A decade ago, as Cat Bohannon watched the sci-fi film “Prometheus,” she was struck by a scene in which a woman, impregnated by alien life, tries to get help from her spaceship’s medical pod. Unfortunately, the equipment is only calibrated for men.
“I’m sitting there in the theater, and this woman 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 bodies have evolved while science has focused primarily on male subjects.
“We haven’t been sufficiently studying female bodies,” she said. “All women and girls are under researched and under cared for, but we're finally starting to change that.”
The writer and researcher appears at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History on Wednesday to discuss why.
"It wasn't like there was some sexist cabal in a back room going, 'We're going to make women's lives terrible,'" she said.
Instead, she feels it can 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 said. “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 way Bohannon puts it, that’s led to science treating the body as “a kind of Mr. Potato Head.”
"Unfortunately, that meant that by the 1990s, huge numbers of pharmaceutical drugs had never been tested on females at all," she said.
Paradigm shifts have followed in how clinical trials are conducted. Yet drugs can take about a decade to go through the review process. In Bohannon’s view, that means only now are consumers seeing new medications which have been sufficiently tested for women.
"And all the ones that are still on the market that weren't sufficiently tested, we're having to do retrospective stuff," she said.
Bohannon gives one example in Ambien, which in the last decade has revised dosing instructions for men and women. It’s one of many subjects she plans to touch on at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
“I hope people bring all their questions,” she said. “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.”
