Science Friday - Gender Bias In Research Trials, Antarctica, Tornado Engineering. June 7, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

For half a century, most neuroscience experiments have had one glaring flaw: They've ignored female study subjects. The reason? Researchers claimed, for example, that female rats and mice would skew their data, due to hormonal cycling. Writing in the journal Science, neuroscientist Rebecca Shansky says that view is out of date—and it's been harming science too. She and Radiolab producer and co-host Molly Webster join Ira to talk about the past, present, and future of laboratory research, and whether science can leave these outdated gender stereotypes behind. The Onyx River is the longest river in Antarctica, flowing for 19 miles from the coastal Wright Lower Glacier and ending in Lake Vanda. This seasonal stream also has a long scientific record—it has been continuously monitored by scientists for 50 years. Science Friday’s education director Ariel Zych took a trip to the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica to visit scientists in the field who are part of this monitoring project. She and limnologist and biogeochemist Diane McKnight, who has spent decades studying these rivers, talk about the frozen desert ecosystem these waterways transect, and how climate change has affected the continent in the last 50 years. Plus: researchers in Missouri are examining the after-effects of recent tornadoes to engineer stronger homes. Eli Chen of St. Louis Public Radio tells Ira more in The State of Science. And science journalist Annalee Newitz talks about the Trump Administration's recent fetal tissue research ban in this week's News Roundup. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we're going to talk about how outdated stereotypes about women and men has corrupted science experiments in the lab for decades. But first, this week, the Trump administration announced a ban on NIH research that uses discarded fetal tissue restricting these types of studies from government scientists. And any scientists looking for government funding for these types of studies will be subject to. to review by an ethical advisory board. Annalie Niewicz is here to break down what that ban means, along with other short subjects in science. Annali is a science journalist based out of San Francisco.

Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. So how will this ban affect scientists? So first of all, as you said, this is going to be affecting people who are receiving federal grants, so not from private industry, but federal. And right now it's affecting a small but significant. number of people who are receiving money from the National Institutes of Health. And it's also going to cut off a rather sizable annual grant that's being given to UC San Francisco, here

where I live, to study HIV. And indeed, most of this research is medical research looking at therapies for Alzheimer's and HIV and other deadly conditions that we'd really love to get better medicine for. So this is going to affect how that research is done. It's going to possibly set back the research a number of years. And medical doctors as well as scientists have already started protesting and saying that this is going to be a real setback. What is the timing on this? Why is this ban happening now? Well, this is an issue that's been a political football for a while.

It's a perfect example of how scientific research often gets tripped up by politics. So the Trump administration is not the first conservative. administration to make a ban like this. We had a similar ban back in the late 1980s under the first Bush administration. And the thing that's ironic about this is that a lot of these conservative administrations look back to the 1950s as a kind of moral high point. And yet, fetal tissue research in the 1950s is what led to a polio vaccine, which saved millions of children's lives. And at that time, the 50s, this kind of research was viewed as almost kind of a godsend. And so it's particularly ironic that we're now seeing conservatives picking this issue up and turning it into something

political when, in fact, during their kind of golden age, it was considered to be vital research that was great for the country. Irony bounds these days in this climate. It does. Let's move on to a study that looks at the rise and decline of anger, what? Which I visited recently. Tell me about it. So this is a new study that was conducted over a number of years by Cambodian and Western researchers. And what they did was conduct a new look at how people were living in and around Ankor Wat, which, as you know, is a large temple complex near Seam Reap in Cambodia.

And it was once the center of an extremely large city of about a million people that existed. about a thousand years ago. And there's a very standard narrative about what happened to Angkor. And that is that around 1431, the city was invaded by Thai forces and basically collapsed and everyone left. And this is kind of the story that we hear, that there's these temples in the jungle and the reason why they're there is because there was this sudden collapse of the civilization. But what these researchers found was by going in and carefully digging and doing new carbon dating on charcoal from hundreds of years of habitation in these areas, that actually the changes at Angkor don't, the evidence doesn't really fit that narrative. And what they actually

found was that people seemed to be clearing out of Angkor in the 1300s, so about 100 years before this alleged collapse. And then during the supposed collapse, people came back and were living there at much greater numbers. And so this whole story of the city collapsing has really become quite complicated. And we see strong evidence that people were living there up through the 1800s. And so suddenly we're starting to realize, especially for people who are studying ancient cities, that maybe the narrative of collapse and abandonment isn't really real. It doesn't really hold up when you start doing research and ground-truthing and looking at what people were really doing in the city.

