ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
Graduate student Anne Murphy had run out of rats. Or rather, she’d run out of male rats, the animals she was using to study brain regions involved in pain modulation for her PhD at the University of Cincinnati in the early 1990s. At a time when neuroscientists almost exclusively used male animals for research, what Murphy did next was unusual: she used a female rat instead.
“I had the hardest time to get the female to go under the anesthesia; she wasn’t acting right,” Murphy says. Her advisor’s explanation? “‘Well, you know those females, they have hormones, and those hormones are always fluctuating and they’re so variable,’” Murphy recalls. The comments struck a nerve. “It really got to me,” she says. “I’m a female. I ...
