culture evolves!

The Beeb continues to report on the condition of the six young men who participated in a drug trial and are in intensive care. There’s an accompanying article interviewing a bloke who was due to take part, where he speaks about the motivations and incentives that are behind why men take part in these trials. There’s often a lot of money involved, and it must be very tempting.

I say must be, because as a woman, my chance to take part in a clinical drug trial (the Phase I, experimental kind) is virtually nonexistent. Dave from Bristol clearly needs to know this (scroll down). The requirements are overwhelming sensible: young and healthy bodies required for the initial rounds. Women are considered more problematic than men because we could be pregnant, or might want to get pregnant at some point, and drug companies don’t want to get sued for impeding fertility.

This has always irked me. Firstly, anyone pregnant or at risk of pregnancy (that would be carried to term)–of course they shouldn’t do a drug trial. Common sense. But presumably there may also be effects on male fertility as unforeseen as those on female fertility from new drug treatments. I can’t comment on the degree of “informed” and “consent” in informed consent in these things, as, well, I’ve not taken part. But presumably this is an issue?

Secondly–and this is an issue that goes beyond gender–it’s representative of a deeply embedded conception of the young man as the default model, medically speaking. I got cranky at my doctor a few months ago when she couldn’t tell me if a consistent pattern of change in my cycle was linked to coming off a (very very common) drug. Fine, I thought, I can search PubMed and nyah to to the overworked NHS. There was not one mention of cycle change patterns beyond “a number of women reported changes to cycle length”. This, if I recall correctly, in a thousand-odd sample.
Anyhow: best wishes to the men and their loved ones. I wish the slightly hysterical tinge to some of the reporting was tempered by a statistic or two showing the number of drug trials per year and the percentage–which I am certain must be low–that result in serious adverse reactions.

Re yesterday’s post:

It’s an interesting essay. I think Science were right to reject it on the basis that it presented no positive suggestions for action. One could be left with only the message that the status quo is acceptable in some situations, if we accept that men and women bring different plates to the table.

The way I see it, there are a number of issues here.

1. The degree to which men and women are different at different things. I have no problem with this. Men and women ARE different. Different bits, different brains, different developmental experiences.
2. Where those differences come from and how they develop. I’m unable to discern what sort of take the author has here and to what degree he thinks in terms of nature/nurture and biology = unchangeable.
3. The culture of academia and how it favours certain traits–something which has a history in itself. With respect to the question of why all the women disappear as one moves into more senior positions, I think this is actually vastly more relevant than any on-average “suitability”.
4. “Is” and “Ought”. Just because women may be on-average more (for example) nurturing, doesn’t mean we ought to be happy with a predominance of women psychologists. The whole concept of “on-average abilities” should surely fly out the window when we are talking about highly skilled/intelligent/trained individuals, because we’re dealing with those people in the upper tail end of their respective curve, not the average 68%. What we should be happy with is an absence of the commercial model in academic culture, one that allows a diversity of people to be thoroughly considered on a number of qualities for any given position.

I was more interested in the mention of creativity and originality in science. It’s a tired old truism that it’s hard to be creative and viable in many areas of science, but I’d like to know what creativity actually means. How could I foster “creative” approaches to my own work? Answers, plz.

The leaky pipeline in science, or why 60% of biology undergrads are female yet only 10% of professors are. Science rejected this after long consideration, but it got published by PLoS Biology. I am just linking to the paper by Peter Lawrence: haven’t read it yet, haven’t read this commentary in The Telegraph, but will do so tomorrow.