That is very interesting. It's quite different from the narrative where I used to hearing about it. Your next story looks at tracking movie star careers through the IMBD movie database. Why were researchers interested in this? So a group of mathematicians in the UK were really interested in whether they could use applied statistics to predict whether people would have. successful careers. And so they tried to do it with scientists and with artists and they just didn't find any signal in the data. But then they got this idea inspired by Joan Rivers,

of all people, to study show business because Joan Rivers is famous for saying it's either feast or famine in showbiz. And they said, all right, let's find out if that's true. So they examined the careers of about 2.3 million actors and actresses in the internet movie database and found that there were very clear. signals about how their careers would work. One was that most movie stars and TV stars are what we call one hit wonders, which means, according to these researchers, that means they have one year where they get decent work and then nothing after that. That's 70% of actors and actresses will experience a career where they're just really big for one year and that's it. The other signal

they saw in the data that was really interesting is that as many actresses, have been arguing, it's much harder for actresses to succeed in Hollywood. So far, it's statistically far more likely than an actress will be a one-hit wonder. It's also more likely that that will be early in her career. And statistically, it's much more likely that actors will find work after a cold spell where they haven't had a lot of work than it is for actresses. So at every point in their careers, it's harder for actresses to get work. And ultimately, these mathematicians described this as a rich get richer phenomenon. The more you work, the more you work, in other words.

Yeah, I wonder if there's an IMBD for scientists where they could find out. Yeah, they actually, so in a previous paper, they used, they looked at scientists, and the way that they analyzed scientists' careers was by looking at how many papers they'd published and how many people cited those papers. And they found, like, no pattern whatsoever. Heray for Hollywood. Yeah. I hope they named this study after Joan Rivers, so she gets a little...

I know. She's quoted in the paper. Oh, she is. That's good. Yes. All right, Annalee. Thank you for fascinating stuff. Annalie Newitt's science journalist and author in San Francisco. And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNNO. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. May was a busy month for tornadoes across the U.S. with over 370 confirmed tornadoes spotted, and one place that saw extensive tornado damage was Jefferson City, Missouri. And engineers are looking at the damage from those storms to try to design better structures. Can you make a building that will better withstand the battering of a tornado?

Joining me to talk about that is Eli Chen, Science and Environment Reporter at St. Louis Public Radio. Welcome back, Eli. Hey, Ira, how's it going? Tell us about who's doing this work. What kind of data are they looking for? Yeah, so about two weeks ago, I followed a band of engineers from the Missouri University of Science and Technology who spent several days looking at damages from an EF tornado that came through Jefferson City. And for those who aren't familiar with that scale, five would be the highest intensity on it. And some of the professors who were part of the group had already been doing some long-term research on tornadoes and how they damage houses.

and basically I watched them walk around an area where apartments were pretty badly hit, you know, roofs were torn off and walls came down. And I listened to a couple of them have some pretty intricate conversations about how maybe the brick veneer could be better reinforced or how metal clips could be used to secure roofs. So they took a lot of photos and some drone footage and they, you know, brought that back to their laboratory to build computer models. So they're not looking to make a damage-proof building, but just the way you can limit some of the damage to the building. Yeah, so the leader of this group was Grace Yan, who directs the wind hazards mitigation laboratory

at the university, and she just wants to update building standards so that houses are protected against lower-level tornadoes. She says it's not cost-effective to build for the worst-case scenario, and I imagine not everyone wants to live in a steel bunker. But Jan says it's worth it to design homes that are a little stronger, especially in tornado alley states like Missouri and Kansas. You know, if your house ends up being in the way of a tornado, you'd rather lose just the shingles as opposed to your entire roof. Mm-hmm.

