about warp bubbles is that, like wormholes, they are also theoretically possible in GR, as physicist Miguel Alcubierre showed in a famous 1994 paper. But there are, as you might expect, some really big problems with warp drives. Once again, you would need that nonexistent exotic matter.

Even more problematic is that warp bubbles may generate huge shock waves of high-energy gamma rays as they move along. Once you dropped out of warp, this blast of energy would fry everything in your path and sterilize any planet you were visiting. Not the best way to announce your arrival at a starport.

Quantum Mechanics: Quantum physics, our über-powerful theory of the atomic and subatomic world, is notoriously weird. In quantum-mechanics physicists are forced to talk about particles being in two places at the same time or two particles instantly affecting each other even though they’re on opposite sides of the universe. Even a hundred years after quantum mechanics became the most accurate, potent physical theory ever created, the basis for all our electronic miracles, we still can’t say we understand what it’s telling us about reality. Personally, I think that’s pretty cool.

What it means for interstellar travel, however, is that there might be something hiding in quantum mechanics that allows you to bypass GR’s apparent restrictions about space and time. Some folks working on merging quantum mechanics with GR into a theory of quantum gravity even believe that space-time may not be fundamental. Instead, it might emerge out of some deeper aspect of quantum reality.

So, yeah, quantum mechanics could have some tricks up its sleeve that a sufficiently advanced alien species might know about and exploit for interstellar travel. But be careful. Unlike the other items on our list, here we are certainly pulling hope out of our keisters. There is no physics here yet, other than waving at the passing quantum weirdness.

*

So that’s it. As far as we know (which may not be far enough) that’s all we or aliens have when it comes to physics and interstellar travel. Now, a good science-fiction writer might find other creative ways to imagine getting from one star to the next, but the list above pretty much exhausts what a scientist would propose based on what we know about reality (which is a lot). The important thing to know is that, in terms of experimentally validated physics, after the first two possibilities, Elvis has most definitely left the building.

To complete the picture, we can also ask how an alien interstellar drive technology might affect what they’re doing here. If they’re restricted to moving just at or below light-speed, that would limit their ability to build a galactic civilization. When it takes two hundred years to send a diplomat between two planets and no one lives more than a hundred years, you have a problem.

Yes, maybe you could solve that problem with cryosleep, but it would still take two hundred years for that diplomat to arrive. Much will have changed on the home planet during that time. Will there even be the same kind of government on either world by the time the diplomat gets there? And after the negotiations, it will still take another two centuries to deliver the answer. That’s a long time to wait for “They said, ‘Go to hell'” (or whatever).

All of this means that, if warp drives or other faster-than-light tech is not possible, then our ideas about interstellar civilizations may be very wrong. If no one can travel faster than light, maybe it’s every solar system for itself. In that case, you never get galactic empires, just individual planetary cultures. These cultures might send settlement missions out to cross the stars once in a while, but given the distances and travel times, even if those settlements succeed, they’d quickly diverge culturally from the home world. If this is what happens, then aliens visiting Earth are not representatives from some Zorgovian Galactic Federation with vast experience of many worlds and many cultures. Instead, they’d be one-offs, and we might be their first visit anywhere.

Now let’s stop and take a deep breath. Everything I’ve just spun out for you is a deep pile of speculation. It does, however, come from taking the science seriously. That’s what makes it so much fun to explore. Life always exists within constraints that the universe imposes on it. Technology can press against those constraints, but it won’t make the fact of the constraints go away. Engines need power. Machines break down. Any alien technology, no matter how awesome, will have to deal with those constraints, so now let’s ask what other kinds of super-advanced tech visiting UFO aliens might have in their toolkits.

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The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank is available via Harper.

The Groupon advertisement said these sensory-deprivation sessions relax the mind. They start by placing you at square one—stripped all the way down to your skin. A session starts with a shower in which the dirt and grime of the world is scrubbed and shampooed away. Next you step into the tank. It’s warmed to the surface temperature of human skin and has about one thousand pounds of Epsom salt dissolved into 220 gallons of clean water. The pods are nine times saltier than the ocean and everybody floats. When you’ve settled, now acclimated to the soft neon glow and atmospheric music inside the pod, press the button to turn off the lights. Stop the music. Close the cover. Float.

I try imagining I am drifting in the middle of the Dead Sea, under a starless sky, without the means to stop myself from floating away from the shore. When I stretch my arms, widely enough to pull the muscles between my shoulder blades, I feel nothing. The sensory deprivation tank doesn’t close in around me. It gets bigger and bigger until I am not sure where the water ends. I keep wiggling my fingers while thinking eventually they will touch something, anything, that will pull me back from the edge of panic. There is nothing to see in the blackness, no place to hold on to. There is only me trying to get free.

The actual Dead Sea is dying—falling into a series of sink-holes and evaporating into nothingness. Environmentalists watch for levels that indicate if soon the sea may be no more. The sinkholes have started to swallow buildings, fields, and roads and could easily swallow a human. The holes can suck a person into the lowest land point on earth, dropping them into abyss until maybe one day the salted shell of their bones finds its way back to the surface. A trolley, which transports tourists closer to the touch of water, has to extend its tracks as each year goes by because everything is receding. This will put more and more distance between human and sea until the buildings are just glimmers on the horizon. This extension adds to the great mystery of the disappearing sea because the connection between the world and the water seems severed. Solid ground continues to drown in what’s left, but everyone still floats.

There are plans being discussed to fortify the Dead Sea and stabilize it before it is too late—plans to bring it back to life. The hope is that by easing the amount of water diverted by Israel and Jordan the sea can rise once again. It is nearly impossible to comprehend how a sea disappears. It is not an ocean, but it is still bigger than my imagination. Many things have disappeared in our lifetimes, but this seems like too much. We as a species have driven flora, fauna, and ozone from the earth for the sake of our own comfort. But where does a sea go? Will it rain down suddenly from the sky when we least expect it? Will we drown when the weight of it splashes from the heavens? Will it find a home in another sea—raising the levels until even more land disappears? These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night—a sea starting to disconnect from the world and wondering why this matters to me in the center of Philadelphia.

*

In the tank, I mull over the word deprivation. How it ends softly at the purse of my lips and what it means. An act or instance of withholding or taking something away from some-one or something. I am withholding the weight of my body. I have taken away my sight. I am trying to forget the pressure of being. The water holds me aloft. It settles in the dip of my back and around the flare of my hips. I make angels in the ripple of it—slowly up and slowly down until the action of it begins to soothe me. I stop searching for the wall if only for a moment.

These sessions are supposed to allow you to disconnect from your troubles and reset. Like a baby coming into the world. Tabula rasa. Blank slate. A hard reboot. Some reviews laud these capsules of salted water as wombs. Perhaps a method to bring the floater back to long forgotten feelings of tranquility before being pushed out into noise and light. A reset. This is my third birth since 1978. I was premature then, and in the too still quiet of the tank I am thinking I wish for this gestation to be truncated too. I shimmy in the salty water, lapping the liquid over my naked skin and against the enclosure like a trapped fish.

I try to relax and expand my limbs until I’m splayed and nude in the tank. It doesn’t help. This darkness is odd. I can still see beyond it, and it feels like I am tumbling toward the unknown. It feels as if in the endless black of it, there are things waiting. Maybe this is too much for me to handle. During my first float, the pod’s soft neon glow helped me ease the descent into deprivation. It was smaller, more intimate. I was able to bump against the side that time. A foot, a shoulder, or my head, depending on how my body had twisted in the water. It was a semidetachment. Simply a pause before the world came back in. Today, the pod is nearly as large as the room in which it sits. Five and a half feet wide. Nine feet tall. Six and a half feet long. Being in this pod is like I am lost in the universe with little chance to make it back to something solid beneath me.

The more I concentrate on the darkness in the floatation tank around me, the more it seems psychedelic. Like a blacklight poster, matte velvet beneath fingers, full of orange, green, yellow, and blue. The Ganzfeld effect says as you take away senses, the others are heightened and hallucinations can occur—like a kaleidoscope you can’t look away from. The brain tries to fill in the gaps and creates neural noise that can lead to altered states of consciousness. This makes sense because in the tank all is black and my brain is forcing me to see what is not there. Reality is getting further away—shimmering on the horizon of consciousness and sucking me deeper into an abyss. Just as the Dead Sea swallows the land and then the land swallows what’s left, I’ve become ungrounded. I’m starting to believe the mirage.

The tank’s darkness swirls and builds when I try to push it back into the familiar inkiness that lines my bedroom each night. This isn’t much different. It is heavy in my mind, and I can’t escape it no matter what comfort I give myself in know-ing I can end this at any time. I simply need to sit up and plant myself to the bottom of the tank ten inches down, and this is all over. I stretch again, needing to touch the wall to ground myself, but the tank feels like it has exploded away from reality, and no matter how hard I try I can’t skim my fingers across anything solid. Even my skin doesn’t feel real. It’s too slick, and each touch slides off my body like I’m waterproof.

The heartbeat in my ears is amplified by the plugs keeping the water out. The whoosh lulls me enough for my mind to wander.

I move my consciousness to Atlanta and the blue dark of the Georgia Aquarium. I remember the gentle wave of jellyfish and how I failed at convincing myself to stroke the rays break-ing the surface of the touch pool. I could only imagine the blur of the animal rising out of the water and puncturing the soft spot at the crux of my shoulder and neck. How the water would stain pink until then it was red. This is irrationality talking, sloshing around in my brain because even sensory deprivation cannot shut it down.

Perhaps what is waiting on the other side of the blackness is actual life—a life that requires me to be present and not in the gauzy moments of my social media or the brightness of a phone. This life would force me to hold fast to the small occurrences. To not tweet or post about them but to rather hold on to a secret joy. To know that all is not up for consumption. Some things are just meant to be lived.

