Hymen Shmymen

 Just want to say that I and two other smart young ladies write a blog focused on gender and science. This entry is cross posted at herstoryofscience.blogspot.com. Please check it out!
 
Since medical school began, I've only managed to read one non-required book in the last two months. It's not a fact I'm proud of but I think I spend my scarce time wisely. I read Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History, an account of the history and nature of virginity. It's an accessible and entertaining read for my overtaxed brain.

This was one thing I learned:

Despite the lack of any actual studies in the literature regarding whether horseback riding, gymnastics, or riding bicycles might have to do with womens' hymens, virtually every contemporary writing about virginity aimed at teen girls is duly equipped with a disclaimer that says something along the lines of 'many girls tear or otherwise dilate their hymen while participating in sports like bicycling, horseback riding, or gymnastics.'"

Woah. There is no scientific evidence that these activities stretch or tear the hymen! Yet I've heard this countless times in teenage girl magazines or otherwise informative literature on puberty and sexuality. Be sure, this "fact" is not just something from conservative abstinence-only sex education curriculum but widely seem in popular and generally accurate sex ed. It's probably in those puberty books your pediatrician recommended you to read. Understandably this belief was popularized in order to dissociate hymen with virginity. In recent years (decades?), it's become more acceptable for girls to participate in sports and the hymen less a gauge of virginity.

I think it also shows that the empirical evidence or lack thereof don't affect people's beliefs that much, in sexual matters and otherwise. In medical school we grumble all the time about evidence-based medicine. It should dictate medical practice but often it doesn't. Doctors and patients often want and perform procedures that aren't medically better than the other options.

Have you heard this when you were growing up?

Things I Think About: Big Talk, edited

An extended version of what was posted a few hours ago. 

One of the most read articles on NYTimes.com the past few days has been this one on the correlation between happiness and substantive conversations. This study found that people for whom substantive conversations -- rather than small talk -- made up a greater proportion of their total conversations rate themselves happier.

The author of the study on the reasons for this:

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people. 

From Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

In the comments follow this article, one reader tried to draw a connection between social media and the substance of conversations, noting that this is perhaps why interactions on Twitter and Facebook don't make people happier. 

Of course it's just a causation but it is interesting to see evidence backing up what I have felt in my interactions with people.

Reading this, naturally I reviewed the substantive conversations I have had in Denmark. So there it was. The cause of the general dis-ease I have felt the past weeks coincides with the lack of conversations I've had the last couple weeks. It's not because the initial excitement of being in a new place has mellowed that I've been feeling drab. During the first few weeks I certainly met new people and made small talk with them but I also managed some really insightful conversations. Somehow this dried up in recent weeks while the stream of parties, dinner parties, and sightseeing trips Århus continued.

Don't get me wrong, I have many friends in Århus, friends whose hospitality I have and will depend on in the future, friends who invite me to their dorms for dinner, friends with whom I've drunk vodka, which apparently makes us good friends, so some Polish guys have been trying to tell me... but I've miss some element of the weeks before.

I want to know more than how to say cheers in their language.

Prioritizing Aid - More Questions Than Answers

There are many worthwhile causes to champion, injustices to fight, both financially and through other actions. Should I donate to an organization that, say, helps fund the education of girls, clean water, or HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment? Should I fund a domestic or international cause? Should I lobby for environmental issues? Universal healthcare in the U.S.?

I feel that I am prioritizing one condition over the other by devoting my efforts to a cause. Of course we should contribute toward solving all the world's problems, but I recognize that our resources -- money, time, political will -- are limited, so we can only give publicity to some diseases and not others.

Now expand this on the scale of national governments, multilateral aid organizations. We all have to make choices about how much to fund for what. Each foreign aid budget, domestic health budget, and NGO has to prioritize what it will spend the most money on.

I often read about how easy and cheap it is to cure a certain disease but there's no effort to do so. No global funds, no rock star benefit concerts, no massive whatever-color-ribbon campaigns. There is no publicity, funding, and political for very urgent needs with simple solution. I've heard that with just a little more push we can eradicate the last few pockets of polio, or with some cheap drug we can save lots of people from something terrible.

The latest example of this is Nick Kristof's column about pneumonia published on Mother's Day (The Killer No One Suspects). According to Kristof, a course of antibiotics to treat pneumonia costs only 27 cents, but pneumonia registers on few people's consciousness as a widespread, emergent disease.

This leads me to ask why some diseases or conditions get more attention than others. Is there some general fascination with the new and incurable disease that plagues all of us? Is it only greed and fame of politicians, drug companies, and scientists that set funding priorities?