Do the standards take into account everything a tornado can do? Not exactly. So, as I was told, the challenge in changing building standards, even in tornado alley states, is that tornadoes hit pretty infrequently and randomly. And even when I was in Jefferson City, just outside those apartments, I saw some homes that were perfectly intact. And so Grace Yan says that the American Society of Civil Engineers, they have these standards that builders need to follow, but they only consider straight-line winds or strong winds that come from a tornado. And I think we have a clip where she says that. They only not by this type of extreme winds, not by tornado. That's kind of not useful then for tornado country.

Yeah, tornadoes cause rotating winds, unlike the winds that come from thunderstorms. and that causes air to flow out. So that creates low pressure inside that spinning air column. And when that touches down onto like a higher pressure object, like a house, then that tornado becomes like a suction. So that's why you see roofs get pulled off and other objects in this path. So they're looking to create standards that will, as you say, not prevent the tornado from ripping the whole house,

but at least getting repairable stuff. Yeah, so the engineers just want a better understanding of how tornadoes of different intensities, damage buildings, and they really want to use that research to recommend that the American Society of Civil Engineers use calculations that consider, you know, tornadoes. All right, Lila, thank you very much for that reporting. Thank you.

Eli Chen, who's out there, Science and Environment Reporter at St. Louis Public Radio. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, going to take you on a trip to Antarctica. Ariel Zitch from our SciFRI team was there. She's going to tell us about the pain. penguine colonies, and a river runs through it. There is a river in the dry valleys, which is dry.

Why is there a river? Ariel's here to talk about it, along with Diane McKnight from the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Antarctica is a place of extremes. There's extreme beauty and unimaginable cold.

And despite the harsh conditions, a dynamic ecosystem thrives there. There are seasons, a network of rivers, and plenty of life, ranging from emperor penguins to tiny algal diatoms. And there are scientists stationed in Antarctica down there year-round conducting research. Our own SciFri education director, Ariel Zich, was lucky enough to travel down to Antarctica this January, and she followed these scientists into the field. She filed a story for our Methods project, which is one of the ways that we are working to connect scientists and the public. Methods brings you into the field alongside the people who are trying to find the answers to the big questions, using video, pictures, and sound to immerse you in the field sites, and you can read the piece and see the amazing photos up on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash methods. Ariel is here to tell us about her trip.

Hi, Ariel. Hi, Ira, how's it going? It sounded like you had a wonderful time there. You had some stunning videos you took from a helicopter flyover. You know, most people... That's right, that's right. You only dream of Antarctica. Describe what it looks like, what was like being there for us.

Well, Ira, it really is incredible. And I, you know, I think everybody expects people to say that when they come back from Antarctica. But the scale of it and the number of ways in which it's incredible absolutely blew me away. I had been researching Antarctica for months before I arrived. even when I did the mountains that surround the place, you know, when you arrive on a sheet of ice that is truly ancient, travel to a camp that hosts hundreds and hundreds of professionals, not just scientists, but, you know, people, fuel technicians and architects and cooks, you know, it's the human presence and then the magnitude of the landscape is really incredible. Now, McMurdo is the main American research station there, right? What was it like to live at that station?

Well, so McMurdo is surprisingly normal. The people there are kind and generous to one another. It's a community that's the size of a small mining town, but it has world-class research going on. And it's very collegial. We eat dinner together in a dining hall. There's karaoke nights. There's knitting clubs. But also at any moment, you could be brushing your teeth with a seismologist or having a coffee with an astrophysicist.

and I think that's what's really incredible about it. It's like science camp on steroids. You know, and it feels good. It's, you know, they're really good people there. I think Antarctica to a lot of people, when they picture it, it's penguins. And you visited a penguin colony there, and you called in live back in January when you were there. Let me play that. For those who missed it, this is what it sounds like.

Remember that, Ariel? Oh, I do. And I remember the smell. And I remember how freaking rugged those little birds. were. So these are a daily penguins. They're not the tallest penguin, you're not emperors, but they're, they're, they're, and they are robust. You can, when you meet one, it's, you fully understand how it is that they've survived for so long in the world's harshest climate, you know, and I, and that was such a gift to see those, those birds. Yeah, when I was there, I was surprised by what vocalization they did. I never expected, like, a little trumpeting like that. It was. Oh, sure, yes. And certainly the persistence of their chicks.