In the tank, I long for the glowing comfort of my phone and the smooth ache of my thumb muscle stretching to tap the screen. There is so much fear. The terror of missing out. Feast or famine and lost opportunities. My mind, still fight-ing this reset, knows the screen flickers with notifications. I’ve yet to figure out how to cull my need for instant response and easy access. The notifications appear. The notifications demand my attention. I fall in line. My phone is just outside the tank, placed atop my neatly folded clothes. It is nearly impossible to stop myself from using this need for my phone as an excuse to cut this float short. I get this anxious feeling in the base of my spine, and it slinks its way up my body until it’s settled so deeply in my brain the choice seems already made for me.

The bartender at my hotel the weekend I visited the aquarium called me an outlier. He watched me scribble notes into a hardback journal spread open like a broken bird on the bar top. I looked up at him, then stuffed another blue crab–deviled egg into my mouth and asked him what he meant. He said, “Most people come to the bar and tap away at their phones, but here you are writing in pen and ink on actual paper. You’re an outlier.” I am a liar. One whose phone was simply tucked into her pocket while she pretended to be deep and mysterious in a new city.

But when the phone is not in my hand, I feel unmoored. It’s kind of like the Dead Sea being brilliant blue and beautiful to the eye. But it’s not really a sea. It is a lake under a grand illusion. Like me pretending that everything outside the purview of the camera lens isn’t falling apart. In the tank, the disconnect from these connections, and my dependency on the escape they provide, almost weighs me down. I need to keep floating. I need to get above the surface. How many minutes have passed now? Maybe the wrinkles in the pads of my fingers will tell me and I can count down to when I can push back into the artificial light of the float parlor and the comforting glow of a screen. My fingers tell me nothing. The ache in my thumb still hums. I try to pull my mind back to something weightless. Something beyond intrusive thoughts. Something beyond the screen I cannot see.

I try stretching my arms again, hoping this time the gentle undulation of the water beneath me has pushed me closer to a wall, but it hasn’t. There is panic starting to settle into my heart, and I try to remember there is no one here but me. There is nothing but water and thought and quiet. There lies the fear. My phone makes it easy to forget what I am afraid of. Dying alone. Being a failure. Not leaving a legacy. If I can stay connected, I can perhaps have all these things. When I sync my breathing to the lap of the water, my heart finally settles. Two beats, then a wave. Two beats, then a wave until before I know it ninety minutes are over and the room comes to life in a gentle rise of music. I think the disconnection of consciousness from my body has failed, but I will try again and hope the next time I am successful.

I scramble to emerge from the tank before it begins to filter the traces of me from the water. Before it removes the bits of me left behind until everything is once again blank. When I step back into the light, I check my notifications nude—ignoring the film of drying salt on my skin that turns me ghostly white. I am a specter trying to return to flesh, and the ground is now solid beneath my feet.

_______________________

Excerpted from The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright (c) 2023 by Athena Dixon.

“That one in there—he just sits and hisses.” The school caretaker pointed to a hole underneath the old building. I crouched down, peered in, and said, “Hello there,” to the dirty, scrawny little cat, who promptly hissed at me with all his tiny might. Hissing Sid, as he became affectionately known, was one of a colony of feral cats that my colleagues and I went on to rescue from the grounds of the school, where they were becoming something of a nuisance. After a little sojourn in a rescue shelter where they were all neutered and their kittens found new homes, the cats were relocated to a farm. Over the next few years, feeding them in their special cat shed on the farm every day, these cats became part of my life. Here, as they learned to trust me, they worked out new ways to communicate with me. Ways that included less hissing and more of the friendly sounds we associate with our sweet‐talking pet cats.

In a cat’s world, where smells are paramount, it must be a bewildering experience when they first hear a person speak. So many different, unfamiliar sounds directed either at another person or, even more perplexingly, at the cat. Humans are very preoccupied with the spoken word, babbling away at everyone and everything we meet. Intrigued as to what their “spoken” sounds mean, we have developed something of a fascination with the vocalizations of cats too. Nestled deep in the history books, a diary entry by the Abbé Galiani of Naples, dated March 21, 1772, offers some of the earliest recorded insights into cat vocalizations.

“I am rearing two cats and studying their habits—a completely new field of scientific observation . . . Mine are a male and a female; I have isolated them from other cats in the neighborhood, and have been watching them closely. Would you believe it— during the months of their amours they haven’t miaowed once: thus one learns that miaowing isn’t their love language, but rather a signal to the absent.”

Little did he know it, but Galiani was ahead of the game with his observation that his two cats never meowed to each other. The true purpose of meowing would only be discovered centuries later, when larger scientific studies of cats became more accepted.

Through the intervening years, feline literature embarked on something of a magical mystery tour of the apparent linguistic talents of cats. Writers mostly attempted to define cat vocalizations along the lines of human language, identifying consonants and vowel patterns and certain “human” letters in their cats’ speech. Reflecting on the differences between cats and dogs, Dupont de Nemours, an eighteenth‐century naturalist, wrote, “The cat, also, has the advantage of a language which has the same vowels as pronounced by the dog, and with six consonants in addition, m, n, g, h, v, and f.”

Some authors took this a step further to describe cats’ use of actual human words. In 1895 Marvin R. Clark, a musician and lover of cats, published an enchanting and slightly bewildering book titled Pussy and Her Language. In this he includes “A Paper on the Wonderful Discovery of the Cat Language,” apparently penned by a French professor named Alphonse Leon Grimaldi. In it, Grimaldi claimed to have elucidated the language of cats, providing an in‐depth analysis of the cat’s use of vowels, consonants (apparently used “daintily” by cats), and grammar, as well as words and numbers.

Grimaldi’s paper included a list of what he considered to be seventeen of the most important words in the feline language:

He went on to elaborate, “In the feline language the rule is to place the noun or the verb first in the sentence, thus preparing the mind of the hearer for what is to follow.” As if this weren’t skilled enough, Grimaldi also considered cats capable of counting. He compiled a comprehensive list, including “Aim” for number one and “Zule” for millions.

Grimaldi’s “translations” were not surprisingly met with mixed reactions; many authors dismissed them as nonsense. However, among his rather bizarre suggestions, he did include a few wonderful nuggets of insight. His description of an enraged cat, for example, will resonate with many people:

“The word ‘yew’ . . . when uttered as an explosive, is the Cat’s strongest expression of hatred, and a declaration of war.”

In 1944, Mildred Moelk revolutionized the world of cat language with her in‐depth study of the phonetics of the sounds produced by her own house cats. Her approach was to divide the vocal sounds of domestic cats into three main categories based on how they are produced. First, those made by the cat with their mouth closed, such as purrs, trills, chirrups, and murmurs. Second, the sounds made while the cat’s mouth is opened and then gradually closed—these include the meow, the male and female mating calls, and the aggressive howl. The last group are all made while the mouth is held continuously open, generally associated with aggression, defense, or pain in cats. They include growls, snarls, yowls, hisses, spits, more intense mating cries, and shrieks of pain.

The difficulty in this vocal categorization lies in the huge amount of variation in the production of sounds, both between cats and within the repertoire of a single individual. As Moelk so elegantly put it, “The house‐cat, unlike man, has enforced upon it no model of traditional language and no standard of correct pronunciation to which it must conform.” Her work has been used as the basis for the analysis of cat vocalizations ever since. Some investigators have attempted to classify them using phonetic criteria like Moelk, while others have examined their acoustic qualities or concentrated on their behavioral contexts.

Although cats have a huge range of vocalizations, in cat‐to‐cat interactions they generally reserve these sounds for three types of occasions: finding a mate, fighting, and communicating between kittens and their mothers. The first two involve supernoisy sounds that we tend to hear at nighttime. Caterwauling, shrieking, bloodcurdling noises—the sorts of calls that make you rush outside to identify the source or cover your ears to block them out. In their quest to communicate with humans, cats seem to have ingeniously worked out that it is the gentle sounds, like those used between a mother cat and her kittens, that appeal to us most.

*

Newborn kittens start life with the ability to purr, spit, and produce a few simple “mew” noises. At least they sound simple to us. What sounds like a lot of squeaking to the human ear is actually a range of different kitten calls. In addition to crying when they are hungry, kittens have a distress call that varies in tone, length, and volume depending on the reason for their anxiety. The mew of a kitten that is too cold has the highest pitch; becoming lost from the nest produces the loudest mew; and the most urgent and persistent mew is reserved for when they are somehow trapped. This last cry often happens as the mother sprawls out on her side to allow her kittens to nurse, inadvertently lying on some of them in the process. Depending on the type of cry, she responds by retrieving the lost kitten or by changing her position a little. Shifting her body as she lies nursing her litter encourages a kitten that has dropped off a nipple and become chilled to snuggle back in, or enables a squashed kitten to wriggle back out. A study by Wiebke Konerding and co‐researchers looked more closely at the responses of both male and female adult cats to recordings of two different types of cries made by kittens. One type had been recorded in what the authors describe as a “low arousal” context, made by kittens that had simply been spatially separated from their mother and the nest. The other was recorded in a “high arousal” context in which, as well as being separated from their mother, the kittens were held by the experimenter (restrained/trapped). On hearing these recordings, adult female cats oriented themselves toward the source of the cry (a loudspeaker) faster for the more urgent (trapped) kitten calls compared with the less urgent (strayed from nest) ones, indicating that they distinguished between the two. This happened regardless of whether they had ever had kittens themselves. Male cats, on the other hand, although they reacted to the kitten cries, showed no difference in their reactions to the two call types. Female cats therefore seem somehow hardwired to identify distress calls of kittens. Studies have also shown that each kitten develops its own individual versions of these calls and that these remain constant as it grows older. Whether mother cats can recognize their individual kittens from their calls alone remains unknown. In turn, mother cats have a very special type of call they use when interacting with their kittens. Often described as a chirrup or chirp, this gentle trill‐like sound was written by Moelk as “mhrn”* phonetically. It is a delicate, cheerful sound, described by the nineteenth‐century writer Lafcadio Hearn as “a soft, trilling coo, a pure caress of tone.”

