"I discovered that there were a lot of areas that hadn't been addressed at all," Manson says. Since then, she has devoted a great deal of time and effort to research in women's health, especially regarding lifestyle influences on disease and the prevention of diabetes.

Manson has so far been pleased with the progress of the Women's Health Initiative, a $628 million program sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that studies crucial issues in women's health, including diabetes and cancer. Manson is a regional coordinator for the initiative.

"We successfully completed our first goal, which was to recruit 5,000 Boston-area women to participate," she says. "Now we're trying to keep the high compliance and participation rates."

While it will be several years yet before the complete results of the survey are known, Manson is not shaken by some early results that show that estrogen supplements may not be an effective treatment for heart disease--and that they may in fact increase the risk.

"It shows that the Women's Health Initiative is more important than ever, because the jury is still out on the effectiveness of these treatments," she says.

Another component of her job, and one that Manson says she finds very satisfying, is teaching. She has spent about 300 hours each year for the last 14 years mentoring medical students from the School of Public Health and elsewhere who are interested in epidemiology, the study of the causes and spread of diseases within populations.

While her career has been studded with success, Manson says there have been some disappointing moments as well. She served on a committee charged with determining the effects of beta-carotene treatment on cancer. "Unfortunately, though the treatment showed some promising prospects originally, the research showed that it had both no benefit and no risk for the patients," she says.