(Note to e-mail recipients: Since nothing seems to prevent typos in the original versions of these dispatches, I’d recommend clicking on the Web version if more than an hour or two has passed since the delivery of the original; since God loves me, but incompletely and with palpable mockery, I usually detect and repair a flurry of mistakes in the immediate aftermath of a mass mailing, never right before. You may also occasionally find that I have corrected errors of fact, which I almost look forward to making just to prove I’m eager to correct them.)
I recently spent a week away from home, but only far enough away to do some running and hiking in parts of Boulder County’s open space I haven’t explored much since Rosie moved in with me a little over three years ago. Part of this was an attempt to discover how much of my desire to escape Boulder relates to the city having become a genuinely bad fit for me versus how much stems from barely concealed and worsening nihilism, a permanent aura of funk that persists regardless of where I plant or transplant the mind that creates it.
Unsurprisingly, it’s both. While having an enjoyable week overall, I confirmed that this place has a supranormal concentration of self-entitled yet blunt-minded fuckabouts, but also accepted anew that even if everyone here suddenly conformed to whatever my idea of neighborly behavior might be, I’d still wake up on most days wondering within minutes how I can pass the next batch of conscious hours without soon wishing I’d never experienced them at all. I am not much for forming new memories or impressions or meeting anyone new, or shopping for food, or writing, and would rather just be able to fast-forward to the point in my day where I’m in bed next to my dog close enough to the edge of sleep to be feeling almost nothing but companionship and peace. I’m not whining; I just don’t like living much, is all.
But form new ideas and impressions I still sometimes do, and while I was exploring some of the trails behind the National Institute of Standards and Testing—in the shadow of the Flatirons, but high enough on the remarkably secular Enchanted Mesa to have a view of some of the most elaborate residences around—I was reminded of “the Glass House,” a property just west of Chautauqua Park that has gradually come down in value over the past dozen years to about $13.75 million, and is adorned in part with artwork from the world-famous SmithKlein Gallery.
Rosie and I reached the spot below after hiking up into Skunk Canyon from near the base of NCAR Road south of town and then circling clockwise around Kohler Mesa. (Maybe four people reading this even know what the hell I’m talking about here, but I just described how tourists might execute half of a lovely afternoon hike. I won’t explain the best way to get back to your car, but you’re still welcome.)
Our view from the Enchanted Mesa reminded me in real time of two nearby residences of some note, both obscured from this perspective by tons of dirt and rock. One is the home on University Hill where JonBenet Ramsey died twenty-five years ago, and the other is the Glass House. I had run past the latter edifice years ago just to suffer the majestic incline leading up and around the set of mansions on Bellevue Drive, but had taken no special note of it and had no idea who lived there. Sometime around the onset of COVID-19, an out-of-town friend e-mailed me the listing of the Glass House, then priced at about $16 million, asking if I was aware my next-door neighbors were on the move. (Actually, I made the second part of that up. For now, I reside in one of a group of shacks out east that might grab $800.000 to $950,000, though it won’t be long until nothing in Boulder sells for under a million.) When Rosie and I finished our hike, I spent a few hours learning about this local testament to untrammeled opulence.
It appears that the house has been continually on the market since 2009, when it was listed, with beautiful comic timing, for $22 million. (2009…housing market….never mind.) The owner was a limited liability company in the name of Jennie Smoly Caruthers, an absurdly accomplished biochemist who had died in 2006. The house was evidently built for her husband, Marvin Caruthers, an even more distinguished molecular biologist. And if anyone deserved to make a pile of money and have fun with it in whatever way they wanted, it was this couple.
The fundamental three-dimensional structure of DNA, which is distributed in the human body among 46 chromosomes and divided into regions called genes that each “code” for a specific protein product, wasn’t clarified until the late 1950s. In the late 1970s, Marvin Caruthers was one of a number of leading biochemists working to build DNA, or segments of it, from scratch.
