Gender Imbalance in Science

There is a gender imbalance in science. This is most obvious when looking at math, physics or engineering programs. It's easy to look around biomedical labs, see the number of women, and assume this isn't a problem for the biological sciences. And indeed, in the biological sciences, women make up 62% of bachelor's recipients and 56% of graduate students¹. Beyond that, the numbers drop off for a number of reasons. Again, in the biological sciences, only 41% of postdoctoral fellows, 33% of tenure-track and 22% of tenured scientists are women. (Nevermind the fact that their salaries also tend to be lower)

Those numbers are pretty shameful. Some might argue that it doesn't matter, as long as the science being done is good (though I'm really not sure who they might be). The problem is, it isn't. Even the research being done is gender biased, as highlighted by a series of recent editorials in Nature. The first points out that there's a gender bias in clinical trials: except for a few key areas (eg. breast, cervical or ovarian cancers) women are underrepresented

Generally, women remain underrepresented in biomedical research. Studies published in 2000 and in 2008 concluded that women were still not included in mixed-sex cardiovascular trials in numbers that reflect the disease prevalence among the general population. A survey of studies published in 2004 in nine influential medical journals found that only 37% of participants were women (24% when restricted to drug trials), and only 13% of studies analysed data by sex.

It's no secret that women and men have different physiologies, and can be differently affected by diseases and their treatments. So why should sex differences not be considered when designing a clinical trial? You can't treat differently if you don't know the differences, and even where gender is known to affect outcomes, there's still no difference in treatment

A 2005 study of 300 new drug applications between 1995 and 2000 found that even those drugs that showed substantial differences in how they were absorbed, metabolized and excreted by men and women had no sex-specific dosage recommendations on their labels. This may be part of the reason why women are 1.5 times more likely to develop an adverse reaction to prescription drugs than men.

And if you're a pregnant woman, it gets even worse. You're forced to either forego treatment or potentially settle for drugs of unknown effectiveness or safety (for you or the fetus), since pregnant women are usually excluded from trials and new drugs are often not approved for them. This despite the obvious fact, that the second article points out, that "pregnant women get sick, and sick women get pregnant." Obviously diving right into clinical trials with pregnant women is a bit risky, in no small part for the fetus (though a controlled clinical trial is probably still safer than rolling the dice with off-label use), but there are ways this can be approached.

There is an obvious alternative: small, well-designed trials for pregnant women, starting with phase I safety trials that would begin at the same time as phase III efficacy trials in the general population. With this staggered approach, pregnant women and fetuses would not be exposed to any compounds that failed in phase I and II trials.

This strategy is simple, and makes sense: it allows pregnant women the same standard of evidence-based care afforded to everybody else (even better, if you consider the lack of sex consideration described above), accounting for their own particular changes while mitigating risk.

Most surprising, to me at least, is the fact that gender bias even extends to animal models. In some ways, it makes sense to keep models simple and avoid potential complications from hormone cycles. Depsite the fact that male mice tend to fight when caged together and single housing takes both space and money, a survey of 2000 studies done in 2009 found a male bias in animals used.

We found a male bias in 8 out of 10 biological disciplines, most pronounced in neuroscience (5.5 males to 1 female), pharmacology (5 males to 1 female) and physiology (3.7 males to 1 female).

Though this might be more convenient or have a practical rationale, it doesn't necessarily result in the best model. So we have biased models feeding into imbalanced clinical trials, with women getting the short end at each step. And the end result:

However justifiable these imbalances may be on a case-by-case basis, their cumulative effect is pernicious: medicine as it is currently applied to women is less evidence-based than that being applied to men.

Which is just sad.

--
¹All numbers based on US statistics from the NSF, 2006.

Thinking About Graduate Studies? Have You Considered A More Humane Form of Suicide?

This story is not really a new one to us graduate students, but I was surprised to find it at the top of the New York Times most emailed list: End the University as We Know It.

Columbia Prof Mark Taylor just comes right out and says it:

"GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)."

Here from my fox hole at final-year PhD student ground zero, I can tell you Mark is not suffering from tenureship delusion. He's right on the money. The demise of graduate school spans disciplines, countries (at least in North America) and affects both core university departments and satellite institutes alike. This painful reality is worth a hard look if you're considering getting into graduate school:

"The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings."

Kudos to Taylor for having the kahones to speak the truth in this rather public forum. I remember several years back an Ottawa journalist, Tom Spears ran a similar story on the plight of the graduate student/biomedical researcher after hanging around our research institute for a couple of days: "Hunting For Miracles at Minum Wage":

"A PhD student will work more than 60 hours a week in the lab, in return for a salary near $19,500, and sometimes payment of tuition. The salary portion is worth about $6.25 an hour -- less than minimum wage, for someone who might hold a key to heart disease, or cancer, or diabetes."

Needless to say, the Directorship of our institute tried to run him out of town. A flurry of follow-up discussion took place here on the Bayblab. See:

"Mr. T. Pities the Fool Who Does Graduate Studies"
"Are Graduate Students Exploited?", and
"More on the OHRI Salary Scandal"

I guess Spears can have the last laugh now with the knowledge he scooped the NYT.

Anyhow back to the original article. Taylor doesn't stop at just nailing down the problems. He proposes some reasonable ways to fix graduate programs. For example:

"Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs."

"Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text."