To humans this enchanting call sounds much the same in all mother cats. Kittens, though, can recognize the chirrup of their own mother when they are only four weeks old. They can distinguish it not only from her meows but also from the chirrups and meows of different mothers. Researchers discovered this by videoing and analyzing the responses of four-week‐old kitten litters when hearing vocalizations of their own and other mother cats. While a mother cat was absent from the room, experimenters played recordings of vocalizations from behind a screen to her litter of kittens still in their nest. They played them a meow and a greeting chirrup from their own mother as well as a meow and chirrup from an unknown mother cat, at an equivalent stage of motherhood to their own. Looking at the kittens’ responses, the researchers found that they became alert faster to chirrups than to meows. They also stayed alert longer, were quicker to approach the source of the sound (the loudspeaker), and stayed there significantly longer when hearing their own mother’s chirrup compared with any other of the sounds. That kittens can do this from such an early age suggests an advanced level of cognition at a time when they are only just beginning to move around and explore their world. This may be an adaptation for survival in the wild, where litters of kittens are often hidden out of sight by their mother while she goes off to hunt or find food. Her reassuring chirrup as she returns lets them know that it is safe to come out.

As kittens mature into adult cats and their vocal cords develop, their tiny mews gradually change into the more elaborate sounds that we describe as “meows.” I’d been studying my adult hospital and farm cats for a while before I realized, just like Galiani back in 1772, that I had never heard them meow to each other. They would hiss occasionally and may well have quietly purred when sitting together, but that was the extent of their vocalizations. Later studies confirmed this discovery—the iconic meow of adult cats is almost exclusively reserved for cat‐human interactions.

In the wild, away from the comforts of a human home, mew vocalizations gradually decrease as kittens become more independent. In house cats, though, meows are by far the most frequent vocalizations directed toward humans. Our pet cats often combine the meow with extra sounds such as trills or purrs. Some cats, like people, are chattier than others. Certain pure breeds, particularly oriental ones such as Burmese and Siamese, have a reputation for being more vocal. That said, many random‐bred house cats, or moggies, spend their days meowing hopefully at their owners.

So why do they meow at us? It seems that over the ten thousand odd years that they have associated with us, cats have learned that we don’t always understand their wonderfully subtle language of scents, twitches of the tail, and flicks of the ears. They need to make noise in order to get our attention. And lots of it. For the ever‐adaptable cat, what could be more logical than to use vocalizations that, as a kitten, so effectively achieved a response from their mother?

What exactly is a meow? A simple answer is hard to find, and it depends on who you ask. Nicholas Nicastro from Cornell University has studied the meow and our understanding of it extensively. His wonderful though head‐spinningly technical definition describes the acoustics of the meow: . . . a quasiperiodic sound with at least one band of tonal energy enhanced by the resonant properties of the vocal tract. The call ranges between a fraction of a second to several seconds in duration. The pitch profile is generally arched, with resonance changes often reflected in formant shifts that give the call a diphthong‐like vowel quality. . . . This call type very often includes atonal features and garnishments (trills or growls) that may serve to differentiate the calls perceptually.

A slightly simpler, more phonetic version comes from Susanne Schötz and her team in the Meowsic project at Lund University in Sweden: “. . . a voiced sound generally produced with an opening‐closing mouth and containing a combination of two or more vowel sounds (e.g. [eo] or [iau]) with an occasional initial [m] or [w]…”

Urban Dictionary’s definition is far more succinct but to the point: “Meow is the sound a cat makes. It is also the sound a human makes when they are imitating a cat.”

To the human ear, meows can sound friendly, demanding, sad, assertive, persuasive, persistent, plaintive, complaining, endearing, and even annoying. Some investigators have attempted to categorize meows into different subdivisions, but their classification proves tricky because, just like other cat vocalizations, the meow varies substantially among cats—and even changes in the same cat at different times. Despite this variability, there seems to be a word for “meow” in every language, from the Danish “mjav” to the Japanese “nya.”

However we choose to say or spell it, the sound of a cat meowing is unmistakable. Unless that meow you thought you heard is actually a baby crying? Both sounds are generated by the vibration of the vocal cords in the larynx, and the acoustics of the two are remarkably similar, particularly with respect to what is known as fundamental frequency, or the number of waves of sound that occur per second. To the listener this frequency is perceived as the pitch of the sound—the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. The cries of healthy babies have been shown in various studies to have an average frequency of 400 to 600 Hz and are described as having a falling or rising‐falling pattern as the cry continues. Adult domestic pet cat meows, although hugely variable, were found by Nicastro to average 609 Hz. Other researchers, such as Schötz, have reported similar figures.

Pitched around the same level, both cat meows and baby cries seem to be particularly hard to ignore. The much‐researched cries of babies have been shown to elicit alertness and distress in adults. In fact, Joanna Dudek and coworkers from the University of Toronto demonstrated that hearing babies’ cries affects our ability to perform other tasks. No one has tested yet whether cat meows have the same effect but, given the acoustic resemblance to baby cries and the creativeness of cats, we can probably assume they are quite distracting.

Is this why cats are so hard to ignore? Have they somehow hot‐wired our brains so we simply must respond to an urgent need to take care of them like a baby? Possibly yes, but probably not intentionally. Throughout domestication, we may have unwittingly selected for cats with the most persuasive meows, those that tend to resemble the cries of our own infants. Nicastro’s study showed that compared with African wildcats (the ancestors of the domestic cat), the meows of domestic pet cats sound much more pleasant to human listeners. This may well be related to the differing pitches of their vocalizations, with the wildcat calls averaging 255 Hz compared with the much higher 609 Hz pitch of the domestic cats. Another study, exploring the acoustics of feral cat and pet cat meows, found the pitches of feral cat meows to be much lower than those of pet cats too. The meows of the ferals more closely resembled those of the wildcats in Nicastro’s study. This suggests that socialization and experience with humans in some way modifies the meows of domestic cats.

Interestingly, while feral cats barely meow at all when first looked after by a human, rescue workers often report that ferals increase their rate of meowing as they spend more time in their company. Even some of the feral cats that I watched on the farm, who only ever came near me very briefly when I dished up their food before leaving each day, gradually began to learn to meow a little as time passed. Cats learn fast.

__________________________________

Sarah Brown’s The Hidden Language of Cats: How They Have Us at Meow is available from Dutton.

There is a story my family likes to tell: a moment I cannot remember. I am a toddler, still chubby-cheeked, with a blunt blond bob. I am standing in the yard of my childhood home. In front of me, my father has begun butchering the family pig. This is his work, his vocation. He is a butcher. It’s how he earns his livelihood, and it’s how he keeps us alive. He’s been doing this work professionally since he was twelve years old.

The dead animal lies on its back atop a platform of bricks, which keep it from getting muddy. My father singes the fur with a handheld wood burner, similar to a blowtorch. He slices open the long belly of the animal, reaches into the cavity. He scoops out innards, working carefully so as not to puncture the organs. Lumpy intestines glisten. Then he lifts a hatchet and hacks the animal into two equal halves at the spine. Now what lies in front of me seems less like an animal, a being, and more like a product. At last, he begins dividing the carcass into bright red cuts of muscle.

This scene is too much for my sister, Zsuzsanna, three years older than me. Zsóka, as I call her, is not squeamish. This is postwar Hungary, after all. Squeamishness is a luxury afforded to no one—let alone a hand-to-mouth laboring fam­ ily like ours. But whatever it is that has captivated me in this moment does not seem to have the same effect on my sister.

Still, I am captivated.

My parents used to chuckle, remembering the way I looked then: my wide eyes taking everything in—the whole complex topography of an animal’s interior. All those disparate parts that for so long worked together to keep this one creature alive. All the mystery and wonder they seemed to hold, visible at last.

This, for me, is how it begins.

While I cannot remember those early moments seeing my father work, I recall, precisely, the world that surrounded them, the landscape of my childhood.

Kisújszállás: central Hungary, the northern great plain re­gion. Clay soils. Sweeping grasslands. A medium-size agricul­tural town of roughly ten thousand people. We aren’t as isolated as some towns; we’re a stop on the railroad, for one thing. Also, Route 4, a primary route to Budapest, goes through town. There are a few paved streets, though my fam­ily’s road is made from packed dirt.

Our home is simple, small. It is constructed, literally, from the earth that surrounds it: clay and straw, pressed into adobe walls, whitewashed, then covered with a thick roof of reeds. The reeds, as I remember, have faded in the sun. They look like a shaggy gray wig.

We live in a single room. The house is larger than this one room, but for most of the year, the other rooms are too cold for anything but storage. We live where the heat is. In a corner of the room is the source of that warmth: a saw­dust stove, the cheapest possible way to generate heat. It’s constructed from sheet metal, about a half meter across, like an ordinary metal barrel with a central cylinder that is packed with sawdust. We collect that sawdust from a nearby wooden toy factory, carrying it home from the factory with the help of horses. Once home, we store the sawdust in the barn, in a pile taller than my father. In the summer we check the pile regu­larly to make sure it hasn’t started generating its own heat; sawdust is known to spontaneously combust.

The sawdust stove grows hot enough that my mother sometimes uses it as an extra cooktop. When it really gets going, the exterior metal glows red. Zsóka and I long ago learned to keep our distance, lest we burn our skin. It’s our job, though, to fill the insert container with sawdust every morning. This is hard work, and it must be done carefully. Like many of the things we do, it isn’t a chore—at least not in the sense that people use the word now. It’s not something that our parents ask us to do, not a favor we’re doing for the family. It’s simply what must be done. If we don’t do it, our family will freeze.

At the center of the room is a large table. Here we prepare and eat meals, sometimes gathering extended family for bois­terous celebrations. At this table, my sister and I do homework and read, help our mother roll out fresh pasta from flour and eggs.

