Advantage of Being a Woman in Science

I went to an amazing lecture yesterday given by Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, a pain scientist from McGill. He lecture was titled "Mice are People too: Social Modulation of and by Pain in Rodents and Humans."

As you can imagine, the lecture was about mice, and how they perceive pain. Turns out that they actually have similar facial expressions that infants do (eye narrowing and cheek bulge) and then of course things like wiggling their whiskers and ears which we has tiny humans either do not have or cannot do. He then went to on to divulge the social interactions of pain, when we are in pain with the presence of somebody we do not know, we experience an analgesic effect, or the stranger effect. This hold true for both mice and humans apparently. Conversely  when we experience pain with the presence of a friend, there is increase in the amount of pain we experience, which is known as the empathy effect. This was all pretty interesting, and actually made sense for me. I definitely feel less pain when I am in socially new or uncomfortable environments  which I suppose goes back evolutionary to the feeling that this new person might try to eat you, and you do not want to show any weakness in front of them. 

The most interesting part of that lecture though was the fact that Dr. Mogil's group found that men, or the smell of males (any species other than mice) also exerted a analgesic effect. This means that the presence of a man, or a man's T-shirt in the room will cause mice to become stressed out of fear of predation. This effect only lasts for about 30 mins, but during that 30 minutes these mice show lower amounts of pain, and then after 30 minutes they apparently realize that the male is not a threat and the effect wears off. It hasn't been proven in humans yet, but the effect was shown stronger in female mice than in male mice, and there is a good likelihood that it is also true in humans.

So how does this relate to the title of my post? Well, if the presence of a male stresses out the mice, then it actually throws off the accuracy of a lot of our experiments. Even when we euthanize a mouse to harvest its DRG neurons for analysis, if there is a male doing the euthanasia or in the room at the time, it could skew our results. This is even more pertinent when we do behaviour testing, especially for sensitivity and pain perception testing. Basically, in this one circumstance  it is better to be female scientist than a male scientist. 

If Dr. Mogil's theories also hold true for humans, this gives us a unique perspective for medicine. Perhaps, women truly do make better doctors or more perform more accurate patient assessment because the patient's pain would not be skewed by the examiner ..unless of course the doctor has never met the patient before and then you would have the stranger effect take place.