In theory, this isn’t much more difficult than working with Legos; DNA is nothing but a string of about 3 billion repeating units that come in four types, and each string of three units, or triplet, bears the code for one of the twenty amino acids that make up the proteins in the human body. (Given four choices of nucleic acids, sixty-four triplets, and hence amino acids, are possible: 4 raised to the third power = 64. Luckily, humans are too crude an organism to require nearly this much variety.)
In practice, the four nucleic acids that characterize each repeating DNA unit—you may remember these from high-school biology as the letters A, C, G and T—can’t be snapped together like Legos, and instead must be assembled on the right nutrient medium, with the right enzyme proteins in the mix to spark the assembly process along. Based on my own dogged but limited understanding of biochemistry, Caruthers managed to figure out and patent various ways to do this.
This research was happening about twenty years before the Human Genome Project resulted in the “mapping” of the whole catalog of human DNA, so that scientists can now tell what part of what chromosome—numbered 1 through 23—holds a given gene. You can probably imagine the value in being able to custom-build a piece of DNA—that is, a single gene or group of genes—from a basic palette of chemical ingredients. When scientists were learning to build DNA “probes” to find out just where certain protein products were being made, Caruthers was at the forefront of these advances, and along the way came to hold multiple patents and have a hand in the founding of various biotech companies. He won the 2006 National Medal of Science, and today he remains a distinguished professor of biochemistry at the University of Colorado.
He probably slew a veritable horde of dragons and orcs and trolls along the way, and had sex with their wives and daughters, too, while the villains watched and helplessly cheered on the carnage. But for present purposes, one of the companies Caruthers co-founded, in 1980, was Amgen Pharmaceuticals, based today in Thousand Oaks, California. This company made its founders and principal investors richer than God Himself at the height of His involvement in cryptocurrency and the sex trade. In 1989, the company rolled out a drug called epoetin alfa, marketed as Epogen. You know this product better as just EPO (erythropoietin), and probably know exactly where the rest of this post is headed.
Perhaps you envision a pharmaceutical company’s main job as synthesizing chemicals the body cannot, often with the aim of getting as many people literally or functionally dependent on these potions for day-to-day survival. But if a company can make a “drug” that is in fact a chemical made in the body under conditions of good health, and can make a shitload of it by engineering a shitload of synthetic (or recombinant) DNA-chunks to serve as factories for making the chemical, then the company has the potential to change the world. The world would be a much more unpleasant place to live for millions of people if not for the ability to make recombinant human insulin.
By 2012, long after Marvin Caruthers’ first-ballot hall-of-fame scientific career was over, Amgen had become the largest biotech firm on the planet. In 2010, the U.S. Medicare system paid out more for Epogen than for any other drug—about $2 billion (a lot of this was undoubtedly fraud). That’s right; a substance you probably know as a drug healthy scalawags take to boost red-blood-cell count to cheat in sports has in fact rescued countless patients with chronic kidney failure or kidney malfunction secondary to cancer chemotherapy from anemia. It rescued Lance Armstrong himself from anemia when Lance was a cancer patient, and ol’ Lance liked it so much he just never fuckin’ stopped taking it.
EPO helped rewrite the distance-running record books in the 1990s to an unknowable but obviously nontrivial extent in the 1990s—sorry, folks, but if Geb, Bekele, El G and those players were all clean, so is everyone else on your heroes list—and, to a somewhat more quantifiable extent, helped destroy the reputation of the Tour de France well before Armstrong’s pleas of doping innocence finally collapsed. Without EPO (and Procrit, Johnson & Johnson’s analogous product), the numbers you automatically associate with certain human feats of endurance would be significantly different. But in the grand business scheme, EPO use by endurance athletes, its outsized reputation among members of this group notwithstanding, doesn’t account for even a fraction of a blip of Amgen’s Epogen sales (and thanks mainly to copycatting, Epogen is no longer the cash-cow it once was for the company).
