A decade in the past, as Cat Bohannon watched the sci-fi movie “Prometheus,” she was struck by a scene by which a lady, impregnated by alien life, tries to get assist from her spaceship’s medical pod. Unfortunately, the gear is just calibrated for males.
“I’m sitting there within the theater, and this girl behind me says, ‘Who sends a multi-trillion-dollar expedition into space and forgets to make sure the medical equipment worked on women?” Bohannon said.
Her new book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution,” looks at how women’s our bodies have developed whereas science has centered totally on male topics.
“We haven’t been sufficiently studying female bodies,” she mentioned. “All women and girls are under researched and under cared for, but we’re finally starting to change that.”
The author and researcher seems on the Cleveland Museum of Natural History on Wednesday to debate why.
“It wasn’t like there was some sexist cabal in a again room going, ‘We’re going to make ladies’s lives horrible,'” she mentioned.
Instead, she feels it may be partially traced to the menstrual cycle.
“But that’s messy, because almost every tissue in your body or mind, whether or not you have ovaries, has sex hormone receptors,” she mentioned. “They all do something a little bit different, depending which tissue you’re looking at. So, unless you’re specifically studying ovaries or the uterus… you’re probably not going to want to use females, because that’s the easiest way to control for the messiness of this hormone cycle.”
The approach Bohannon places it, that’s led to science treating the physique as “a kind of Mr. Potato Head.”
“Unfortunately, that meant that by the Nineteen Nineties, big numbers of pharmaceutical medication had by no means been examined on females in any respect,” she mentioned.
Paradigm shifts have adopted in how medical trials are performed. Yet medication can take a couple of decade to undergo the evaluate course of. In Bohannon’s view, which means solely now are shoppers seeing new medicines which have been sufficiently examined for girls.
“And all those which are nonetheless available on the market that weren’t sufficiently examined, we’re having to do retrospective stuff,” she mentioned.
Bohannon provides one instance in Ambien, which within the final decade has revised dosing directions for women and men. It’s considered one of many topics she plans to the touch on on the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
“I hope people bring all their questions,” she mentioned. “It doesn’t matter how weird it is. I am not a shy person. The beautiful thing about the body is that it’s always taboo. So, once we start talking about it, the taboo doesn’t matter anymore, and we’re more free to express our lives as they are.”
