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Biologist Discovers Bloody Truth
By Michael Abrams

Author Bio

Michelle Petersen owes her livelihood to bodily fluids. So I guess you could say it was too much of a good thing that helped drive this biologist into biotech writing.

The had-enough moment for Michelle came at the end of a two-year stint as a laboratory researcher for Biosite, a manufacturer of medical diagnostic equipment in San Diego.

"I really despised doing lab work. It was really boring. It was really repetitious. On top of it, I found myself standing in front of large vats of urine and blood all day," she says.

For those of you who really want to get quantitative about it, we're really talking about pints, liters, and gallons, certainly enough to put Michelle in quest of another occupation.

That was in 1998. Michelle was two years out of college. A friend helped her land a job at Incyte Genomics, where she tested the company's genetic database software for data integrity. The interface to the software was sort of "kludgey," Michelle says, so she found herself also writing training materials, as well as conducting training sessions.

"I really liked doing that. That's when the light bulb went on," Michelle remembers. "I said to myself, This is what I should be doing."

Michelle says she was not surprised she liked writing so much. While in college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Michelle had been torn between two majors. Though Santa Cruz had no communications major, it did have one in literature, to which she was drawn.

But she was also fascinated by animals, particularly marine mammals. (She used to volunteer to rescue marine mammals, and has taught more than a few orphaned harbor seal pups to how to eat fish.) When friends, parents, and other influential folk insisted that biology was much more practical, Michelle was swayed. But now at Incyte, Michelle had maneuvered her way into a writing gig, and she loved it.

Michelle soon switched to online auction site eBay, where she wrote documentation both for internal usage and for customers, including some help topics. However, she grew tired of the Bay Area, and its steep housing prices and traffic. A graduate of Rancho Bernardo High, she decided to return to San Diego. That was last November. She showed up at her first STC-SD meeting and started looking for work. A recruiter picked up her résumé from Monster.com and put her in touch with Gen-Probe, where she was hired to write manuals for laboratory analysis instruments.

And now Michelle is once again back in the business of dealing professionally with bodily fluids. But we're talking droplets, sufficient for the devices Michelle documents. Some such instruments test for the presence of things like gonorrhea and chlamydia. You can understand why, when it comes to working with bodily fluids, Michelle has come to the conclusion that less is much much better.