I doubt Marvin Caruthers had any direct hand in the synthesis of human recombinant erythropoietin, or foresaw how it would change not only the athletics record books but the entire cultural landscape of top-level endurance sports. Nevertheless, I cannot help but appreciate that multimillion-dollar behemoth looking down on a town that has hosted and housed some of the most notable cyclists, triathletes and runners in the world.
Caruthers may live one town over in Louisville now, and may also have the power to remove this before you see it if he chooses. But if he was nice enough to give $20 million to the University of Colorado in 2007, back when that kind of money actually meant something, then he’d probably get a chuckle at these perspectives. Also, I run by the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building almost every day, and can almost see it from the end of my street. It is a beautiful structure, towering above the track at Potts Field just to the north across Discovery Drive.
I have no idea when the Glass House will sell, but I can think of a couple of excellent fates for it. One would be if it were reduced to shards by people throwing stones, preferably from within the home and by the owners or their drunken, ungrateful adult children. I think any glass house worth that much dough should have the equivalent of a shooting range inside it, or a bowling alley—a space set aside specifically for people to throw rocks and defy the time-honored admonishment referencing hypocritical accusers. Except that in this vision, one fateful toss of a modest stone is somehow enough to set in motion a cascade of catastrophic structural failures that send the house down the hillside in shrieking ruins, taking out a few $5 million shithole houses on the ugly way down to Baseline Road; this option is reminiscent of the “Mousetrap”-style death of Tom Hanks’ fixer-upper in The Money Pit.
A second gratifying outcome would be the current owners—now paying about $80 grand a year in property taxes alone on that eyesore, if my math is right—burning it for the insurance money and blaming it on homeless people, or simply paying some bums to torch the place and handing them a few Ben Franklins for their trouble. Any house that goes unsold for that long should be suspected of serious problems, like pipes that tend to freeze in the winter or a persistent farty-mothball smell in one of the sub-basement titty-bars.
Anyway, I had some fun with this, but I’m back to hating most of life here, and the fact that I’d feel the same way elsewhere isn’t enough to keep me from considering bailing by summer’s end. On Thursday nights, there is some kind of group ride for happy fuckups who enjoy having a few beers (some of them, anyway; you can smell it on them) and taking to the common rec paths just when it’s getting dark. The past Thursday, I was walking Rosie through one of the tunnels when the convoy came the other way, spread out across the entire path, at least 100 to 150 people in a convoy of grinning dipshits, maybe half with lights and many of them exceeding the 20 MPH speed limit on the ramp leading into the tunnel. Some were old, some were barely adults; all deserved a battle-axe or mattock swung at their faces hard enough to not merely behead them, but instantly convert their heads into a mist consisting of equal parts blood, shit, and whatever the ingredients of hipster-goo are.
It is, in theory, very easy not to be a flat-out, bug-eyed cocksucker and be one of a group of people riding three or four abreast on a rapidly darkening path being used by other people. It should be elementary to determine that it is dangerous to ride fast on a bike without lights under any circumstances. But around here, this is not conventional wisdom. Yelling “Happy Thursday!” is evidently meant to serve as a combination “We can do anything!” and “Get the fuck out of our way, we’re brain-damaged cunt wads!”
One of these riders, leading over the handlebars and letting out a standard AIEYYYEEE! while zipping through the tunnel, looked like Freddie Mercury wearing a nightgown and blessed with giant knockers, although once the distance between us dropped to a few feet I decided the presentation was more like the Church Lady with a porn ‘stache. AIEYYYEEE! Either way, I think I would rather live in a town of poor people where no one exercises or even knows how to ride a bike than around assholes who only know to misuse them, even if their entertaining sartorial antics remain somewhat unique to towns like these. If I wind up staying, it’s more because of being too lazy to commit to another shitty plan than because I have “decided” to stick around.
Soon, I will finish a post about the Olympics, but those and my fascination with distance running both seem like a long time ago. I don’t watch any news, just Netflix series about warrior-princesses who behead dickheads like reckless cyclists with mattocks and axes, so I have no idea what might come next. It will, however, again surely be trash.