Like many kids who are bitten by the journalism bug, I became editor of the high school newspaper. I took risks right from the start: one of my articles incited students to boycott the school lunchroom (protesting a new rule requiring them to eat there); another nearly cost the newspaper sponsor her teaching job. (She had let a pro-integration editorial, which was not welcome in a segregated school system in 1962, slip into our pages.) When I wasn't stirring up trouble at school, I spent summers at high school journalism workshops at the University of Florida and Northwestern University.

Later, as a second-year student at Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois, my friends and I founded an independent, off-campus newspaper that covered a battle between the school's president and some of its faculty. When the professors lost the dispute and their jobs, it was time for those of us who'd supported them to depart as well. In Fall 1967, I transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where Telegraph Avenue was quite a shock after a tiny college surrounded by corn fields. I took two years off from journalism and focused on trying to excel in Cal's fiercely competitive academic environment. And because it was the late Sixties, I spent as much time as possible marching in anti-war demonstrations and going to Janis Joplin concerts at the Fillmore.

The New Journalism had just hit when I entered Stanford University's graduate program in communications, and consequently many of us aspired to be Tom Wolfe or staff writers at Rolling Stone. Clearly these people could say whatever they wanted, however they wanted, without being shackled by the conventions of who-what-when-where-why-how. Because dream jobs were hard to land, I freelanced for magazines and weekly newspapers and anyone who would pay me to write, moving in the mid-Seventies from San Francisco to Atlanta. When all else failed, I worked as an office temp.

Although editors increasingly asked me for stories about science and medical research, I didn't think of myself as a specialist until I became editor of Employee Health and Fitness in 1982. This was an insider newsletter for corporate health directors, and my job was to be their eyes and ears at scientific meetings, separating the trite from the original and the reputable from the suspect. I discovered that I liked interviewing experts and translating their work for less-specialized readers.

I returned to the freelance life less than two years later, confident that I could write about clinical medicine and about health care delivery. At this time, the AIDS epidemic was front and center for me and other reporters on the medical beat. Over the next three years I covered dozens of scientific meetings, including the first international AIDS conference, and wrote more than 250 articles published in periodicals for physicians. Dozens of my stories were about this frightening new illness. Before long, I had a staff job at Medical World News, a national magazine for doctors.

Although I had a good news sense and was an accurate reporter, the stories I wrote for physician audiences were not as rich as I wanted them to be. I searched for educational opportunities, and in 1986 won a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I spent the next academic year at MIT and Harvard, studying molecular and cell biology, physiology, and virology. It was HIV, of course, that got me interested in the study of viruses.

The more I learned about science, the more passionate I became about writing for general audiences. I wanted to explain technical information in ways that would help readers not only understand more about their own ailments, but also be more informed citizens and voters.

I got my chance in 1991, when I beat out several doctors to become the first non-physician (and the first woman) editor of the Harvard Health Letter. The oldest consumer health newsletter in the country, this monthly publication reached 300,000 subscribers and was routinely picked up by newspaper columnists and large-circulation magazines. Its traditional strength was translating medical information so that individuals could make better decisions about their own care; I insisted that we also write about how health policy shapes what happens in the doctor's office. For the first time, the Health Letter covered costs, quality, and how to get the most for your money.

Although I am proud of the work I did during six years at the Health Letter, I remember how much I missed reporting on AIDS, a topic of little interest for many of the newsletter's core readers. I was professionally and personally restless when I had an epiphany during my early morning shower. I wondered why I didn't know more about AIDS vaccines. Why isn't there one? What's taking so long? These questions were my first glimpse of a looking glass that I stepped through a few months later, when I left Harvard Medical School to work on the most difficult and mesmerizing story that I have ever touched. I had been gearing up to write Big Shot for years; I just hadn't realized it until that fateful morning in the shower.