You know, I was there during fledgling season, and so, and those chicks were still begging, even though they were at least the size of their adult counterparts and fluffy as heck. So, yeah, that was something to see. Another group of scientists you were with were working in an area called the Dry Valleys. I mean, why is it called Dry? I mean, it's exactly what you think. It's a desert. And, you know, what's surprising is when we see images of Antarctica, we see

snowpack, we see glacier, we see mountains, we don't often see bare earth and dirt and silt. You know, and it being in this place that receives constant sunshine in the summer, like all of Antarctica, but that is dry and even warm at times, you know, that's remarkable. It was astonishing, right? So, and even early explorers, when they first arrived, the first humans to set foot in these dry valleys couldn't believe that they could run their toes in the dirt, you know, feel the silt in their hands. they could feel the warmth of the sun.

And also, they could reach down with a cup and dip fresh water and drink it without having to do anything. I mean, and that's what's so special. That's why this place is truly a continental outlier. I want to bring on a scientist who works on the rivers in the dry valley and who is Ariel's Rumi at McMur. Dan McKnight is a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and a professor of civil environmental and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado. in Boulder. Welcome to Science Friday. Welcome. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Let me give out our phone number for our listeners if they'd like to talk about Antarctica. 844-724-825-8-4-4-Sai Talk or you can tweet us at SciFri. How do these river systems in Antarctica work? Is it melting that's coming off the glaciers in the summertime? Yes, that's correct. that some people think, well, it has to be at least zero degrees to start melting, but actually the melt starts when it's minus five below, and the ice sort of heats up underneath the surface layer,

and these streams flow for about six to 12 weeks per year. And the Onyx River is the longest river there, and one that is well-studied. There's something called the Onyx River Record. Yes, and we are the keepers of the record in our research group, and it's been data that have been collected since 1969, and it tells us a lot about how the valleys have experienced different climate conditions. Now, most rivers in the world, they flow into something, right?

Does the onyx flow into something? The onyx flows into a closed basin lake, and water is lost from the lake by basically evaporation from the perennial ice cover of the lake, and the ice is four meters thick. So it flows into the Lake Vanda. Lake Vanda. Yes. Yeah, I was there.

It was amazing. Yes. It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. Yeah, it's incredible. And, Errell, you show in the piece that you filed on our website at Science Friday.com what it looks like around the river and the area. And one of the interesting parts about that river basin is that there were algae growing near the water, right, Diane? Yes, that's correct.

These are mats of blue-green algae, which are not that unusual all over the world, and they're freeze-dried for most of the winter and fall, and as soon as the water comes down the stream, they start growing again, and the other organisms that are in these algal mats. They're diatoms. Yes, there's diatoms, and there are 50 species of diatoms in the dry valleys. That's a lot of diversity for Antarctica. And a diet time is? Diet time is a microscopic algal cell that has a silica shell that can be well preserved. And so that's how we can tell them apart by looking at the patterns in the silica glass shell. That's interesting.

Ariel, you interviewed Mike Goosef, who is a scientist on the ground and he works with Diane. What were you looking at? So I traveled to an article largely to meet people who were persisting in research that have been going on for an extremely long time. So Mike Goosef is one of the other leaders on the long-term ecological research project in the McMurdo Drive Valley's. And it's a group of loads of scientists who are all measuring, watching, experimenting with questions that just take years and years to answer.

And I followed Mike around. And he showed me some of the changes that have been happening in the dry valleys. So some of the shifts that he's noticed in his career, but also that the L-T-E-R as a whole have documented, things like changes in permafrost, things like changes in the location and amount of water flow. And that was, you know, it's simple in some ways, the work, but it's also, it's an act of persistence. And the interest and passion that they're pursuing it with is something. Let me go to the phones, 844724-825. Audrey and Deer Lake, Minnesota.

Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, hi, how are you doing today? I was there back in 07-08, and there was a man who lived here for years, and his name is Charlie Blackmer. He did construction down there for years. But when I was there, I remember there was a lot of training about environmental cleanup, and if there was any accidents or, you know, taking any waste out with you so you don't contaminate anything there because everything's kind of like a big research laboratory. Have you seen any changes in that or any, you know, uptick in trying to make sure that we are not environmentally changing or altering Antarctica by our human presence?