Each night, my father stands at the head of the table, doling out dinner servings to each of us. He served in the army dur­ing World War II and cooked for hundreds of soldiers on the front line, rationing foods with precision. I can still see him today: He ladles pasta into his own soup bowl. “Soldiers dur­ing the war on the front lines!” he hollers. Then he reaches for my mother’s bowl. “Soldiers during the war in the back coun­try!” Then he reaches for my bowl, then my sister’s, giving us kids the smallest servings. “Soldiers during peacetime,” he says quietly.

Then he laughs and serves us all a little more. Times might be hard now, but he’s known worse. Every adult has.

Nearby are the beds where we sleep: mine and Zsóka’s, our mother and father’s. The beds are so close, we can reach out to touch one another during the night.

Outside is not only my father’s smokehouse (where sau­sages hang, dripping thick globs of fat, stained orange from the paprika, onto the floors) but also the barn, where, already, a new pig is growing. Next year’s meat. In the yard, chickens peck the earth, and we have several gardens. In the main gar­den, we grow food for our family: carrots, beans, potatoes, and peas. Dinner is made from whatever happens to be ready for harvest (flavored, like the sausages, with paprika—always lots of paprika). Zsóka and I have a garden of our own, too. Every spring, we place seeds in the ground. Our fingers are still clumsy, but we are gentle as we work. Gently we cover these seeds with soil, then—weeks later—watch shoots push their way into open air and stretch toward the sun. We also grow fruit. We have apple, quince, and cherry trees, plus a grape arbor and pergolas.

And there are flowers, too: blue hyacinths, white daffodils and violets, and great bursts of roses, which together make this humble homestead feel a bit like Eden.

Someday, decades in the future and an ocean away from here, in a land I haven’t yet heard of called Philadelphia, I’ll settle down in a home on a wide suburban street. There I’ll go in search of flowers to plant, and it is only when I struggle to find white daffodils that I will understand what I’m doing: searching not just for any blooms, but for these, the flowers I knew as a little girl, the ones I can remember my mother plant­ing and tending.

Outside of town lie fields of corn. We plant this corn our­selves, using hoes to soften the soil and cut the weeds. We thin the plants, pull weeds from the soil, fertilize the ground with cow manure, and then harvest the crops. We give the kernels to the animals, then use the cobs to fuel the kitchen stove.

Everything is like that: Nothing goes to waste. We shake walnuts from trees, eat the nuts, and burn the leftover shells as fuel.

It will be years before plastic becomes a part of my life, years before I understand the concept of garbage, the idea that some things are so useless they can simply be thrown away.

We don’t have a cow, but our neighbor does. Every morn­ing, my sister or I run over to the neighbor’s home with an empty jug. We fill the jug with milk still warm from the udder and serve it for breakfast. Leftovers become kefir. When we rinse the last milk from glasses, we pour the cloudy water into a pot for the pig, who devours everything greedily.

As we scurry around, getting ready for the day (the indoor air so cold our breath is sometimes visible), we listen to a small radio. Each morning, an announcer tells us whose “name day” it is. Every day of the year, a different name, a different person in our lives to celebrate: February 19, Zsuzsanna; November 19, Erzsébet. Good morning, the voice on the radio might say. It’s October 2, which means it’s the name day for Petra. The name comes from a Greek word that means stone, or rock. . . . Then, when we arrive at school, we know whose name day it is, and we wish them a happy one. It’s a good system. How many of us really know the birthdays of the people in our lives? But if you know someone’s name, then you know their name day, and can wish them well.

For the first decade of my life, we use an outhouse. At night—especially in winter—we pee in a chamber pot. Nearly everyone I know, at least in these early years, does the same.

There’s no running water of any kind in our house. In the yard, we—like all the families on our street—have a well. Sometimes, I lean over the edge, staring down into the dark­ness, feeling the cool, wet air on my skin. In the summer, this well becomes our refrigerator. We lower our food to the wa­ter’s edge to keep it from spoiling. In the winter months, the whole house becomes our refrigerator (in the coldest months, we store eggs beneath our beds to keep them from freezing).

We use our well water for animals or for watering plants. This water is too hard for bathing and washing, and it isn’t potable, so each day my father walks to a nearby street pump, carefully balancing two thick buckets on a wooden rod. Zsóka and I follow him, carrying water home in smaller containers. Once a week, we heat this water, pour it into a shallow tub, then bathe in it.

At the community pump, neighbors exchange gossip, dis­ cuss the day’s news, share everyday joys and frustrations. This pump is, for me, the original watercooler, the first chat room.

Occasionally, a man rides up our street on a large horse. He bangs a drum loudly, calling us all outside to hear whatever announcement he’s brought from the authorities. This is an­other, more official news source—what some communities call a griot or a town crier.

“Next Tuesday,” the man might bellow, “there will be a preventive vaccine campaign for chickens! Keep your chick­ens indoors on that day so that they each might receive their vaccine!”

We make note of the information, then carry this news to the water pump when we go. Everyone repeats the announce­ment, in case anyone missed the man’s visit: Did you hear the news? Chicken vaccines. Yes, next Tuesday. Keep your chickens indoors.

And, sure enough, when Tuesday comes, students from the veterinary school enter our yard. Zsóka and I catch our chick­ens in the hatch and hand them over, one at a time, to the man who will inoculate them—my first-ever vaccination cam­paign, I suppose.

Science lessons are everywhere, all around me.

I climb trees and peer at birds’ nests. I watch hard eggs become naked hatchlings, mouths wide and begging. The hatchlings grow feathers and muscles, leave their nest, begin pecking the ground. I see storks and swallows take flight, then disappear when the weather grows cold. In the spring, they return and start the cycle all over again.

In the smokehouse, my sister and I collect fat drippings with a spoon. We drop the fat into a pot; when summer comes, my mother calls a woman to the house. She’s ancient, this woman, carrying knowledge passed down through genera­tions. Under this woman’s direction, we melt the fat, then mix it with sodium carbonate, using a precise ratio she alone seems to understand. Then we pour the mixture into wooden boxes padded with a dishcloth and wait for it to harden into soap, which we slice with a wire. We use soap bars for bathing and shave some into flakes for laundry.

Looking back, I understand now that this local “soap cooker lady” was the first biochemist I ever met.

Another lesson: One summer, our potatoes are infested with a pest, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, known in the United States as the Colorado potato beetle. The insects lay eggs, and larvae explode across the garden, eat away at stems, and turn entire leaves to lace. They’ll destroy the whole crop if we do nothing. My parents put me on potato beetle duty. I scour the plants, plucking insects one at a time, dropping each into a pot. Each bug is about half an inch long with a spotted head and dramatic black and white stripes on its backside. The bugs themselves don’t especially bother me, but when I miss one, it lays clusters of eggs, from which erupt disgusting pink larvae, wriggling and sticky. I pluck those, too.

The work is tedious and sometimes gross. But it provides me with an early education not only in entomology but also in ecosystems. For here, too, nothing goes to waste: I feed these pests to the chickens, who are delighted with the bounty. Po­tato beetles feed the chickens, who in turn feed us: a lesson in the food chain that becomes, quite literally, a part of me.

There’s no end to the work to be done. My sister and I carry water to chickens and gather their eggs. On the rare oc­casions when our family chooses to cook one of our precious chickens, we chase that bird down with a broom and scoop it up. We wash dishes and clothes by hand. Twice a week, my grandmother, who lives a half-hour walk from our house, cuts bunches of flowers from her garden—labdarózsa (snow­ball bush), török szegfű (sweet Williams), rózsa (roses), dália (dahlias), szalmavirág (strawflowers), tulipán (tulips), kard­virág (gladiolus), and bazsarózsa (peonies)—then hauls them to sell at the market. We help her cut and prepare these flowers for sale.

Even if my grandmother hadn’t told me the names of these flowers, I would have learned them by heart. In fifth grade, I receive a book about the flora of Hungary; the book features gorgeous watercolor illustrations by Vera Csapody, a Hungar­ian woman botanist and artist. I am obsessed with this book; hour after hour, I turn the pages, memorizing the bright bursts of colorful petals, the spindly root threads emerging from ro­tund bulbs, and the precise variegations and striations of leaves.

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Excerpted from the book Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Katalin Karikó. Copyright © 2023 by Katalin Karikó. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Nothing compares to a peregrine falcon. Of course, comparing anything in nature is foolhardy. Nonetheless, when beholding this bird, perched or flying, one can only think of superlatives. Strikingly beautiful, masked face, the fastest animal, and a gaze of majesty knowing the ages. Bold and powerful. Untouchable. If you have seen it, you know what we mean—the falcon epitomizes the raw power and beauty of nature all at once. Their worldwide distribution makes them observable to many and has them clinging to rocky cliff s, usually above waterways, but also city skyscrapers, which they use as cliffs. Once nearly brought to extinction, these birds have made a remarkable comeback. Nature’s stunning bird has been restored, and Yellowstone National Park (YNP) is no exception.

Evolution honed peregrine falcons to be unparalleled speed machines. They have long, pointed wings, enabling them to swoop and dive in flight at mind-boggling speeds as they pursue avian prey, from small birds to shorebirds to ducks, that they capture in midair. Their bodies are tightly cloaked in sleek feathers that contribute to their streamlined aerodynamic efficiency—no fluffy owl feathers on a peregrine. Their nasal openings have a post that baffles air so that peregrines can continue to breathe as they dive. Being struck by a diving peregrine often kills prey instantly, but if it does not, the peregrine inserts the upper part of its bill, with projections called tomial teeth, between the prey’s neck vertebrae. With a quick twist, the peregrine instantly severs the spinal cord of its prey. As it flies with prey held by tightly clenched feet, each toe ending in a sharp piercing talon, the peregrine might even eat on the wing.

