Billions of dollars are being spent on the Human Genome Project. To
its supporters, it is money well spent; the project promises information
about all human genes and genetic diseases. To its detractors, these ambitious
aims are hyperbole.

Biologist Ruth Hubbard has long been critical of science and the way
it seems to stand outside of society: genetics, she has long insisted, lends
itself all too easily to abuses of human rights. Hubbard has always taken
pains to write science clearly; in this book, she has collaborated with
her son, writer Elijah Wald, to ensure that anyone without any expertise
in genetics could understand both the science and its social context. In
this, they have succeeded, even when explaining the more technical details
of how DNA works.

As the search to identify specific genes continues, so do abuses. Discovering
that you have a gene associated with a specific disease (even though you
may never suffer the disease) might mean you are refused insurance or lose
your job; the discovery at the very least will make you anxious. You might
even be pressurised to abort a pregnancy if the fetus also had the gene.

Of course, some people would claim that you have the right to do so,
especially if the gene is associated with a debilitating disease such as
cystic fibrosis. Hubbard does not dispute this: what concerns her, rather,
is that the intensified effort to ‘map’ the human genome puts too much emphasis
on genes and too little on the contexts in which they work – or in which
people work. Take the gene involved in cystic fibrosis, for example, which
was first identified in 1989. Identifying it is one thing – but do people
want to know they have it? The most significant finding of a recent study
considered by the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Group of the US
Human Genome Project was the lack of demand for testing: people don’t want
it (91av, 18 September).

Nor does the effort to locate genes do much to change the conditions
in which people work. Perhaps some people are genetically ‘hypersusceptible’
to work-place contaminants. But, Hubbard emphasises, this information is
likely to be used by employers to discriminate against them. Meanwhile,
nothing will be done to alter the conditions that produce the contaminants
in the first place. Nor does the identification of ‘genes for learning disabilities’
help students to learn better. What it does, she notes, is to ‘take the
educational system off the hook’.

Ignoring the social context in which genetic knowledge is used is mirrored
by the way in which the cellular and bodily context is ignored. Genes are
a reification, a shorthand way of talking about lengths of DNA. But to work,
to build proteins or whatever else it does, the DNA requires the rest of
the metabolic apparatus of the cell – or of the whole blood-forming system
in the case of genes involved in the synthesis of haemoglobin. ‘When scientists
talk about genes ‘for’ this or that molecule, trait, or disease, they are
being fanciful,’ argues Hubbard. ‘They attribute excessive control and power
to genes and DNA, rather than seeing them as part of the overall functioning
of cells and organisms.’

Not only do enthusiasts attribute excessive power to genes, they are
also inclined to simplify the trait with which a gene is supposedly associated.
One example is the recent claim that a gene ‘for’ male homosexuality has
been discovered on the X chromosome. Human sexuality is complex and diverse:
it is far from clear just what it is, behaviourally, that is coded for by
this putative gene. Several scientists have also suggested that genes on
the X chromosome have tended to be conserved in mammalian evolution; similar
X-linked genes, that is, can be found in most mammalian species. I look
forward, therefore, to investigations of the genetic basis of, say, cross-dressing
among gay grizzly bears.

Geneticists speak of ‘mapping’ the human genome, so that we know where
genes ‘for’ all kinds of things (from homosexuality to manic depression)
are located; a promotional video produced by the Human Genome Project asks
viewers to ‘imagine a map that would lead us to the richest treasure in
the world’, with which we will know ‘where . . . every genetic inheritance
of humankind is to be found’. Hyperbole, indeed – but, Hubbard points out,
it is not clear what we would do with the map even if we had it. Would it
really help to fight disease? Or to struggle against injustice? Or would
the money be better spent on improving human rights and people’s working
and living conditions? The richest treasure in the world might be health
for all, as the WHO has emphasised, but rich countries spending vast amounts
of money on capital-intensive research will not achieve it.

