Md. native's expertise led to drug recall

Now based at Mo. hospital, she sounded Heparin alert

"We were already very concerned about it, but that made us more concerned," said Dr. Priti Patel of the CDC, which is trying to determine if there's still a problem after the Baxter products have been withdrawn.

Elward's high school teacher recalled that she took every biology and chemistry class available, but Elward said she settled on a career in medicine while attending Loyola College in Baltimore. Her interest was stoked, she recalled, by working weekends at Maryland Shock Trauma Center's intensive care unit.

She didn't gravitate to the field's sleuthing side, she said, until she interned from 1988 to 1990 at a laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University studying the origins of HIV infections. In 1994, she graduated from the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

"It was apparent very early on that Alexis was headed for bigger things. She is clearly very bright and showed the kind of attention to experimental detail that is the mark of a good scientist," Dr. Richard Markham, the Hopkins lab director, wrote in an e-mail.

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