Peregrines are the most far-reaching terrestrial vertebrate, occupying every continent except Antarctica. This wide global reach makes them hard to characterize, as they live across a broad range of ecosystems, from desert to tundra and coasts to mountains. The species has such a broad reach that one peregrine researcher said that his boss referred to a peregrine as “a weed among hawks,” as this bird adapts to almost everything—like a weed. They can also be tolerant of humans. Equally broad is their diet; although they eat birds almost exclusively, they rarely specialize in a particular species. This breadth of range and diet makes them resilient, a characteristic needed for life in Yellowstone because of its high elevation, unpredictable weather, and large swaths of relatively unproductive (for birds of prey) coniferous forests.

Although tough, peregrines were not spared from worldwide population declines due to organochlorine pesticide use, mainly dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, commonly known as DDT. Widely used in agriculture in the 1940s and 1950s, this pesticide was used in forest management as well. Some 62 tons of DDT were applied in northern Yellowstone in 1953, 1955, and 1957 to control a spruce budworm outbreak. This pesticide-induced decline was first identified in Great Britain but was soon found to have global reach. Although few direct mortalities were attributed to DDT, its sub-lethal effects caused eggshell thinning, resulting in widespread reproductive failure. Across North America, peregrine populations declined during the 1950s to 1970s, depending on the level of exposure to DDT. Populations in eastern North America and southern Canada were completely extirpated, and falcons in western and northern populations declined between 10% and 75%. The portion of the population in Yellowstone National Park was lost. Some thought there would be no peregrines south of the 50th parallel, and there was nothing to be done.

Piecing together peregrine history in YNP is difficult due to inconsistent records and monitoring. Likely abundant in what is now YNP for centuries, the first peregrine falcon in park archives was recorded in 1914 by naturalist Milton Skinner. Spotty records exist through the next several decades, with sightings in the Bechler area (1929; an adult with two young), the Firehole River corridor, Osprey Falls, and especially the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. With towering cliffs astride the Yellowstone River, the Grand Canyon was and is ideal habitat for peregrines. Others, most notably Jay Sumner and Jim Enderson, did some additional monitoring during the 1960s, knowing there was evidence of nesting in the 1950s, but the effects of DDT were already taking hold. Enderson visited the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in 1961, 1962, and 1964 and found no peregrines. At another site that had been active in 1960, he saw an adult in 1964 and heard a second but did not find a nest.

By the 1970s, sightings in YNP were rare and confirmation of breeding tenuous. Peregrine falcon expert Bob Oakleaf (Wyoming Game and Fish Department; WGFD) conducted surveys during this period and presumed peregrines were present, although he was unable to locate any. The last known nesting territory was vacant by 1970. The combination of inconsistent monitoring and DDT-induced declines made putting together the peregrine story problematic; they were nearly extirpated before people really started looking. Because there were no estimates of population size or adequate records of known nest sites, it was impossible to know much about them or how their populations were changing within the park. Elsewhere in North America, populations reached their lowest levels by the mid-1970s. Peregrines were listed as endangered in 1970 under the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969, a precursor of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, and then listed under the ESA.

Once DDT was banned and ESA protections were put in place, recovery efforts began in earnest. A massive, North America–wide reintroduction effort was undertaken. Most prominently, the Peregrine Fund was born, with a goal to captively rear peregrines for release across their decimated range. Along with others, the Peregrine Fund released nearly 7,000 peregrines across North America between 1974 and 1998. YNP was part of this significant endeavor and was considered the center of recovery efforts for the Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho region, with 36 captively raised young released in the park at four sites between 1983 and 1988. These acclimation and release areas, called hack sites, were located at Madison Junction, Slough Creek, Crown Butte, and Terrace Mountain. Regionally, 644 birds were released at 35 sites within 162 miles (260 km) of YNP from 1980 through 1997. Interestingly, the last territory known to be occupied in YNP, located in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, was the first to be reoccupied in 1984 by two of these released birds. The female came from a Jackson, Wyoming, release area and the male from a nearby location in Idaho.

After the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone territory was occupied, reoccupation of the park was spotty and slow. By 1994, only 11 pairs (about one new pair per year) had reoccupied YNP. Additionally, reproductive success was initially low, and through 1989, only about three young per year were produced park-wide. After 1989, however, reproduction accelerated, and in 1992, 17 young were produced. Furthermore, there was evidence, based on banding records, that most of the recruitment was from birds born to wild and not released parents. As time went on, reoccupation continued to increase, and by 2007, there were 32 known pairs across the park.

Peregrine falcons are back and doing well in Yellowstone. With continued monitoring of both birds and eggs, we hope to be able to detect any decline or new environmental contaminant before it leads to extirpation again. Protecting all the native wildlife in Yellowstone is at the heart of our most fundamental charge. Our other charge is you: we aim to keep this amazing bird visible and enjoyable for all of Yellowstone’s visitors, so its sight and sound can be heard echoing off Yellowstone’s canyons and cliffs.

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Yellowstone’s Birds: Diversity and Abundance in the World’s First National Park, edited by Douglas W Smith, Lauren E Walker and Katharine E Duffy, with Robert K Landis, is available from Princeton University Press.

Like many before him and many after, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) imagined a utopia. The Dominican friar envisioned a more perfect world at the turn of the seventeenth century, just as Spanish imperial power had transformed his homeland into a wayward province. In his thirtieth year, Campanella had returned home to Calabria, in Southern Italy, after a brush with the Inquisition. Increasingly convinced that astrological signs and prophetic texts foretold great upheaval, he was denounced for fomenting a rebellion in order to transform Calabria into a republic—the only chance, he believed, to save it from the tyrannical rule of the Spanish crown. Two of his fellow conspirators cracked and revealed his plot to the Spanish authorities. Campanella was arrested. Despite the pressures of interrogation under torture sanctioned by Pope Clement VIII, he refused to accept the accusation of rebellion, continually insisting that he had simply been following the prophesies from ancient texts and an unusual number of eclipses. The year 1600, he said, foretold great, turbulent changes. He was not rebelling, but simply acting upon the signs of nature. The authorities thought this insane, which worked out well for Campanella, as it made him unable to repent and thus not an appropriate victim for the death penalty.

Following this conflict with the Church and viceregal authorities, Campanella penned La citta del sole (The City of the Sun). The book transformed parts of Plato’s Republic into an imagined new world located somewhere near equatorial Taprobane in the Indian Ocean, an island that had long floated on the margins of European knowledge and wonder. There lived the Solarians, whose society enacted key Renaissance ideals. With them, whether he meant their predilections to be read sincerely or in jest, Campanella’s present-day reality bled inconspicuously into early modern science fiction. Just like elite Europeans, the Solarians invested in their animals; more to the point, “highly esteemed among them is the art of breeding horses, bulls, sheep, dogs, and every sort of domestic animals, just as it was in the time of Abraham.” The Solarians would have found similar breeding practices in Renaissance European stables, such as those throughout Campanella’s native Southern Italy. In both places, experts monitored animal breeding. Stallions and mares were not “set loose in the meadows” but instead brought “together outside their farm stables at the opportune time.” These breeders even orchestrated animals’ pairings to match the constellations. Horses required Sagittarius ascendant, in conjunction with Mars and Jupiter, while Taurus yielded the best oxen, and Aries improved sheep. In Europe, beautiful images were hung upon barn walls during mating season as a means of spurring the imaginations of the livestock, which was thought to produce ever lovelier offspring. Likewise, the Solarians employed “magic to induce these creatures to breed in the presence of paintings of horses, bulls, or sheep.”

However, while Europeans and Solarians shared practices for systematically developing animals, they diverged in their treatment of humans. Campanella’s central narrator, “the Genoese Sea-Captain,” had encountered Solarian society and returned to Italy to explain its wonders. In one of many such explanatory passages, the captain described how Solarians looked down on what they believed to be a contradiction among Europeans: “Indeed, they laugh at us who exhibit a studious care for our breeding of horses and dogs [ch’attendemo alla razza delli cani e cavalli], but neglect the breeding of human beings.” By contrast, the Solarians had created a superior society because they were willing to apply the rational principles of good animal husbandry to crafting generations of humans. They understood breeding to be broadly defined—encompassing education and reproduction alike, and pertaining to the fruits of human wombs just as to the seeds of the earth. The Solarians had mastered a Renaissance version of eugenics—a feat that many Europeans would have envied, others loathed, and still others doubted.

Campanella’s vision of controlling the breeding of men and women so that “they bring forth the best offspring,” just like other domestic animals, was built around the language of razza, a term that, as Dániel Margócsy has put it, “meant race, breed, and stud all at once.” In Campanella’s time, breeders across the European countryside and Europe’s American colonies applied terminology with its origins in the stable to describe the populations of livestock and other domesticated animals that they had bred. To Campanella, his Solarians, and other Renaissance thinkers, the word razza was associated with a specific population that could share qualities, and was often employed in breeding projects aimed at creating the “perfect” animal. A razza did not have inflexibly fixed characteristics, though; these were instead evanescent and easily lost, and their persistence resulted from reproductive work. Most of all—although, unlike widespread animal breeding, it was rarely realized—Campanella’s fiction encouraged readers to use this attention to razza to reshape human populations. Just as animal breeding required careful staging and rational decision-making, Campanella’s narrative suggested that similarly, human breeding could—and should—be carefully controlled.

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The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance by Mackenzie Cooley has been shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize.

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Beyond that, Campanella’s vision of improved nature reflected widespread beliefs and more than a century of real investment in animal breeding projects. Razze of horses joined collections of books and exotica from around the globe, displayed in their stables like objects in kunstkammer in order to evoke wonder and princely power. Numerous princely families, from the Spanish Habsburgs to the Gonzaga of Mantua, created their own “races” of horses, dogs, and other domesticated animals, their experts’ efforts recorded in a mass of bureaucratic texts. A paper trail ballooned around such projects, complete with the brands stamped into the animals’ flesh, their diets, lifespans, coloring, and other details. Through the ceaseless writing down, labeling, and categorizing of animal life, the language of razza was cemented and increasingly but unsystematically tied to specific traits. Each time these categories were written down and used in a sale, or read at the palace, or referred to in court proceedings, these documents helped to consolidate the idea of razza as a nameable, visible, and legible reality. Race, that complex concept, emerged through efforts both conscious and unconscious, but animal records represent one of the many spokes of the wheel. For Campanella, humans were the telos of breeding’s powers, animals the epiphenomenon. This book partially inverts that anthropocentric emphasis.

