the repression of women by our society. The best and brightest women in many communities were relegated to the one intellectual role deemed suitable for them. They became teachers and many poured their love of language, science, music and art into students like me." Education and Career Falkow enrolled in biology at the University of Maine, because of their microbiology department. During the summers he worked in pathology at the hospital in Newport, staining slides and assisting in autopsies. He graduated in 1955. Before he started graduate school at University of Michigan he developed extreme anxiety. He was later diagnosed with agoraphobia. He avoided movie theaters and crowded places between 1955 and 1983 and dropped out of his first attempt at graduate school because of recurring panic attacks. He returned to Rhode Island to live with his parents and work at the Newport Hospital as a technician, focusing on bacteriology and processing and examining patient samples. He re-enrolled in graduate school at Brown University and graduated with a PhD in 1961. He finished his work for his Ph.D. thesis at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in the Department of Bacterial Immunology. While at Walter Reed, he worked with African-American microbiologist Othello Washington. Washington was older and more experienced than Falkow, but was assigned to be Stan's technician. Upon meeting, Falkow and Washington decided it would be more appropriate and better for both men to work together as a team. The two men worked together on isolating mobile genetic elements and the transfer of genes between E. coli and Salmonella and published a paper together about Proteus species. Falkow also worked with Shigella species and contracted dysentery, which lead to hospitalization, after being exposed to infected monkey feces flung at his face by an infected monkey. Multiple times through his training and early career more senior scientists, some Nobel prize winners, recommended that Falkow focus more on mechanisms of gene expression and less on pathogens because "nobody cares about typhoid". Falkow remained interested in pathogens despite many warnings from his peers and supervisors that infectious diseases were not interesting and were becoming less frequent in wealthy countries and were therefore a diminishing field of study. His early work in the 1960s focused on the genetic mechanisms, which enable bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. He showed that organisms, such as Shigella, can possess DNA fragments called plasmids which