Kayla Woods
I have always been a writer and I have always been a scientist; it just took me a while to realize I could put them together. When I was in the first grade, I won an award for best original creative work. The story was called Curse of the Vampire Blood, I was probably the only kid that entered the contest, but I was still pretty proud of myself.
I also had a deep love of science from a very young age. When I was eight years old my aunt bought me a chemistry set for Christmas and I was elated. I didn’t really read the instructions though and I quickly grew bored with the mundane reactions that they suggested so I just mixed all the chemicals together. When they started to fizzle in the plastic tray that I was given in which to conduct experiments I panicked, and washed them all down the drain. Not the best lab practices or safety measures. During the fourth grade, I decided I wanted to try to find an alternative for gasoline and started studying organic chemistry on my own. My love of science and my love of the arts had still yet to intertwine.
I wrote short stories and plays all through high school, as hobbies rather than as interests I could seriously pursue, and when I planned to go to college I was advised to study something that would pay well. I was told I was too smart to be a starving artist. I tried to follow both my artistic and scientific pursuits and originally double majored in theater and chemistry, but I eventually dropped the theater major and graduated with a bachelor’s in chemistry in a minor in math from Fort Lewis College in 2014. I immediately went on to grad school in order to conduct research rather than do the mindless lab work available to me with only a bachelor’s degree. I earned my master’s degree in 2015 from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and immediately went to work in private industry. I analyzed biological matrices from Beagle serum to monkeys brains, but found the research opportunities were not what I wanted for myself.
When I was given the opportunity to work at the coroner’s office in El Paso County, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. It seemed perfect for me, as someone who always had an interest in poisons and the macabre. I worked at the coroner’s office for three years and learned some things that I will remember for the better, and a number of things that have scarred me in a way that I will never recover from. I did manage to publish an academic paper while I was there, but I still thought that I wasn’t quite doing everything that I could. When I was in grad school, I loved writing my thesis, which was like writing a book, and I worked at it during every quiet minute that I had. I love doing research and I love expressing myself through my words. If I could write a thesis, why couldn’t I write a nonfiction book?
I felt that, as a woman in science who wanted to share her knowledge with other people in the general public, I had something to offer. Science has been guarded by the good old boys’ club as something that only people with degrees can understand, and I don’t like that. Science isn’t an elitist pastime, it’s just how the world works. I may have gone as far as getting a master’s, but you don’t need a master’s degree to be interested in chemicals and poisons and how the world functions on a molecular level. Anybody can find it interesting. I found it interesting as a little kid with a chemistry set, and even now, my friends outside the science community tell me that they think what I do is interesting.
So, I decided to write a book. My first book-in-progress is a historical survey of the way that humans have used poisons as medicine, from Ötzi the Iceman to modern day uses of chemotherapy and opioids. We know the anti-vaxxers don’t have it right, but how do we know that modern medicine is leading us in the right direction when it has misled us so many times before? How do we know what remedies are helping us and which ones are slowly killing us? These are the questions I am trying to answer.
Kayla Woods 