Dr. McNay? Well, the environmental protocols of the Antarctic Treaty were approved around the early 90s, I think, 1992. And so there has been major changes in, since as a part of that, in terms of the early. of how waste is managed. And at McMurdo Station, something close to 80% of the waste is recycled or disposed of in some way. And before you can go in the field, you have to take an hour-long waste management class. I remember that class. Yeah.

I learned a lot, actually. Let's talk about speaking of change. Let's talk about climate change. Can it be difficult to measure in Antarctica? Can you see it? You've been going there for a while? Yes, my first season was in 1987, and we observed a period when the dry valleys were colder and the stream flow decreased a great deal and some streams ceased altogether in the summer. And then that's turned around since about 2002, 2005.

And so we learned afterwards that that cold period was partially a result of the ozone hole because ozone itself is a greenhouse gas and that absence of ozone was changing the climate. And now other factors may be taking over. Interesting. Ariel, were you studying of the effects of climate change in Antarctica and it must be pretty difficult? Well, so it is. And I think what was interesting was hearing the different lenses through which these different scientists are studying it. So some people are seeing, you know, shifts in soil ecology, changes in neumatoid number and abundance and diatoms and algae, certainly. And then other people were seeing

changes in the physical structure of the ground, or in the melt season and duration. You know, and what was interesting to me, too, beyond, you know, beyond this sort of observational approach, there's a lot of experimentation going on, this idea that, okay, maybe water will be more abundant in the dry valleys in the future, why don't we modify this environment and experiment with changing the availability of water? You know, I witnessed the Pulse Press project, which is this basically simulated flood scenario over, you know, over different, you know, different regimes. So, and even the answers to those questions, these experiments, they're going to take seven years because that's how long it takes a nematode to go through a complete life cycle. So, you know,

it's, yes, they're studying that change and those changes are becoming apparent. And it's, It's fascinating. Let me get a quick tweet in from somebody who wants to know. There it is. Donald says, what is considered warm in Antarctic Desert? Is it like that year round? Fascinating. Yes, well, a warm sunny day can be four or five degrees above zero,

but you have to imagine all this black ground, just radiating heat. And it can be almost too warm to be in a sleeping bag in your back. packing tent because the ground around is warm because it's heated up. Black because of volcanic action, Mount Arabis nearby. Volcanic sands and the streams will warm up to 15 degrees sea on a sunny day. You can feel the water is warm. Interesting. Yeah.

Interesting. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Diane McKnight and Ariel Zitch. Our number 844-724-8255. Let's go to Christopher and Murray, Kentucky. Hi there. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me. Go ahead. Yeah, I'm curious if you guys have seen any sorts of buildup of precipices due to the evaporation of the waters as they flow into the lake. That's a great question. And when you walk down a stream channel, you can see this white, salty crust on the edge of where. the water is, where there's damp soil. And when there's high flows, all that salt is mobilized, and the water is actually salterer than you might expect.

You know, it's interesting when you're into Antarctica. What surprised me about the glaciers is actually how dirty they are. How much salt and silt and whatever is on them? They're not pristine, are they? Well, there's very strong winds in the wintertime, and the land doesn't have any plant vegetation holding it down. So there can be sediment deposited on the surface of these glaciers that make them dirty, and it varies from year to year. And that sediment influences how much melt happens.

Ariel, were you surprised how old the ice is down there, how old these glaciers are? Yes, I was incredibly surprised. And, you know, it's funny because you think about things moving at a glacial pace. I'd heard that glaciers flow, you know, that's something we hear about, oh, glacial flow. You can really see it when you're sitting atop a glacier that it looks like a flowing ooze. Like it looks like it's oozing down a mountain and it doesn't move in front of your eyes, but you can absolutely see how it does. You know, and that is something. The other thing, too, going back to this dirtiness thing, they're so microbially active.

I spend a day with some researchers who are watching nutrients being uptick, uptook by these different microbes that are hiding in these little sediment pools. And, you know, they're ingesting nitrogen and phosphorus and doing cellular respiration. That thing is a breathing glacier. Yeah. And, Dan, you've been studying Antarctica for decades, as you say. How have you seen the river ecosystems change? You mentioned that the melt is a little different over the years? Yes, when it was very cold, many of the algalmats sort of dried up and blew away.

