Georgetown University Biochemist Seeks to End Gender Bias in Medical Research

Kathryn Sandberg is the director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington. The focus of her research is to eliminate gender bias in medical research. She has petitioned members of Congress for gender equity in publicly funded medical research.

For many years, scientists have tended to use male animals in medical research. The reasoning has been that the reproductive cycles and hormone changes in women make it more difficult and costly to use female test animals.

“Sex differences are evident in physiology and even down to the level of cell biochemistry and genes,” Dr. Sandberg says. “Men and women are not the same, but when they are treated that way, medicine suffers. I propose that the proportion of male and female models used to investigate specific diseases should reflect the disease prevalence in the general population.”

Dr. Sandberg is a graduate of the University of Rochester. She holds a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Maryland.