Campanella wrote almost a century after the cascade of American encounters—from Christopher Columbus’s voyages (1492–1504) to Hernán Cortés’s seizure of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (1519–21) and Francisco Pizarro’s thuggish domination of Cusco (1533)—when the glow of discovery had started to fade, leaving in its wake questions about the feasibility of long-term domination and permanent conversion. As Campanella sat in prison, King Philip III’s Spain was zealously guarding a vast swath of the known world. The domains of his father, Philip II (1527–1598), had encompassed the Iberian Peninsula, stretched across the Italian peninsula, extended up to the rebellious Low Countries, spread over large sections of North and South America, and extended to a smattering of islands across the Atlantic and Pacific and to strongholds up and down the coasts of Africa and Asia.

As a Habsburg subject in the non-Spanish possessions, Campanella wrote extensively about the Spanish monarchy, especially the Habsburg family, and the implications their imperial actions had for their dynastic fate. Freed from his Neapolitan prison and writing from Paris at the outset of a long war between France and Spain (1635–59), he prophesized that Spain’s failure to change its tactics to improve integration meant that it would lose its power to the French, who would reunify Christians. His reflections on the monarchy took the Catholic mandate of universal conversion seriously, but he increasingly believed that the Spaniards were squandering their position as a superpower through their pride. Consistent with the ideas he articulated in City of the Sun, marriage and the problem of population emerged as central to Campanella’s critique of the Spanish monarchy, as he saw Spain’s population as declining, with young men dying in war and women growing infertile. For Campanella, demography was a yardstick of power, and what is demography but the creation of a human population through choices made by generation upon generation? Although he overestimated its demographic collapse, Campanella had a point about Spain’s demographic travails and the role of war and empire. The Habsburgs, however, did not follow Campanella, either in terms of imperial population or in applying the lessons of animal husbandry to elite marriages, deferring instead to the pressures of honor, family loyalty, and dynastic strategy.

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Excerpted with permission from The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance by Mackenzie Cooley, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2022 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

When we enter the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, with five million other visitors each year, we step simultaneously into the age of the dinosaurs and into the Victorian age. We inhabit a grand Romanesque hall successfully campaigned for by Richard Owen, still awed by the terrible lizards that he named, and that he had carefully boxed over from the British Museum collection in the early 1880s to the new site. We are drawn to Charles Darwin’s statue in the secular nave that invites cultural genuflection like Abraham in the Lincoln Memorial, like David in the Galleria del’Accademia, like a modest Jesus Christ in St Peter’s. Richard Owen’s own likeness used to be at the top of those stairs, but he was usurped and displaced in 2009, the Darwin anniversary, and now we have to search hard to find the old man to whom we owe a good deal, Huxley notwithstanding. There he is, up a level, in a nothing-place. The statue of Thomas Henry Huxley is nearer Owen than Darwin, and they still growl at each other.

And yet, for all this late-Victorian marbled hagiography, neither Darwin, nor Owen, nor Huxley is the real primate treasure of the Museum. Guy the Gorilla is. He now sits in his glass enclosure, taxidermied (actually latex-stretched, less-dignified, but more technically correct). Guy is displayed like a simian Snow White in her glass coffin, suspended somewhere between life and death. Like a thousand stuffed beasts before him, but also like marble Darwin, Huxley, and Owen, he is made to seem alive. In this strange, suspended afterlife, these four primates remain connected.

Julian Huxley adored Guy the Gorilla perhaps more than anyone, and in life, not death. His friend the extraordinary animal photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, fresh from a Huxley family portrait session in Pond Street, Hampstead, caught Guy very much alive in what he singled it out as the best shot of a lifetime, noting also how much Julian loved both the photograph and the animal. This gaze is surely the steadiest and most commanding of centuries of intra-primate exchange, the ape’s reflexion.

Wolfgang Suschitzky, Guy the Gorilla, London Zoo, 1958. By permission, the Estate of Wolfgang Suschitzky.

Of all orders of animals, primates were core Huxley business, their appreciation of simians stretching from the wild to the captive, the historical to the filmic. Thomas Henry Huxley wrote one of the most famous “monkey books,” as Charles Darwin called it, of all time, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863). It was hardly the first study of “man-like apes,” yet appearing at the height of the evolution controversy, the book focused attention freshly on the similarities and distinctions between humans and other primates, setting the shape of ideas for the rest of the century. Huxley’s work was directly antecedent to the great boom in primatology, catapulting controversy over the human-simian link well into the twentieth century where his grandson picked it up. Yet while T.H. Huxley preferred, or was forced, to study monkeys and apes dead, as skeletons or as soft anatomy specimens, his grandson looked at them living. Just as Julian watched the habits of the grebes as an animal ethnographer, so he came to value observational studies of primate behaviors. He was custodian of Guy’s predecessors, Moina Mozissa and Mok, lowland gorillas kept at the London Zoo between 1932 and 1938, and then Meng, a mountain gorilla who arrived in 1938. He engaged closely with key primatologists of the twentieth century, first Solly Zuckerman who studied captive apes, then George Schaller and Jane Goodall who spent years in Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania, their behavioral studies inspired by Julian’s ethology.

Thomas Henry Huxley occasionally observed the chimpanzee and orangutan in the London Zoo, yet he never saw a gorilla alive. Rather, he encountered them as rare and precious specimens, in anatomy collections or in libraries; in scientific reports and in a tradition of printed African travel accounts from the 1500s onwards. These great apes were quasi-mythic to him, even though he put so much store on them in his search for evidence as to man’s place in nature. “Africa” too was mythic to the elder Huxley as well as his small-minded mid-Victorian critics who taunted at one point that he led a Gorilla Emancipation Society.[i] A century later, however, saving African gorillas and their native habitats from destruction was precisely, and seriously, Julian’s mission.

In 1947 London Zoo’s most famous creature ever arrived to replace the dead Mok. Julian couldn’t take his eyes off the great ape. “When I saw Guy at the Zoo this summer, I could hardly tear myself away.” Guy was the finest animal he had ever seen, domesticated, captive or wild. But when Julian received that special primate return gaze, Guy managed to stare the ethologist down: “Magnificence in his reserve and silent strength, he gives you a look of sombre dignity that makes you feel in some real sense his inferior.” [ii] Julian the great observer, felt watched. And yet eye contact alone was insufficient. He found himself wanting to talk with Guy. “If we could only get through the barrier of non-communication set up by their inability to talk, what strange areas of subhuman mind we could explore.” Julian struck through “subhuman” in his typescript for a BBC talk on Guy, acknowledging the primate’s mind as equivalent to his own, not a greater and a lesser, a human and a sub-human. The expression of emotion projected by this particular man onto this particular animal was plain.

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The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution by Alison Bashford has been shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize.

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The photographs of gorillas kept in Julian Huxley’s papers signal his captive attention both to individual creatures and to the species. He kept a copy of Suschitzky’s magnificent portrait taken at the London Zoo in 1958. In many ways, it was framed by the convention of human portraits; in the convention, indeed, of the endless John Collier paintings of the Huxley primates. In fact, Suschitzky was the portraitist of this generation of Huxleys, over many decades photographing Julian, Aldous, Juliette and the Huxley sons, Anthony and Francis. The year that he captured Guy the Gorilla, 1958, he also captured the brothers, Julian and Aldous. It is another intimate portrait of fraternal primates, Julian characteristically talking and Aldous’s troubled eyes cast down, equally characteristically listening. It’s a moving image, especially when one knows the brothers’ past. Yet it has none of the strength of the portrait of Guy. In this image, we feel emotion in man and animal with the same kind of power that Charles Darwin experienced when he climbed into Jenny the orangutan’s cage, on occasion with a mirror. In this case, with a keeper’s help, Suschitzky passed his own reflecting machine—his camera—through the bars, to catch not the enclosing iron itself, but far more hauntingly, its shadows. Julian, like everyone else, was struck by the shadows of the bars across Guy’s face, across his very self. Perhaps this signaled how prison bars and cages were disappearing from zoo design and aesthetics—Monkey Hill anticipated this. The sign of imprisonment and captivity was being replaced by devices of apparent clarity and freedom—the suspended disbelief of a clear glass barrier, or of moats, zoological ha-ha walls, the kind of “sunk fence” that had been built instead of high walls at James Huxley’s Barming Heath asylum all those years before. But it was all disingenuous, and for human benefit only. There was no escaping the fact that Guy was captive and contained.

Julian and Aldous Huxley, by Wolfgang Suschitzky, 1958. By kind permission, the Estate of Wolfgang Suschitzky.

Many years ago, the insightful art critic John Berger wrote an essay, “Why Look at Animals?” He cut through mountains of scholarship on zoos and beasts with the clarity of one simple observation: in the wild animals stand and watch us, nervous, ready to flee or to fight, never letting us out of their sight. In captivity, however, despite being close up and proximate, the last thing animals do is watch us, or hold our gaze: “nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.” [i] Yet there is Guy, staring down Julian Huxley and still holding our gaze with commanding power brilliantly caught by Suschitzky. Defiant in the moment, 1958, Guy unknowingly defied Berger’s insight. It is an excruciating image of life, especially when we try to hold Guy’s gaze in death, now in his glass case in South Kensington. Neither on all fours nor standing proud bipedally as man-like ape, Guy sits on a fake rock, a kind of miniature Monkey Hill, and stares blankly. Berger was right even about Guy: he no longer looks at us, but past us into a beyond.

Guy, a western lowland Gorilla, The Natural History Museum, London. Courtesy, Alamy.

[i] John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (1977] London: Penguin, 2009), 37

[i] Leonard Huxley (ed.), Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, I, 194.