Good ideas but I don't think any of his proposals would address the most serious problem, which is the supply-demand/slavery issue.

At any rate, it's clear that research training is broken. We need to fix it. Any other ideas?

Canada's impact factor

I ran across some statistics that showed Canada has a pretty decent citations per paper published according to in-cites.com. Apparently after Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, England and the United States, Canada has an average of 11.14 citations / publication. That suggests to me that Canadian researchers are producing some quality research publications. The USA publishes WAY more papers than any other country and it's all obviously in English. So perhaps having English as an official language in Canada helps as we publish a lot of papers that may be cited by English speaking US researchers. If you are interested in some better analysis of where Canada sits internationally check out this somewhat old Nature paper (2004, subscription req.) What is disturbing to me is that despite being obviously productive researchers, this is not reflected in the Canadian governments investment in research. We are ranked 14th in health research funding!! Also check out patents granted / capita which is pretty interesting, go Iceland! These stats are of course to be taken with a grain of salt however I still find them interesting.

What Type of Pawn are You? Chess and Success in Research

"Pawn" is often taken to mean "one who is easily manipulated" or "one who is sacrificed for a larger purpose."
-Wikipedia

Combining three of my favorite topics (science, philosophy and healthy irreverence) into a single post, Alex Palazzo over at the daily transcript compares graduate students and post-docs to chess pawns in a discussion with a labmate (over beers of course). To give you the gist:

German Nihilist Postdoc: You know what we are?
Me (Palazzo): No, what?
GNP: Leibeigenschaft.
Me: What's that?
GNP: A serf, you know like in the middle ages.
Me: You mean XXX is our lord and we follow his commands?
GNP: Yup. Or a pawn, yes that is what we are.

So does chess strategy offer any insights as to how to succeed in the "competitive" world of research as a graduate student/post-doc? Let's see what wisdom Google has to offer:

"The Pawn's only movement is forward, except for capturing."
- Chess Basics

"a player may end up with two pawns on the same file, called doubled pawns. Doubled pawns are substantially weaker than pawns which are side by side, because they can't defend each other, and the front pawn blocks the advance of the back one."
-Wikipedia

"pawns gain strength as they advance because they pose the threat of queening...however, an overadvanced pawn is then often a liability."

"A passed pawn...is considered more valuable - especially if it is protected with other pawns."
-Chess/Strategy (Wikibooks)

"A pawn which has no friendly pawns in adjacent files is an isolated pawn. The square in front of an isolated pawn may become an enduring weakness. Any piece placed directly in front not only blocks the advance of that pawn, but can't be driven away by other pawns."
-Wikipedia

"1. Connecting Pawns = good 2. Isolated Pawns = bad 3. Doubled Pawns = even worse"
- Devilant's Kung Fu Chess Strategy Guide

Hmmmm...Well, I'll just leave the chess stuff at that. Anyway, all this brings me to my actual point. One comment of his in particular -
"If we are not protected or backed up by the other pawns",

reminded me of a post topic I've been wishing to explore. Actually I haven't had time to come up with anything interesting yet, but here are the questions I'd like to look at before I forget:

• How do perceptions of "success" and how to go about getting it vary amongst grad students/post-docs (GS/PDs) ?
• How do these perceptions guide them to develop different strategies to attain that "success"?
• What is the impact (if any) of the execution of each possible strategy on:

1. The GS/PDs own stress levels and overall health.
2. How s/he interacts with labmates (particularly one's peers, ie other GS/PDs).
3. Lab-wide social dynamics amongst peers.
4. The stress levels and overall health of their peers (GS/PDs).
5. The general lab culture, environment and morale etc.
6. Scientific "productivity".

Ha! Now that I write that out it's no wonder I haven't had time to think about it. Actually it's not really a topic I've been interested in thinking about at all in the past, until I became aware of how radically perceptions of the obstacles to, and conditions for, research "success" seem to vary amongst students/PDs.

So maybe we can do this one in true web 2.0 style instead and everyone else can offer the opinions and answers. Anyone??

In the mean time, check out the post and comments and have a laugh.

(PS - While one might indeed find similarities between lab oligarchies and chess, I personally find GO a lot more appealing...). Maybe that's because I'm a pawn. Power to the peasants!

Will Bill Gates Fix Science?

• "Four reasons why academic research is broken", a great little article by Jason over at Unsought Input. He raises some great points regarding the current sad state of access to scientific information and how its hurts society. I think the article's right on the money. I especially like the thing about citations - the way journals cite literature is just like so 1940s.

• On a more optimistic note, the Gates Foundation, now backed by the fortunes of the world's richest two men (Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) is changing the landscape of drug development with its mission of prioritizing humanitarian project funding. Even the big pharmas are starting to shake in their boots and will probably have to fall into line and also start developing AIDS drugs and vaccines for underprivileged majority who need them. Serves them right for being so damn greedy in the first place. One cool project that the Gates Foundation is helping to make happen is Jay Keasling's engineering of bacteria to synthesize cheap anti-malarials. Throwing $43 million at project such as this one, which will eventually make a curative dose of Artemisinin available for a quarter, you can see why big pharmas are sleeping with one eye open.

• Finally, just to prove that the bayblab is way ahead of mainstream science: a new study describing a method to distinguish organic from non-organic produce based on measurements of nitrogen isotope content.