Even the Rats Were Male

Once upon a time, a scientist discovered that the basic response of human beings to threats and stress was “fight or flight.” For the next eighty-five years, till 2000, that understanding was cemented by obtaining the same results from studies on animals.

You wouldn’t want to be standing up at an international conference on stress questioning something so firmly established as that!

Except there was one little glitch that no one had noticed till Dr. Taylor and some colleagues at UCLA noticed that the original research had been done predominantly on men. When they looked further into this it turns out that the laboratory studies on animals were also done on males.

Yes, even the rats were male!

Apparently, these scientists, who also it turned out were predominantly male, decided that pesky issues like female hormonal cycles and emotional reactions and who knows what could really mess with a man’s research.

As Dr. Taylor describes this discovery:

“An epiphany in science is fairly rare, but when it happens, there is no sensation like it.

“The sudden realization that all the classic theories of stress were based almost entirely on males was a stunning revelation.”