My heroes growing up were boys. In the books I read, boys got dirty, flew to the moon, sailed pirate ships and generally had a lot more fun.

So I was happy to see these books for children advertised at the Cell Biology meeting. It’s a series about women scientists doing cool stuff: designing robots, camping with gorillas, and busting apart moon rocks.

The series,“Women’s Adventures in Science” is a project of The National Academy of Sciences. I haven’t read any of these books, but I’m intrigued. I hope some little girls are too.

While I was traveling in Australia — where most hotels do not seem to have heard of the internet — I missed this rather heartwarming press release from the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The center is launching an effort to “recruit, retain, and develop women faculty”, led by Elizabeth Travis, the center’s first associate vice president for women faculty programs.

About half of medical school students and graduate students are women but a 2006 study by the American Association of Medical Colleges easily shows the “leaky pipeline”: women account for 15% of assistant professors, 6% of associate professors and only 4% of full professors. Women also make up just 10% of deans, department and division chairs.

The press release also cites research by Wayne State University linguists in 2003, which showed that the same resume gets a lower evaluation score when attached to a woman’s name than when attached to a man’s name.

The new program at Anderson aims to recognize those who support women faculty; help women build leadership skills and continue to collect data.

I must say it all sounds promising. I particularly like Travis’ comments that all past efforts focused on helping women navigate the system. Rather than “fixing the women,” she says, “we need to focus on fixing the academic environment instead.”

Hear, hear!

If you could take a pill that completely eliminates your periods, would you?

Turns out the answer is rather emotional for many people. I say people because some men seem to have strong feelings about it too (as they do about many things that affect only women).

Most contraceptive pills entail 21 days of hormones, followed by 7 days of placebo. What follows is a period only in name, since women don’t actually ovulate while taking the pill. This fake period was designed into the pill when it was first introduced in 1960 so as not to freak women out too much.

This month, the FDA is evaluating Wyeth’s Lybrel, with which women would take hormones for a full year or longer (Women taking Seasonale, available now, still have 4 periods a year), remaining period-free throughout. And this is getting many experts riled up: those who think it might be unsafe, yes, but also those who argue that it is culturally dangerous—as in, it redefines femininity! Ahem.

Last year, I summarized the pros and cons of pills like Lybrel for the mainstream magazine Women’s Health, but briefly: the new pill could be healthier, because it cuts down on the hundreds of periods women now have on average as compared with about 50 or so not too long ago. On the other hand, we don’t really know what the long-term consequences might be.

So, what would you choose?

The Israeli health ministry released a rather sobering study yesterday: apparently, women who work in a lab are at a 26% higher risk of developing certain cancers.

The scientists are careful to avoid saying anything about cause and effect — they didn’t discover links to any particular chemicals that might be the trigger, for example. But there is a convincing correlation. The study took into account 9,000 hospital, health fund and university lab workers who had worked in the labs for 20 years or more, according to this news article.

Depending on the kind of lab they worked in, the women seemed to be at higher risk of breast cancer, melanoma, lip cancer (that one I find a bit strange, I must admit) and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but at lower risk of lung cancer (which also I find strange).

Because of the findings, the health ministry began organizing courses on lab safety. Good news is, the researchers say, the study was conducted over the 80s and 90s, when conditions were much worse than they are today, so women working in labs today are probably safer.

Do you buy that?

The hot topic on the talk radio circuit here in DC lately has been whether to make vaccination against the human papillloma virus mandatory for school-age girls. The subject, predictably, has brought out the crazies—but it’s also been a good month for airing some legitimate concerns.

Sometime this week, the DC city council is slated to vote on such a mandatory-vaccination bill. Events here in DC might reflect events going on across the country, since similar bills are pending in about 24 states.

The council members behind the bill have acted firmly and swiftly—lining up vaccine advocates to testify in favor of the bill, and soundly thrashing anyone who opposes it. For instance, at a city council meeting I went to last February, one councilman harshly criticized the city’s Children’s Hospital for failing to take a stance on mandatory vaccination.“I am taken back and disappointed,” he said.

