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Nome Sobel is a neurobiologist at the Weitzman Institute of Science in Israel

and a few years back he wanted to research what tears were good for.

Do they have a purpose?

For example, did they have a chemical

signal in them? It's a difficult thing to study for a few reasons. I should point

out here that our initial study at least suffered from a really unfortunate gender bias.

And this happened because, you know, we started off by publishing, just putting up posters in our campus and in a neighboring

campus saying that we we need volunteers who can cry with ease because we need

to obtain tears for our research and this led to you know about like

70 women volunteers and one man basically right and and and this it is just a cultural thing and you know, although Israel is very macho, but I don't think it would be very different in the U.S. either.

Men don't very readily admit to crying and, you know, typically will not come to a lab and cry for

an experiment and women will and so we ended up with you know with women tears

and and that's what we were working with for a long time.

When you made the call for volunteers and you had just the one male respond, did you

do anything with that guy or did you just let him go? Yeah, he felt he couldn't cry. He couldn't?

...