The questions must be addressed, and urgently. Hubbard and Wald have
produced an excellent book: it is clearly written and makes a strong case
for caution in the face of rhetoric. I would urge anyone who is concerned
about the uses of genetics, and about its construction of people as nothing
more than assemblages of genes, to read it. I would also recommend it to
those geneticists who receive public funding for the Human Genome Project.
‘In the name of disease prevention, the genetic ideology in the past led
to gross abuses of power’, Hubbard and Wald remind us. No one, I assume,
wants a repetition of that. Public funds should be spent on something that
people want: whose interests are being served by this research effort? Women
offered screening for the cystic fibrosis gene seem to be voting with their
feet.

Lynda Birke lectures in the department of continuing education at the
University of Warwick.

Women seem to be entering the sciences in increasing numbers. Even engineering,
once a firm bastion of masculinity, is now becoming an attractive option
to many women. Fine-but what happens to those students when they encounter
their subject’s history?

If history enters science teaching at all, it is usually in the guise
of the Great Names, those who have given us theories or laws that are still
important today. These, of course, are men-Boyle’s law, Darwin’s theory,
Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton.

We can respond to that in two ways. Many take the line that women may
have been absent in the past, but that ‘it is different now’, that prejudice
is diminishing. Others wonder whether women really were absent, or have
been hidden from history.

Ogilvie’s book began with a student dissertation on women in science.
As far as the student could detect from available literature, there were
none-with the honourable exception of Marie Curie. Yet there have been women
working in science throughout history, as many scholars are now discovering;
curious, isn’t it, how few of these names are remembered now.

As part of this effort to redress the balance of historical accounts,
Ogilvie has produced a biographical dictionary-a source book outlining the
lives of many women who have contributed, in some way or another, to the
history of science. As a resource, both for its biographies and for its
annotated bibliography, this book is valuable. The introduction provides
a brief overview of the historical context, painting a broad picture to
frame the biographies of scientists that follow.

An important theme of this introduction is to trace women’s involvement
in scholarship throughout history; Ogilvie notes that women’s involvement
in developments in philosophy or science was often relatively peripheral,
not least because they were denied access to formal education. Yet there
are inevitably problems with taking such a broad sweep-21 pages to move
from antiquity to the 20th century requires much condensing, and I doubt
that it can be done without seeming to gloss over a great deal.

One such problem for me was that I did not get much sense of changes
in science itself, in how, for example, it is organised. For instance, science
has become increasingly institutionalised (and thus more powerful), since
the middle of the last century. But what effects has that had on women’s
participation? And on the kind of work in science that they were able to
do? Botany, for example, was considered (relatively) acceptable as a subject
of study for women in the 19th century, and so many more women entered botany
than some other areas of science.

Ogilvie’s conception of science is broad, and includes women who wrote
on natural philosophy, those whose medieval visions produced treatises on
animals and plants, midwives and astronomers. That may be too eclectic an
approach to science for some; but it does serve to remind us that the intellectual
roots of our science are far wider than Newton and Copernicus.

The biographical details given for individuals are concise, and clearly
referenced, and I came across many women scientists whose names have long
been forgotten. What is striking is that women have engaged with science
in so many, varied ways. What is equally striking is that relatively few
of them have risen within science to positions of power; they have been
tolerated-sometimes-but only on the margins.

American women are somewhat over-represented among the biographies,
particularly those from the 19th century. No doubt there are many names
of European women working in science yet to be discovered. But that is perhaps
a minor flaw. Ogilvie’s book is important in bringing to our attention the
fact that women have not been absent from the history of science. That they
have been absent from textbooks on the history of science tells another
story.

Lynda Birke is a biologist in the Department of Continuing Education,
University of Warwick.

IS SCIENCE sexist? During the past decade many feminists have argued
that the practice, content and even the philosophy of science are sexist.
Science has a gender – it is masculine. Feminist thinking threatens many
people because it discounts the widespread belief that science is objective
and apolitical, says Ruth Hubbard, a biologist at Harvard, in Feminism and
Science. This idea is ‘profoundly political because it obscures the existing
distribution of power in society’, she adds. A more feminist science would
uphold different, more egalitarian values.

Yet feminist critics have also found the advocacy of a feminist science
to be problematic. Feminism and Science contains these debates. A recurring
theme is the rejection of the notion of a singular science that we might
transform to create a more egalitarian science but, like women, the sciences
are too diverse ‘to be equally transformed’, argues Helen Longino, a philosopher
at Mills College, California. Similarly, when Evelyn Fox Keller, at Berkeley,
California, writes of nature ‘in its mercilessly recalcitrant diversity’,
she could equally well have spoken of women or the social movements that
are contemporary feminism.