But the council might not have bargained for the skepticism in the community. Most callers on the talk shows are against mandatory use, and the fear of vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry is alarming, with words like “sterilization campaign” and “experimentation on our children” being thrown around the airwaves.

Merck didn’t exactly engender confidence among skeptics with its heavy-handed lobbying campaign—which it has since shrewdly withdrawn—for compulsory vaccination with its HPV vaccine, Gardasil (for a great perspective on this see the March editorial in Nature Biotechnology).

To find out more about opposition to the vaccine, I went to a community forum on it at a local library back in March. As expected, representatives of religious groups, such as the Archdiosese of Washington, attended—presumably concerned that the vaccine could lead to promiscuity among young girls.

But the religious folks didn’t say much, because they didn’t need to. The anti-Merck, anti-pharmaceutical industry rhetoric was out in force—it had passed no one by that Merck was behind the Vioxx scandal a few years ago. A few people ventured into full-blown conspiracy scenarios,

“This is a recombinant vaccine, made by GENE SPLICING,” said one participant, “It changes the entire structure of the human race.”

While that might be exaggerated, other arguments against mandatory vaccination were more sane and well-reasoned. Most compelling to me was the argument that the long-term efficacy is unknown (for more on this and related issues see our news story). Studies show the vaccine protects for a few years, but whether girls vaccinated at age 11 will be protected if they become sexually active in their late teens seems unclear—given this uncertainty, is worth the public health investment?

Even some members of the CDC panel that recommended voluntary vaccination are skeptical that it’s time for mandatory measures.

While we aren’t in danger of changing the entire structure of the human race, I can understand the reasons for caution—if only to give people time to get used to a new type of vaccine in their doctors’ offices.

Last week, the Office of Women’s Careers at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that with a little bit of financial help, young women scientists who temporarily leave the lab can successfully reclaim their careers when they come back.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the biochemistry department had 30 faculty members — and only 2 were women.

The situation seems to have improved somewhat and 8 of the 37 principal investigators are women. The graduate student pool, in contrast, was half women when I was there and is at least that now.

You know where this is heading. Women are overwhelmingly the majority among biology majors in college, many make it to graduate school but then drop out along the way to the top. There are a hundred opinions — some, like Larry Summers’, quite controversial — about why that happens. And we’d like to hear your views about that too.

But one indisputable factor is that when women scientists leave the lab to have a baby, it’s very difficult for them to maintain research productivity. There are a scattered few programs to help women at this vulnerable point in their careers, which we wrote about in 2004 in the news feature, A lab of her own.

The MGH program, described in a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, gives two-year “bridge grants” of up to $50,000 to junior researchers who also care for young children. In the first nine years of the program, 90% of the recipients have remained at the MGH and more than half have received academic promotions at Harvard Medical School.

The amount is modest to be sure, but it helps the recipients — 40 so far — find practical solutions to their quandary. For example, Karen K. Miller, a 1999 recipient, applied her grant toward hiring a research assistant who continued Miller’s work on anorexia nervosa while she was away. It also shows an institution’s commitment to helping them with their careers — something many women scientists say is sorely needed.

Good news is that Harvard University, which recently found itself a woman president, is already exploring a similar model to help women at the university.

So Harvard has gone and elected itself a woman president, the first in the university’s 370-year history. That means half of all Ivy league universities now have women at the helm, which is a remarkable statistic.

A few weeks ago, scientists got a little excited that Nobel Laureate Tom Cech and neurobiologist Steven Hyman were being considered for Harvard president. But Drew Gilpin Faust, a historian, became the odds-on favorite after Cech withdrew his name from the race, saying he was choosing to stay on as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And who can blame him? The Harvard job, as Larry Summers knows well, is no cake walk.

I’m a bit wary that Faust’s appointment will be bandied about as proof that Harvard has addressed its problems with creating equal opportunities for women. But perhaps scientists still have reason to rejoice. The New York Times reports today that:

Asked Sunday whether her appointment signified the end of sex inequities at the university, Dr. Faust said: “Of course not. There is a lot of work still to be done, especially in the sciences.”

