I’m writing a book! It’s called LAB RAT. The goal of this book is to deliver humanity to the unlikeliest of narrators: the human research subject. Long overlooked, but essential to every medical advancement since the Age of Enlightenment, I believe that the human research subject holds the key to understanding what it means for us to be sick—and to be healed. Throughout the book, I transform the lifeless term “human research subject” into a collage of real people: working-class entrepreneurs, train-hopping punks, enterprising prisoners—people, in short, on the lower-rungs of the social ladder—whom I reanimate in order to fight for their dignity to exist in the same pages as the inventors of medicine.

LAB RAT is about the wonder and fragility of medicine—and the body. Set in the CROs, labs, prisons, reservations, outdoor shanties, and state institutions where drugs are (and were) tested, the book operates in the middle place between compound and cure; or, when cures are hypotheses, and hypotheses must be evaluated on a mass scale. Like a clinical trial assessing a drug’s efficacy, I assess creation myths around medicine and pharma, mining them to find answers to the book’s essential questions: Why are we so sick, and how do we heal? What does the way we treat human research subject say about the way we view sickness and health? And: What is a cure, anyway?

I’ve already received some nice words from early versions of the book. Michael Bibler called my work "wry, hilarious, and heartbreaking all at the same time.” Lambda Literary Award-Winning writer Julie Marie Wade called Lab Rat, “quite unlike anything I have ever read before. It's capacious in scope but also captivating on the level of sentence and scene. Here we have a fully realized memoir enhanced by research and imagination—or, just as true, a work of probing topical nonfiction anchored by a compellingly unique voice, narrative, and consciousness."