Wide-Open Field? You Mean Like My Head?

If men started getting pregnant, it's often said, there'd be a male birth control pill in two years. Is there a research area where the gender dynamics cut the other way? Well, here's what happened when the Columbia University Medical Center's Angela Christiano noticed she was going bald at the age of 30:

I began reading all the papers on alopecia. In my training, nobody had talked much about hair. I thought maybe the reason was because it had all been figured out. When I started digging, I saw the opposite was true. I thought, “Maybe this is the hand of fate directing me to a topic? This is a wide-open field.” If I could identify the genes involved in alopecia, then maybe we could figure out what they did, and that might be the way to a treatment.