TRANSCRIPT

Host : Newsflash – there’s a gender bias in science ! Not a big surprise. You knew that already, right ?
There are more men doing science than there are women. But it’s not just male researchers who are in
the majority. Spare a thought for the lab mice as there’s also a strong bias towards male animals and
cells in research. This can be a problem as a disease doesn’t necessarily affect males in the same way as
it does females. Now the National Insitute of Health in the States is requiring their scientists to start
balancing the genders of their model organisms. Janine Clayton from the NIH has written a comment on
the subject. Noah Baker caught up with her and asked what kinds of model organisms were involved.
JC : Animal models involve a variety of rodents, mice, rats, but they also involve other animals as well,
and what we cover in this new policy is both animals and cells because it’s really important to understand
that every single cell has a sex and the sex of the cell affects the biological and biochemical properties of
the cell and that’s important in research.
NB : How widespread is this bias across the sientific community ?
JC : Unfortunately, it’s pretty pervasive. We know that several disciplines use many more male mice than
female mice and that information is available in the literature and, unfortunately, we also know that many
many people do not publish the sex of the animals that they are including in their research despite the
fact that they publish other important information so it’s a pervasive problem.
NB : And why is there this bias ?
JC : Well, there are a variety of reasons that explain this bias and some of them include a misconception
by scientists that female animals are more variable than males because of hormonal cycling and some
folks don’t think that sex matters and that you can actually apply your findings from male animals or male
cells to females to understand them. And the information about the importance of sex being a
fundamental variable in biomedical research is not uniformly disseminated. In some cases, it just may be a
matter of convention.
NB : So what kind of problems can arise from only using male models in studying systems for example in
disease ?
JC : When you only use one type of cell or animal, the male that is, you’re learning about how a therapy
or a disease process progresses in that particular type of animal or cell, in this case male. We know that
diseases differ in terms of how they are expressed in people. For example autoimmune diseases are much
more common in women than men. Multiple sclerosis is one of those and we talk about that in the paper
but men who get multiple sclerosis tend to have a poorer outcome.
NB : Now animal models and cell lines have been used for literally centuries in research, why is it only
now that this issue is cropping up ?
JC : As we learn more and we have new technologies, we have scientific evidence that grows by leaps and
bounds everyday and we are learning more, and when we learn more, that identifies gaps in our
knowledge and we now understand that sex matters in a significant way and, unfortunately, previous calls
to action have not resulted in a systematic understanding throughout. And so what we’re doing now is
calling on scientists to take sex into account in their plans for preclinical research, that research using
animals to find out if a drug, a procedure or a treatment is likely to be useful in humans. I expect this to
enhance our ability to learn more from the experiments that we’re doing once we pay attention to this
blind spot we have, you know, we think of this as a blind spot, looking for differences between males and
females, and we need you to check your blind spot before you change lanes in the preclinical space as
you’re going to clinical research.
NB : How exactly do we go forward now ? How do scientists change this practice ? Will it be difficult for
scientists to start using different methods in the future ?
JC : We think of this as an upgrade to the operating system and whenever your computer, your
smartphone gets a new software that updates it, can address gaps and bugs, and fix bugs, so we’re
thinking of it that way. The first time you try to use it, you might be unfamiliar with it but over time it
becomes easy and you see ‘waoh I have this thing I never really had before and now it works really well’.
We need our scientists on board, the scientists who come in and review as part of the peer-review process
on board, we need our colleagues in the publishing world to make sure that their reviewers do this and
we need our colleagues in the clinical realm, both those who teach and those who care for patients to
know that we’re gonna be providing preclinical data that is sex-specific for them so that when they have
their male or their female patient, they will be able to have sex-specific information available to help them
treat each patient as an individual.
Host : That was Janine Clayton from the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.