And then when there was a huge flood in January 2001, everything was scoured. And now we've been watching things grow back and new types of algalmats. peer here and there. It's been exciting. Ariel, did you see the algal mats? Oh, yes. And actually, this is one of the joys of working with people who have been in the field for two months, as they say things like, oh, wait until you see the beautiful colored algae. There's black algae and orange algae and green algae. And I got to walk out and meet these algal mats in person. And yes, there certainly are black algal mats. I wouldn't have even known they were there if they hadn't been pointed to me. The orange is a ruddy brick orange, the green. It can

range from being just barely green to like bright, iridescent green. So they're beautiful, but those, they're subtle, and they're everywhere in these streams. And how thick they grow under the ice in the lake, don't they? Yes, the lake bottom is covered with very thick mat, and then there's floating algae growing on the low amount of light that comes through the four meters of ice. We've run out of time when I thank both of you. I could talk about Antarctica forever, so. And you do, after you do. Ariel, after you get back, you want to talk about it all the time, don't you?

I do, yeah. It's hard to help. And, you know, that was one of the things that's, it's going to be great. Please read the story because, you know, to get a real sense of it, you need to sort through those valleys yourself. I think that's... You took great photos. Great photos, great videos, and you can see all of them up on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash methods. Thank you, Dr. McKnight. Also, Diana McKnight is a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado and Boulder. It's been a pleasure to be here. It's been a pleasure, and you're lucky to keep going back down there.

We're going to take a break after we come back how gender stereotypes have been harming science by excluding female rats and mice from studies. We'll talk about it. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. For the rest of the hour, we're going to talk about how outdated gender stereotypes about women and men infiltrated decades of experiments on health and fear and anxiety and PTSD

because researchers have, in many cases, excluded female mice from those experiments. We've invited our colleague from WNYC, Molly Webster, here to talk about it. She's a longtime producer and guest host of Radio Lab and was behind the podcast series Gonads last year, all about human development, sex, and gender. Molly, welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, Ira.

Is there something you came across in your research, for that series? Yeah, totally. I was looking into gender and science, and one of the things I started seeing is we like to think that science is outside of bias infiltrating it, but our feelings about gender affect everything from, like, the way we look down microscopes or the types of questions scientists asks or even, like, feelings about gender and the emotional tone in which we write a research paper. And then last week there was this article in the journal Science. It was a perspective

piece. And it pointed out one of the other ways that gender stereotypes are making their way into lab research. And it's this idea that female mice are too hormonal. And so they shouldn't be used in research because they'll screw up the data. And that what they point out in this perspective piece is that the male mice actually also have, you know, hormones and variability. in that hormone. And the piece was a call for researchers, you know, to represent the other half of the species in their research. And so today, Rebecca Shansky is a neuroscientist and a professor, associate professor at Northeastern University in Boston. She was the author of that science paper, which you can read at ScienceFrily.com slash gender. Dr. Shansky, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me. So, Dr. Shansky, I'm curious what made you write this perspective today. So I wrote it today because actually a couple of years ago in 2016, the National Institute of Health, which funds most neuroscience or most basic science research in the United States, instituted a new policy called Considering Sex as Biological Variable. And what it says is that if you are a scientist and you want money from the NIH, then you have to use animals of both sexes. in your research. And what that meant for most scientists was that for the first time, they were going to have to start using females. Because basically since the NIH has been around,

most scientists only use males in their research, as you pointed out, because they felt that females were too hormonal. And when this policy was announced, there was sort of this cry across the country from, from basic scientists who, you know, that basically asked, what are we supposed to do about the hormones now that we have to use females? And it was clearly the most concerning aspect of this new policy for basic scientists. And I had actually already been studying both males and females because I was really interested in sex differences in a number of different neurobiological processes. And so I had sort of already worked my way through some of these questions.

And now that I have a little bit more perspective and I was hearing people say, oh, but there's going to be animals, females with high estrogen and low estrogen, and it's going to mess up all my data and I won't be able to interpret anything. And I started to think a little bit more deeply about why we consider female animals, female mice to be so driven by their hormones. Why is this like the one thing that you think sort of makes a female mouse who she is? And we don't really talk that way. When we talk about male mice, we say this is the default.