I checked categories to which this entry belongs, I'm selecting many of them. This is because that at some level, these health, gender, environmental, and social issues are interrelated, cycles of poverty, environmental degradation leading to health effects, tuberculosis exacerbating AIDS, etc. But most organizations have one or several focuses, some of which leave other behind. Inevitably, aid organizations or lobbies will be fighting for the same funding, the same piece of the pie so to speak. Expansion of one program may see cuts in another. Am I second guessing myself too much? Is this the activists' curse of caring too much?


x-posted at Choice Words

Imnotstupidimnotstupidimnotstupid. Repeat.

Lists, Nobel Prize, Science Funding, Depression

Before: Regular jellyfish.

I'll start with the Nobel prize. In an article article aptly titled "Depression and then Nobel Prize", Tara Parker-Hope elaborates on depression as the major factor for Douglas C. Prasher leaving biomedical research. (Kenneth Chang wrote the original article published in the Times.) In addition to individual cause of Prasher leaving biomed research, there are larger structural issues too, mainly inadequate science research funding.

Prasher's relationship to this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry is that he was the first scientist to isolate the fluorescent protein gene from jellyfish. The Nobel was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien for the technique of inserting this gene into other organisms to use as a marker. Prasher gave the gene to Chalfie when they were both working at Woods Hole and Prasher then left Woods Hole.

But reading the blog post and Chang's original article, it struck me that this attribution ignores larger structural problems with science research: lack of funding. Prasher's story through this lens would read something like this:

• Applied for 5-year NIH grant to study fluorescent protein gene. Application denied.
• Applied for 2-year American Cancer Society grant to study the same. Grant received. But it was less money than the NIH grant.
• Quit job at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
• Gets job at USDA. Quits job. Beginning of depression.
• Gets job as NASA subcontractor. Position eliminated due to lack of funding.
• Depression returns.
• Gets job driving van for Toyota dealer.
  

I don't know what caused what: if depression lead to loss of interest in job or lack of research funding lead to depression. I don't know if maybe Prasher just wasn't a very good scientist and the other NIH grant applicants really were better than he was.

But depression seems to me only a part of the problem. I don't think this is sufficient evidence to make this an example of the American individualist psyche that blames failure (and glory) on individuals, but I'm tempted to make the generalization. I'm also tempted to turn this into a policy pitch for increased federal funding for science research. The bad news is that NIH funding has remained flat since about 2003 and flat funding is in essence decreased funding because of inflation.

--

I try to keep a short list of things I want to write about soon but I usually never get to write about most of these things because my (un)productivity is about one entry a week. I hope that now that I write these out, I'll feel like I have an obligation to write them.

This week I want to write about:

• Nicholas Kristof's NYT column about the global effect of a potential Obama presidency.
• Pauline Chen's post on the Well blog about literary medicine and its role in medical education.
  
• The Man Who Set Stage of a Nobel Now Lives a Life Outside Science
  

I read publications outside the NYTimes, I swear.

--

After:












Mouse neurons. source
An image drawn with fluorescent bacteria colonies on an agar plate. source

NYT Op-Ed Art, Music, Literature, and Science

I'm working on another update but I saw this New York Times Op-Ed "Put a Little Science in Your Life" and thought I would say a few quick things about it. Brian Greene is the author of this piece and of the books "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos." He sums up the problem with science pedagogy as follows, "We continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details." I like his explanation of " the vertical nature of science", that students must learn the foundations of scientific theories before they can move on to the exciting new breakthroughs. I agree that this is part of the reason that many students find science so boring.

In contrast, the humanities is not bound by such linearity. We now don't teach little kids English literature chronologically, starting with Homer, then Vergil, and so forth until the poem gives way to the novel and to modern authors. But The Odyssey and the Aeneid are introduced once students have a grasp of reading.

It's an apt comparison, the necessity and beauty of art and science. As a musician, I know what Greene meant when he said that this way of teaching science is like making a music student practice scales without performing the great masterpieces.

Earlier this evening I took a walk by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, very close to where I live. Inscribed on the marble facade of the hall was a quote from John F. Kennedy in which he linked the greatness of a nation to the fluorishing of art:
"The is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo Da Vinci, the age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare."

After reading this op-ed, I re-read the quote and realized that Da Vinci was also a scientist and so achievement in science too should be connected to achievement in art and state. The Smithsonian Institute was reluctant to accept Charles Freer's art collection because the institute initially wanted to focus on scientific knowledge. But the in end Freer's bequest became the Smithsonian's first art collection.

Greene writes, "Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension."