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

Science Friday

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🗓️ 7 June 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

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 Writing in the journal Science, neuroscientist Rebecca Shansky says that view is out of date—and it's been harming science too.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join Ira to talk about the past, present, and future of laboratory research, and whether science can leave these outdated gender stereotypes behind.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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Irafo. A bit later in the hour, we're going to talk about how outdated stereotypes about women and men has corrupted science experiments in the lab for decades.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
0:23.1	government scientists. And any scientists looking for government funding for these types of
0:28.4	studies will be subject to review by an ethical advisory board. Annalie Niewitz is here to break down
0:35.2	what that ban means, along with other short subjects in science.
0:38.9	Annali is a science journalist based out of San Francisco. Welcome back.
0:43.4	Hey, thanks for having me. So how will this ban affect scientists?
0:48.0	So first of all, as you said, this is going to be affecting people who are receiving federal grants.
0:53.9	So not from private
0:55.5	industry, but federal.
0:57.5	And right now it's affecting a small but significant number of people who are receiving
1:02.2	money from the National Institutes of Health.
1:04.7	And it's also going to cut off a rather sizable annual grant that's being given to UC San
1:10.2	Francisco, here where I live,
1:12.1	to study HIV. And indeed, most of this research is medical research looking at therapies for
1:19.3	Alzheimer's and HIV and other deadly conditions that we'd really love to get better medicine for.
1:26.2	So this is going to affect how that research is done.
1:30.1	It's going to possibly set back the research a number of years.
1:33.3	And medical doctors, as well as scientists, have already started protesting and saying that this is going to be a real setback.
1:39.8	What is the timing on this?
1:41.4	Why is this ban happening now?
1:44.2	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.
1:55.5	So the Trump administration is not the first conservative administration to make a ban like this.
	...

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