This is the standard for how the brain really works. And when I was thinking about this idea that we're so concerned with how hormones, and not even so concerned but so sure that hormones are going to be. driving our data points in females. I began to see the parallels between that and the, you know, deeply ingrained gender stereotype that women are hormonal, emotional, unstable. There really seem to be some parallels there. And so that was something I really wanted to explore in this piece. And so that's why I wrote it now. Let me just remind our audience. If you're a researcher who has had firsthand experience with this. Do you use both male and female mice or flies or cells in your work?

Please give us a call. Our number is 844-8255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. And Dr. Shansky, in your paper, you had a quote, which made me smile, but it said women but not men are still pejoratively described as hormonal or emotional, which curiously neglects the well-documented in fact that men also possess hormones and emotions. It made me giggle, and then it also made me think, well, the interesting thing is I do associate at some level hormones with female mice and rats. Is that an incorrect assumption, or is there some nuance that I'm missing? So, I mean, certainly female mice and rats do have hormones, and they do fluctuate the way

that they do in women. You know, the thing I'm trying to point out here is that the hormones for females from a scientific perspective are seen as a problem, right? They're seen as a problem, a source of variability of uncertainty in the data, which hasn't been pointed out as being a problem for male animals, even though across a cohort of male mice, they're going to have different levels of testosterone. They might have other sources of variability that we don't, you know, don't necessarily have a guess as to where those sources might come from. But when, you know, when the sort of default was to only study male animals, whatever the sources of variability in your data were across a group of animals weren't really seen as a concern. It was just sort of like, oh, that's natural variability in your mice and that's to be expected. whereas the variability that you get in a cohort of female mice is actually the same within the same range and sometimes even lower than the variability you see in a cohort of male mice.

And so now it's like now variability is a problem now that we have to study females. And so it felt like a double standard from a scientific rigor sort of angle. And that was also what I was trying to point out there. Yeah, I'd want to say that was one of the more surprising parts of your perspective piece, like this idea, which I had never heard before, that hormonal male variability is equal to, if not sometimes greater. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah.

So one source of hormonal variability in male mice comes from if they are housed together in a cage, which is pretty common in most scientific vivariums. You'll have a cage with maybe four or five male mice together, just because it saves space. but the male mice will usually establish a dominance hierarchy pretty quickly once you put them in the cage together. And if you drew blood from each of those mice, the one who turned out to be the alpha male would have up to five times higher testosterone on average compared to the subordinates. And yet, you know, it was never a problem from a scientific variability perspective. A number is 8447-8255. We have a phone call. Let's go to Torrey in Fort Collins. Hi, welcome to Science Friday, Tori. Hi, thank you. Go ahead. So I worked in the lab with Tamarisk beetles, and during this study was about different populations of these beetles and how well they're controlling an invasive plant. And we were looking at how fast they were flying and also how many eggs and females were laying. But,

the flying test, we were only testing the males. And I thought this was interesting because the females had a higher weight because of all the eggs that they have. And we didn't want that to sort of add another variable to the speed of the different beetle populations. But I also think it would have been important to look at that because obviously the females are going to be traveling and spreading the population as well. And I think it would be important to look at. Makes sense to me. Thank you, Ty. Is there a, like, we tend to think, I think, of hormones is very unique, and so they have become this thing in research we don't want to touch. But Dr. Shansky, is there some sort of, are there other things out there that kind of act similarly, not act similarly, but are like hormones in the sense that they vary between females and males, and yet we've learned to live with them?

Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, in my field in neuroscience, there are a lot of different things in the brain that, you know, that just sort of function differently between males and females. And, you know, for example, there are some brain regions that are sexually dimorphic that can come from development. And, you know, and we don't necessarily, you know, in some cases, it's very clear, you know, they rule, sorry, govern, like, reproductive function or something like. that. So, of course, you need things to be different in males and females. There are other areas in the brain that we're just learning about that might be, that might work differently in males and females. For example, the dopamine system, there seems to be some important sex differences there as well. But a lot of this is just coming out because, you know, people are really, for the first time, really just starting to dig into studying both sexes.

