I earned my Ph.D. in sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. This was an exciting and challenging time for me. Our faculty was nationally renowned, and the educational standards were exceptionally high. Throughout the university, not just in sociology, there was a heavy emphasis on research.

      One day, a couple of other graduate students and I were reading the bulletin board near the Sociology Department office. We became puzzled as we read a new announcement. The Medical School was looking for male volunteers for sex research. It said the pay was good.

      Our imaginations immediately soared--and we laughed and joked about working our way through graduate school by having sex. We wondered if the announcement might be a joke. We did have a lot of pranksters among our students, and this could be one of their shenanigans. But the announcement looked genuine.

      One of the students decided to call the number posted in the announcement. Sure enough, the recruiting of men for sexual research was genuine. Our faces lit up. But then came the bad news. The medical researchers had received so many applicants that they had decided to limit the participants to just the medical students who had applied.

      This was my introduction to sex research. The announcement had been posted by William Masters, a member of the Washington University Medical School faculty. Masters' research became world famous. He teamed up with Virginia Johnson, whom he later married, and their studies became known as the Masters and Johnson research.

      By the way, after Masters invented a motor-driven artificial penis, the need for the men he had recruited disappeared--much to the dismay of the volunteers, I'm sure.