David Singerman | Research

Current projects

My next book-length research project explores doping in sports from 1980 to the present through a single drug: recombinant erythropoietin, or epo. In its natural form, epo triggers the body to produce red blood cells. Recombinant epo for anemia patients became the first biotech blockbuster drug in the 1980s, but in the 1990s it became more famous for nearly destroying endurance sports like cycling and running, where participants used it to boost their blood's oxygen-carrying capacity. Antidoping authorities struggled to test for it, and epo was even blamed for the deaths of young athletes. But the latest and most rigorous pharmacological evidence suggests that epo has no benefit at all for competitive performance—a finding that seems hard to square with volumes of anecdotal testimony about its effect.

Popular narratives about doping portray heroic officials fighting for fair play against cheaters, while academic scholarship argues that athletes are subjected to a global police state of biomedical surveillance. By approaching the subject as a historian of science, my project avoids these moralizing binaries and instead asks how and what people learn about performance-enhancing drugs. What does modern science really know about how well these substances work in practice, especially when high-level athletes are already physiological outliers yet cannot be studied directly? How do ambiguous laboratory results become legally definitive "adverse analytical findings"? How do dopers—or entire countries—find ways to evade testing regimes? And how do athletes themselves, both amateur and elite, develop vernacular knowledge about using drugs, when that knowledge and the actual supply of drugs must both circulate illicitly?

Completed projects

My first book, Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar, will be published with the University of Chicago Press in September 2025. To explain the rise of global capitalism, historians have told the stories of how cotton, tobacco, rubber, grain, beef and other natural objects became exchangeable market goods. What makes sugar unusual among commodities is that, by 1900, its value was so tightly defined by modern scientific methods. Prior to 1850, sugar was valued on the basis of its taste, color, texture, and origin. My book traces the efforts of planters, industrialists, and state actors over the following decades to replace that complex sense of value with a single measurement of the sucrose molecule.

Based on archival research in the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, *Unrefined* tells the political, scientific, and labor history of the idea of pure sugar. It begins with European laboratories, moves through Caribbean plantations and Scottish workshops, and finally lands in U.S. custom houses, refineries, and commodity exchanges of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sugar’s chemical identity promised a stable basis for manufacture, trade, and even financial markets in speculative futures. But the actual matter of sugar turned out to be difficult to discipline, and enslaved workers, customs agents, and refining industrialists, and others continued to exploit their particular expertise about sugar's unstable substance. Sugar thus shows us how global commodity systems depended on the victory of modern science over other forms of knowing, but also how insecure and tenuous that victory could be.

I have published several articles and book chapters related to *Unrefined*, in addition to a series of short popularly-oriented pieces for Bunk History and The Atlantic online. In 2022 I interviewed the historian Lara Putnam for Public Books.