I'm curious where like this idea of how hormones affect females like at what point it entered into lab research you had an interesting nugget at the top of your piece about the history behind all of this right so I started trying to figure out I was like okay when did we start saying women were emotional and hormonal where did that come from and I dug it a little bit into some gender studies

literature and found, so basically what I learned was that around a little bit before the turn of the 20th century, the common line about men and women was that women were sort of an inferior version of men. And that maybe became just a little bit too politically incorrect for the times. And so the biologists who were sort of putting forth these. theories on gender and biology and sex sort of restructured their narrative. And the goal here was to sort of grant women some sort of uniqueness and say, okay, you have your own qualities.

The female psyche is its own thing. It's not just like a different version of that of males. But the qualities that we're giving you are, you know, instability, sensitivity, emotionality, and all of these things, which clearly make you unfit to, you know, take on leadership roles in society, essentially. So the goal is to still preserve the patriarchy, to preserve a male-dominated world, but sort of get, you know, sort of throw this bone to women, essentially, where they're saying, okay, you know, you're your own person.

I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with Rebecca. A neuroscientist and associate professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and Amali Webster, producer and guest host of Radio Lab, creator of the podcast series, GONAD. I have a tweet that came in that sort of is in the same vein from Abbas Jaffrey, who writes, where do people get the idea that science is free from these stereotypes? STEM is a quintessential example of gender bias in modern society.

So why are we so surprised about this, I guess? What are you saying? Dr. Shansky, what do you say about to that? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we shouldn't be too surprised. Although, you know, as was mentioned earlier, you know, scientists like to, we like to consider ourselves to be unbiased and objective. But I think that, you know, given the response to this new policy from NIH and, you know, even before this policy came out, this was still the running line. If you wanted to study females, you had to figure out how to control for the hormones, and whether that meant tracking the hormonal cycle or removing the ovaries altogether so that

they didn't have any circulating hormones. And, you know, in my graduate work and in my postdoc work, I completely, you know, bought into that that perspective that the female hormones were something that needed to be dealt with. And I think things have changed since, you know, since I started my... own lab and have you know really started to think about you know what are we we're trying to understand how the brain works and in a female animal hormones are a part of how the female brain works and so like why are we trying to change that we should be

you know working within that you know that that structure so yeah so I think it's it's not really unsurprising but I hope that with this piece it will sort of bring some of these things a little bit more to the surface and people can and think a little bit better how to be unbiased in their research. Yeah. It's interesting in the perspective you're sort of balancing two things, which is saying at some level there really is no difference in variability of hormone levels between males and females,

but that at another level there actually is. Are there cases in which accentuating those differences or, I don't know, just staring hard at them can actually add into gender stereotypes? I mean, there's always a danger, I guess, when you report research showing sex differences. And I think that the thing that scientists who do study sex differences need to be careful about is the way that you communicate your data to the public and the way that those things are written up and try to think about the interpretations that can come out of your data. You know, so we, a lot of the, in my field in behavioral neuroscience, a lot of the behavioral

tasks that we use have been developed in male animals. And we have, you know, kind of standard ways that we interpret what the animal's behavior is to mean in terms of, you know, more sort of like human level psychological constructs. And what I think that we're going to start learning as more and more people start bringing females into these paradigms is that females may be using different structures. strategies to work their way through these paradigms, whether it's a learning task or a task that's trying to tap into some sort of emotional dimension. So I think that we need to be open-minded about how we interpret some of our data, especially when the metrics were developed all in males. I'd like to thank my guest this hour, Rebecca Shansky, neuroscientist and associate professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

You can read her paper at ScienceFriday.com slash gender. And, of course, my co-pilot, Molly Webster, producer and guest host of Radio Lab and creator of the podcast series Gonads. Thank you, Molly. And thank you, Dr. Shansky, you're joining us today. Charles Berkwitz is our director, senior producer Christopher Antalyaata, and our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. We also had production help today from Lucy Wong. Quick program note, every year we celebrate Cephalopod Week, and you know those amazing squeege. cuddlefish and octopuses.

And this June, you can join us in 10 cities across the country for Cephalopod Movie Night from June 21st to 28th. Come on out for an evening of talks, tentacles, and talent. Go to Science Friday.com slash movie night to grab your tickets before someone with four times as many arms grabs them first. That's ScienceFriday.com slash movie night. That's going to be Cephalopod Week from June 21st to 28th, Science Friday. dot com slash movie night i'm ira flato in new york