That was the state of her knowledge in August of 1973, when she started her first job. She did not know then how rapidly her knowledge in that one area would expand. The recent graduate got a job as a research technician. She was hired by a physician who ran a research wing of a Houston hospital. He and his associates studied both women’s and men's reproductive health.
The Texas researchers wanted to discover how vasectomies might affect men's reproductive health. They were accumulating a large collection of blood samples from men who had had a vasectomy. They then looked at selected hormone levels in those blood samples.
The graduate who had gone with out a brother worked in one of the laboratories that analyzed those blood samples. She soon found that she needed to use and hear repeatedly terms that had never been mentioned in her own home. Eventually she even developed the ability to listen respectfully to a comment on vasectomy from a gentleman who had contributed one of those many samples.
Although the female technician remained in at that job for only one year, it was not her final exposure to research that concerned men's reproductive health. She had a second exposure to that area following the birth of her two sons. While caring for them, the former technician had been introduced to issues that relate to the health of small boys.
The mother of those two small boys had somehow managed to acquire quite a bit of laboratory experience. Most of that experience did not relate to men’s reproductive health. It did, however, give her the confidence to tackle almost any research project. For that reason, she no longer needed to take a job as a research technician. Instead, she could enter the world of industry, and she could take a job as a Research Associate.
It was that title, “Research Associate,” that eventually allowed the working mother to gather more information on men’s reproductive health. That title served as an acknowledgement of the woman’s laboratory skills. She had the ability to culture many types of cells. Eventually she was asked to grow in a culture dish two different types of prostate cancer cells.
That experience caused her to make note of printed information on prostate cancer. In 2003 the Research Associate chose to become a freelance writer. She then discovered a new web site focused on men’s health. She saw that they needed writers, and she suspected that they could use information on men’s reproductive health.
That summarizes briefly how a woman who never had a brother, a woman who had attended an all-female college, managed to become a source of information on prostate cancer. She shared that information with the online readers of the following web site: www.men4health.com. She is now a columnist for the revised web site, a more inclusive web site called open4health.