Coming Soon:
I was an unsuspecting grad student when a rare autoimmune problem hijacked my body, making me a part of a family tradition: fighting for survival. A half century earlier, my parents and grandmothers outran the Nazis; now I had to outrun a life-threatening diagnosis by digging through the last century’s research on immunity, and in the process, uncovering awe inspiring discoveries that impact everyone’s survival.
Inside Job tells a crucial story of a disease that affects millions but is too-often overlooked and misunderstood. It’s a story of being medically adrift while the life of my unborn child hung in the balance, and later, that of a second baby, and eventually even my own life. It’s also the story of an inscrutable class of diseases whose history reveals the delicate fulcrum on which medical advancement can rest, how the wrong kind of progress—misguided science accepted as truth for 50 years—can drag down the rate of innovation and cost lives. Finally, it’s a story of how societies differentiate between insider and outsider. My grandparents and parents, who survived the annihilation of the vast majority of Poland’s Jews, embody the dangerous negotiation of friend versus foe. While the details of their experience are extreme, their efforts to survive and assimilate resonate with the immigrant experience across time and place.
These three narratives converge thanks to perseverance, resilience and luck. Inside Job is the story of the indelible consequences of inclusion or exclusion at the cellular, social and political level. How we navigate the chaos of the world into which we are born, how we manage a chemistry that’s out of our control, and how we negotiate the gap between what is scientifically understood and what’s still beyond our comprehension is the story of how we all survive.