[ii] Julian Sorell Huxley, Guy The Gorilla typescript, 1958, Julian Sorrel Huxley Papers, Rice University, MS50, Box 74: 12.

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From The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution by Alison Bashford. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from University of Chicago Press.

Charged with hindsight and consequence, the origin stories of landmark inventions make up, at this point, a genre of their own (e.g. The Imitation Game, The Social Network, and Hidden Figures). Any film that attends to a STEM breakthrough in particular has to deal with a daunting problem: how do you dramatize an esoteric subject for a general audience?

The STEM movie of the summer, Oppenheimer, seems to decide early on that its audience cannot understand physics, much less evaluate its protagonist’s skill as a physicist. Instead, Oppenheimer’s intelligence is asserted by way of what I can only classify as weird flexes: reading the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit mid-coitus, or giving a lecture in Dutch, later telling a colleague that he had learned the language in six weeks for the occasion. That there are no subtitles during his lecture, that the formulas he writes on chalkboards are shot out of focus and garnished with music, conveys the degree to which the audience is asked to believe in Oppenheimer’s competence but not to worry over the particulars—the particulars, which for me, lay the foundation of pleasure in any great film about craft.

A craft movie, as I’ll refer to them here, is a drama about a person who wants to be great at their trade. Sports movies and workplace movies fit into this category, as would a movie following an artist, chef, dressmaker, musician, hitman, ballerina, or stripper, so long as the work itself is central to the plot. The best craft movies replicate the pleasures of learning a craft yourself. You become conversant with a new world. You begin to recognize its values and customs.

Take Whiplash (2014), in which the craft is drumming in a jazz band. The film teaches you to pay attention to tempo, to understand tempo as a contract between the conductor and the drummer. We know it is important because of the way the conductor (J.K. Simmons) will start and stop rehearsal, over and over, until Andrew (Miles Teller) has the tempo just right. Is Andrew playing at the conductor’s tempo? When Andrew’s tempo is off, the conductor tends to throw a cymbal at his head, so we know what the problem is, even if we lack rhythm. Eventually, all the conductor has to do is look Andrew’s way with a certain wild spark in his eye, and we know his tempo is off.

The immersive promise of a craft movie is realized to great effect in the last ten or so minutes of Whiplash, during a high-stakes performance. Andrew goes rogue. He does not follow the conductor’s tempo. The wild spark appears in the conductor’s eyes, but the conductor doesn’t yell because this is a performance, not a rehearsal. There’s something erotic about it, this not being able to yell. “I’ll cue you in,” says Andrew to a string bass player. “I’ll cue you,” he says to the conductor, reversing their usual power dynamic. We hear the song “Caravan,” which we have only heard halted, in segments. We hear it now in full, and underneath it we hear the stored energy of all those halted run-throughs, expressed at last. The conductor hovers over Andrew, nodding, affirming, beginning once more to take charge of the show. Power is seized and surrendered, and all the while the drumming doesn’t stop. For ten—full—minutes.

This is what I love about a craft movie. That by the end of it, I can watch someone drum for ten minutes and it comes to mean all of that. I have rehearsed for the final performance, too. What would this scene have meant had the film not prepared me to understand its significance?

The latest film from writer-director Christopher Nolan is a craft movie insofar as its central drama involves talent, work, and the pursuit of greatness, but it doesn’t leave me feeling like I have been brought into the fold. Most notably, I don’t feel prepared, or even invited, to evaluate J. Robert Oppenheimer as being uniquely capable at physics. Instead, I am handed other people’s evaluations of him and asked to accept them at face value. From the outset, the film proclaims Oppenheimer’s status as Promethean, leaving me, as a viewer, with nowhere to go, little to determine.

Oppenheimer is not the first movie about a man in STEM to hurry through the technical stuff. As Stuart Jeffries observed for The Guardian in 2016, math movies often have “a black hole where the maths should be.” So extensive are the precedents that Oppenheimer is not even the first movie with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck to fit this bill. Watching Oppenheimer, Good Will Hunting springs to mind, in which Damon’s Will Hunting develops his skills as a mathematician, yet his most memorable show of prowess, the one that leads his friend Morgan (Affleck) to boast—“My boy’s wicked smart”—concerns not math but early American history, as if expertise in one, conceivably more accessible field of study can stand in for another.

It may seem unfair to compare music with a subject like physics or math. Still, within any subject, there is an art to selecting how much and what to explain.

I have been given a working knowledge of several trades, some of them out of my wheelhouse, through media that is deliberate about unpacking craft. Though the musicians in Whiplash play “double time swing,” I’m neither expected to understand swing nor left out of the story because I don’t. (Asked to define swing, Cootie Williams, jazz trumpeter and Duke Ellington collaborator once said, “Define it? I’d rather tackle Einstein’s theory!”) Instead, tempo, a more accessible concept, serves as the story’s battleground. Watching I, Tonya, I’m taught to fixate on the triple axel, a move defined by Tonya’s mom (Allison Janney) and coach (Julianne Nicholson). “You skate backward, and then take off from a forward position on your left leg and then somehow fuckin’ hurl yourself blindly like three-and-a-half rotations like you’re light as shit . . . land on the opposite foot on the back, outside edge of razor-thin blade.” When Tonya first completes a triple axel in competition, I know to watch because of the announcer’s commentary, and I get to see it a second time, replayed in slow motion. This triple axel tunnel vision, which establishes Tonya’s potential as a figure skater, makes the rest of her story all the more tragic.

These films do not explain everything about their respective crafts. It isn’t the job of a narrative to do so, nor is there time, even if they wanted to, in under three hours. Yet, even understanding the craft in terms of just one criterion, I am able to care deeply. These films, selective and concentrated, teach you a limited lexicon and draw your attention to the relevant context of the hero (Andrew wants to be like Buddy Rich; Tonya wants to beat Nancy Kerrigan).

As is the case with any biopic or adaptation, Oppenheimer makes me curious about the logic governing Nolan’s choices of what’s left out and what goes in. A lot of names and terms populate the movie’s first act: quantum physics, fission, fusion, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman. (A “Sea of Scientists and Soldiers,” Vulture called it.) It leaves me both tired and disoriented, as though I have just read aloud the complete list of rules to a board game but am no closer to understanding how the game is played. We see, sporadically, through Oppie’s point of view, vibrating slinkies that represent the idea of energy. We watch him throw stemware into the corner of his room, where it breaks on the floor. I think we are meant to think something like, “Ah, yes. Physics.” Beyond that, the line between the slinkies and the glass and the bomb remains tenuous, associative at best.

Perhaps the intention is to overwhelm, to make the viewer feel small and unable to keep pace with the person whom the movie, and its source material, casts as Prometheus. I find it uncomfortable to be forced into a posture of reverence toward a man whose invention, regardless of its theoretical impact, killed hundreds of thousands of human beings. I’d rather be trusted to make up my own mind.

When it comes to STEM in film, there can be drama in the minutiae. Moneyball, which manages to simultaneously be a STEM movie and a sports movie, offers a good example. The problem that Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) are trying to solve using statistics is made known to the viewer in unambiguous terms; Beane says of his poorly funded team, the Oakland Athletics, “[T]here are rich teams, and there are poor teams, and then there’s 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us.” This film does include a whiteboard full of numbers, but Brand stands next to his numbers and explains what they are: the number of games the team must win, and the number of runs they must score in order to do so. We scroll through spreadsheets showing players scored along columns like BA (batting average) or CS (caught stealing), and get eyes on the source material, the statistician Bill James’s formula for “Runs Created,” the aggregate metric Brand wants to use “to find value in players that nobody else can see.” Thus, we are showered in numbers, but, critically, we know what kind of numbers they are. What a loss it would have been to bypass this moment. The success of a movie like Moneyball suggests that audiences not only can tolerate, but might enjoy, romp in the weeds.

In the case of Oppenheimer, the one salient physics idea we need to hold onto is already there, within the noise: the chain reaction. As Oppenheimer tells Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), “When we detonate an atomic device, we might start a chain reaction that destroys the world.” This “troubling possibility” adds to the already high stakes of the Trinity explosion.

The chain reaction concept is doubly pertinent as a way to situate the Manhattan Project in the fuller context of history. Where does Oppenheimer’s culpability start and end? Is he a demigod, or is he a domino? To what degree was the bomb inevitable, with or without him, after the atom split? The presence of retired Einstein, who says, “Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement,” makes the frame of the story more cyclical and expansive.

Oppenheimer chafes when it uses scientific settings only as texture, when its digressions lean irrelevant, hagiographic, and intentionally showy. But when Oppenheimer lets us in on the work itself, when it lets us assess the goals, risks, and costs of the Manhattan Project, and with that knowledge, reach our own conclusions about the person in charge (that is, if are able to tune out the voices calling him things like “actually important” or “a prophet”)—that’s when the movie finds its groove. When Oppenheimer maps out a town in Los Alamos to be populated by scientists; when, using glass jars of marbles, he visualizes the amounts of uranium and plutonium that have been produced thus far; when, nonchalant, he explains the possibility of total atmospheric ignition: these moments work because of what they accentuate: the collision of the ego and the actual job.

Feynman, who is known for his work at Los Alamos as well as his contributions to the fields of quantum computing and nanotechnology, writes, “[A] kind of intense beauty that I see given to me by science is seen by so few others, by few poets and, therefore, by even fewer more ordinary people.” It is this visionary capacity that excites me most about craft movies and especially STEM movies. I want such a film to initiate me, if only for a few hours, into another way of reading the world.

In 2017, almost a hundred years after insulin was ‘defensively’ patented for the express purpose of preventing unethical profiteering, Alec Smith was found dead in his Minneapolis home at only 26 years old. He had been diagnosed with T1DM two years previously, but seemed to have adapted well to the demands of insulin treatment. What had gone wrong? Smith’s great misfortune was that he had been lucky enough to be born a citizen of Earth’s wealthiest nation. Unlike most industrialized countries with the finances to do so, the United States offers no universal health coverage to its population. When he ran out of insulin and could afford no more, he was simply left to die.