Will Drew Gilpin Faust take Harvard’s gender inequities to task?

I’m now a certified East-Coaster and so I did the only right thing for my holiday—went to Florida. But I haven’t quite caught on to the drill—since for beach reading I passed by numerous candy-colored books and Janet Evanovich mysteries.

Instead, I chose a topic I at times found disturbing: “Birth: The surprising history of how we are born,” by Boston Globe reporter Tina Cassidy.

The book, published this fall, introduces the reader to birth methods and fads through the centuries—such as fish bladder vacuum extractors, strange levers, and “twilight sleep,” a drug mixture that made women forget their memories of pain (as well as childbirth). In the middle ages women squatted over incense smoke and consumed fungal extracts to speed delivery. In mid-20th century, many women were routinely tied down during labor, their pubic hair shaved and newborns stashed in nurseries.

Cassidy examines the prestige of midwives in some communities and their persecution in medieval Europe. One witch-hunting guide proclaimed that “No one does more harm to the catholic faith than midwives.” Church leaders believed God intended women to suffer, and for centuries resisted attempts at pain relief.

Chronicling the rise of obstetrics as a medical profession, Cassidy describes harrowing rates of infant and child mortality in unsanitary city maternity wards. Even by 1932, 4.5 percent of women died from childbirth in New York City hospitals. Home delivery by midwives was generally safer; in regions of colonial America maternal death rates were 1 percent or lower.

Now, in the United States and many other countries a woman’s chances of dying in childbirth are less than 20 in 100,000 births.

But all is still not well. In Afghanistan, Angola, Niger and Sierra Leone women lack access to even basic care, and more than 1600 out of 100,000 women die.

Cassidy also questions whether some of today’s practices have a sound scientific basis. It was not until the 1950’s that a researcher even bothered to rigorously document the length of the stages of labor. That researcher laments that doctors often take these averages as a benchmark today, viewing women with longer labors as candidates for cesarean section. Even now, it seems to me that basic questions remain unanswered, such as the exact linkage between premature contractions and premature delivery.

Rates of cesarean section become more disturbing every year. In United States the rate is 29 percent, and it’s above 35 percent in Italy, Mexico and South Korea—soaring above levels regarded as acceptable by the World Health Organization, and above rates in countries with records of safer deliveries.

Cassidy relays these statistics along with breezy anecdotes of women giving birth on the Boston subway, of placentaphagy (eating the placenta), and male involvement in birth—such as tribes where the men flagellate themselves while their partner labors. I might not recommend it for the beach, but I’d give Cassidy’s book a higher page-turning rating than an Evanovich paperback—and I’m still thinking about it days later. I can’t help but be unsettled.

Obstetricians may have eliminated some of the more drastic methods of previous centuries, but it’s clear that something is still seriously amiss with how we are born.

It’s been a while since I last posted—holiday parties, you know, and the stupor that usually follows. But some news that’s being widely reported today jolted me right out of that. Newspapers everywhere are saying that doing housework can reduce a woman’s chance of breast cancer more than playing sports or jogging or whatever. Housework! If you could see me now, you’d know I was spluttering.

What really gets me is that none of the articles I read looked beyond the basics to ask whether the study might be flawed in some way. Only one pointed out that the number of women who were doing job-related activities might have been too low to show a decrease in breast cancer risk. I know being retro is in right now, but surely this kind of study should raise at least some eyebrows—and some hard-hitting questions about the methodology?

Call me paranoid, but this sounds to me like an awfully convenient study for men: “I would mop the floor, honey, but you know how you need it for your health.” Please!

The researchers are speculating that the moderate level of activity doing housework could be more useful than the bursts women experience with more vigorous exercise. Apparently, the women who showed this benefit did at least 16-17 hours a week of housework.

Well, that probably explains it then: the poor things were probably so busy cooking and cleaning that they never got a chance to go out and drink alcohol, eat unhealthy or skip going to the gym because that new Daniel Craig movie opened and they just had to see it. Seems to me that being a hardworking housewife may go along with some other good habits that just might explain the extra benefit.