This tragedy was far from unforeseeable. While a small number of Americans are able to access subsidized healthcare through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, almost all working- age people rely on a fully privatized, insurance-based marketplace to meet their medical needs. Those fortunate enough to have stable, full-time employment often receive health insurance as a perk of the job, but this leaves many to fall through the cracks.

When he was first diagnosed in 2015, Smith was registered with the insurance that his mother held through work. According to the terms of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), this provided him with coverage until his twenty- sixth birthday. Unfortunately, he was already approaching the cut-off date. In 2017, he “aged out,” and was left to fend for himself.

Smith did not live in poverty. He worked as a manager at an independent restaurant, and received a salary of around $35,000 per year: not an extravagant income by any means, but comfortable enough for a single man. Losing his health insurance, however, was devastating. As a small business, his employer offered no coverage, but he was paid too much to qualify for Medicaid assistance. His only options were to either take out an individual health insurance policy, or to go without and pay for any costs up front.

It quickly became obvious that for Smith to maintain the level of care he had enjoyed on his mother’s insurance, even the most “affordable” policy would involve crippling costs. In addition to a $450 per month premium, he would be expected to pay full price for his supplies until he met an annual deductible of $7,600. Even after all of that, he would still be liable for smaller ‘co- pay’ fees every time he picked up a prescription until he met his “out of pocket maximum.” In short, Smith was looking at a potential yearly bill of at least $13,000 – over a third of his total income.

It must have seemed absurd. For only $5,400 per year, he could buy the right to spend up to another $7,600 on medical care alone, and his other expenses – rent, utilities, food, etc. – had not gone anywhere. At work he had heard talk that the owners planned to open branches at several new locations, and, as the ACA had also stipulated that companies with more than fifty employees should offer health coverage to at least 95% of their full-time workforce or face penalty fines, he reasoned that, as a manager, he would almost certainly be offered insurance when the move went through.

After his diagnosis, Smith remembered being shocked at an initial pharmacy bill of around $500 for a month’s worth of insulin and supplies. This was a lot, but it must have seemed manageable. It was, after all, only $50 more than he would be paying in premiums if he took out an individual policy. His mother later remembered him telling her how he planned to go without insurance, asking “how bad could it be?”

The answer, as it turned out, was very. Insulin is now one of the single most expensive substances on the planet. When he went to the pharmacy to pick up his prescription, he was told that a single month of supplies would set him back $1,300 – quite a sum for a substance that one recent article suggested could be produced – profitably (!) – at an average cost of only $133 per user per year.

Smith was shocked. He had, with some justification, never imagined just how expensive such an apparently ubiquitous thing might have become. He simply did not have the money that was being asked of him and, lacking insurance, was not eligible for any of the commercial discount schemes that might have reduced his immediate costs, however modestly. In the end, he left with only a fraction of what he needed to effectively manage his condition.

With little other option he began to ration what little he could afford, injecting as little as he felt he could get away with while also radically cutting his carbohydrate intake. If he could buy enough time to reach his next pay packet, he must have thought, at least he could replenish his supplies and take stock of the situation. This decision, however, proved to be disastrous. Smith’s strategy was a desperate gamble, and, as it turned out, a fatal one. Only a month after being unceremoniously dumped from his mother’s insurance policy, he fell into a coma and died of DKA. Damningly, his experience was far from unique.

When Allen Hood, for example, turned eighteen, he was rejected by Medicaid. In the end, he also turned to insulin rationing. Two years later his mother came home to find him on the floor, unconscious. Cruelly, she was forced to watch for over two hours, only days before Mother’s Day, as paramedics tried in vain to save her son.

Jada Baldwin was also uninsured. When she was taken to hospital with DKA in 2019, she admitted that she had been unable to give herself insulin for three whole weeks (!) prior to her admission. She was sent home, and died eight days later.

After he lost his job in November 2017, Jesse Lutgen’s health insurance went with it. The most ‘affordable’ individual plan he could find at short notice came with an incredible $10,000 deductible so, like Smith, he tried to pay out of pocket. He was found dead in February the following year.

These stories represent only a tiny fraction of those who have died for want of a vial that, twenty-five years ago, could be bought for less than the cost of a round of drinks at most mid- range bars. At the time of writing, typing “insulin” into the fundraising website GoFundMe returns countless results, many of them last-ditch attempts to acquire vital supplies from uninsured (and underinsured) Americans. Make no mistake, this is a crisis.

It is not, however, by any means a uniquely American one. Global diabetes rates are increasing rapidly, and demand for insulin along with them. As the planet’s richest country, however, the United States makes for a telling case study. The argument that the resources or infrastructure to provide universal health coverage is simply not there holds little water. If the political will to do so existed, the authorities in Washington D.C. could end the crisis for their constituents almost overnight several times over.

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Whatever the “type,” diabetes is a dangerous condition that can lead to disabling and even potentially fatal long-term complications. In reality, however, it need not – with enough insulin it can be effectively controlled. People living with diabetes do, on average, live slightly shorter lives than the general population. Nonetheless, their life expectancy is now substantially greater than it was in the mid-twentieth century, and there is no reason to believe that this gap might not close further in the future, should we allow it to.

Over the last hundred years, diabetes should have lost much of its bite. With effective treatment it is an unpleasant inconvenience and often a chore to deal with, but it should be little more than that. However, for many it remains an existential burden, and it continues to be recognized as one of the leading causes of death worldwide. This framing, however, is somewhat misleading. When people die after rationing insulin, ‘diabetes’ is usually listed as the cause. When they develop avoidable complications that end up killing them, the same thing happens. It is true that in most of these cases the condition has physically contributed to their deaths, but many would have survived had they been able to access the supplies that they needed. Often, they did not die ‘of diabetes’, but rather of inadequate access to healthcare. The problem here is political, not biological.

Those who argue against universal –  or at least more affordable – healthcare usually do so out of an ostensible commitment to free market economics. On paper, the free market is one in which private companies can set whatever price they choose for their products, while individuals are able to freely decide where to buy what they need. In theory, this leads to a community of rational consumers who continuously seek out the best deals, encouraging businesses to undercut one another to attract customers. This, so the thinking goes, leads to affordable prices and greater efficiency.

This utopian, self-regulating free market is, of course, nonsense, and insulin serves as a perfect example of why. Those who use it, and especially those with T1DM, are a captive audience. They cannot choose to go without. Furthermore, global production is dominated by only three major companies – Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi. In practice, these manufacturers hold a near-monopoly, but they rarely undercut one another as the theory suggests they should. Instead, they do the opposite, forming an effective cartel that is able to maintain artificially high prices. If their customers have no choice but to buy their products, why ruin the party by competing when they can work together to guarantee one another’s profits?

There are some ways in which insulin can be acquired more affordably. Doctors can pass on “samples” to their patients, for example, which of course also function to advertise certain branded products. Sometimes “free clinics” can help in the short term, and pharmacy coupons or the so-called “co-pay” cards issued by manufacturers might also reduce immediate costs.

None of these, however, are real solutions, and they tend to come with a long list of terms and conditions. ‘Co-pay’ cards, for example, are often not available to the uninsured, and even where they are, the holes in the system become rapidly apparent.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Eli Lilly announced that it would make a card capping monthly insulin ‘co-pays’ at $35 available to those without insurance. Should someone acquire one of these cards and have it accepted by a pharmacy, neither of which is a given, they might still be expected to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year for their supplies. There is also a $7,500 annual limit, based on Lilly’s ‘contributions’ towards the still-extortionate list price with each purchase. In practice, this means that virtually nobody is able to get everything they need at the reduced price.

“Co-pay” cards are also never issued simply out of goodwill. They also function as effective marketing schemes that encourage people to buy certain products – and still at a significantly inflated cost. They may save money for individuals in the short term, but manufacturers more than recoup their costs in the process, and never fail to cynically use the opportunity to considerable PR effect by highlighting how much they apparently care. This is not the only way companies work to repackage profit-oriented policies as charitable benevolence.

Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk each, on paper, donate vast quantities of insulin to those in need through what are known as patient assistance programs (PAPs). Each company has its own with slightly different small print, but they operate similarly in practice and provide one avenue through which some uninsured people who meet certain criteria can receive their prescriptions free of charge, apparently direct from the manufacturer. This sounds very generous on the face of it, and undoubtedly some people have benefited from insulin acquired through PAPs. We should, however, be very careful about attributing any social consciousness to profit-seeking enterprises. No private insulin manufacturer makes its products for the good of humanity, but rather to secure the greatest possible return on its investment – that has been clear since the 1920s. PAPs are no exception. In fact, they represent a very clever piece of misdirection indeed.

When someone receives insulin from, say, Lilly Cares – Eli Lilly’s PAP – they are not actually getting it from Eli Lilly the manufacturer. Instead, it comes from the Lilly Cares Foundation, an affiliated, but ostensibly independent, non- profit organization. Eli Lilly proper provides thousands of dollars’ worth of insulin to Lilly Cares, which then distributes it to successful applicants. Why the middleman? The answer should surprise no one. When Eli Lilly “donates” insulin to Lilly Cares, they are able to designate this as a charitable contribution. This “donation” can then be claimed back as tax relief at “fair market value” – a value which is determined entirely by the manufacturer cartel of which Eli Lilly is a controlling member!

Insulin may be sold for far more than it costs to produce, but its “value” here is determined wholly by its list price. As prices go up, these generously minded companies can claim back ever more from the government, even while their expenses remain stable. The system is framed as manufacturers doing people a favor, but in reality, the function of PAPs is clear. This is a clever system of tax avoidance dressed up as humanitarianism.

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Excerpted from Stuart Bradwel’s Insulin: A Hundred Year History. Used with permission of the publisher, Polity Press. Copyright 2023 by Stuart Branwel.