Another problem of feminist science has been that many people have read
feminist as feminine, and fear that it would mean simply imposing a different
set of biases on scientific knowledge. And, because it implies that women
might ‘do science differently’, the idea of feminist scince carries the
danger of creating a second-class – women’s – science; the history of teaching
domestic science as women’s science should teach us the consequences of
that approach.

Those who scoff at the notion that bias on the grounds of gender informs
scientific practice should look at the suggestion made by Ruth Ginzberg,
of the University of Indiana, that Western society has tended to label women’s
knowledge as non science or even nonsense, for example, in relation to medicine.
One well-attested case is the history of women’s knowledge of and involvement
in midwifery. The scientific approach of hospital medicine takes precedence.

Ginzberg draws an amusing parallel. She asks the reader to imagine a
society that decided, because of the hazards associated with food and eating,
to ‘be much more scientific about the whole process’. Everyone who ate or
served food should do so under medical supervision, just in case. At the
hospital, medical wardens would test everyone carefully for levels of different
nutrients; and monitor the stomach contractions of patients at high risk
of gastric problems. We would, of course, think such a notion absurd. Yet,
she says, this is exactly what science has done to childbirth.

The second half of Feminism and Science focuses more on specific critiques.
The history of embryology, argues Nancy Tuana of the University of Texas,
is replete with ideas of the female as somehow lacking. Females were supposed
to orginate from ‘the weaker seed’; embryos were supposed to develop from
the sperm, the uterus providing only nourishment.

And such images persist. A more recent example of how science constructs
images of gender is provided by the Biology and Gender Group, of Swarthmore
College, US, with their account of ‘sperm tales’ as a genre of science fiction.
Introductory biology books, they say, contain accounts of ‘the heroic sperm
struggling against the hostile uterus. . . . The founder of our body is
the noble survivor of an immense struggle who deserved the egg as his reward’.
Fertilisation is portrayed as (masculine) battles won.

The philosophical debates about science are much discussed in feminist
circles, but they are rather inaccessible to many outside those debates.
For that reason, I wondered about the logic of locating them in the first
half. For those new to feminist analyses of science, or even those who think
that gender cannot be assigned to science, the second half of the book is
more relevant. There is a danger in using historical examples (as feminist
criticisms often do): scientific colleagues may simply dismiss the argument
by saying that science has progressed. As Judith Genova at Colorado College
argues, ‘scientists disown their past by relegating it to ‘bad science’
or to the poor scientific standards of the day, and fail to realise . .
. the banality of bad science’.

Instead of learning from the past, we perpetuate the same mistakes through
our belief in scientific purity, and what passes muster today may be the
history of bad science tomorrow.

It is inevitable that there will be resistance to the feminist message.
Science regards itself as being beyond mere cultural values, including,
of course, the counter-cultural values of feminism. But scientists should
heed the underlying message: believing that science is pure and neutral
does not make it so. We might move closer to those ideals if we learn to
heed those voices that science has silenced.

Lynda Birke lectures in the continuing education department, University
of Warwick.

I know full well how important the rainforests are, and about their
diversity of species. They are irreplaceable, and losing them increases
the risk of global warming. I’m well aware, too, of the problems posed for
indigenous peoples once the loggers and cattle move in. However, important
and worthy though rainforests are, the attention they get from the media
does seem to swamp any reporting of what is happening nearer home. 91av
is as guilty as anyone else in this respect: plenty of stuff about exotic
places with wonderful animals (that we otherwise see only in zoos and safari
parks) and magnificent plants (ditto in botanical gardens). But apart from
an occasional snippet when, for instance, a new town development threatens
a site of special scientific interest (SSSI), our own habitats don’t seem
to merit much attention. The bog down the road or Farmer Giles’s hay meadow
are simply not exotic enough.

You could be forgiven, then, if you hadn’t heard that the Royal Society
for Nature Conservation recently launched a campaign drawing attention to
the extent of habitat loss in Britain. It has called its campaign ‘Losing
³Ò°ù´Ç³Ü²Ô»å’.

The Shropshire Wildlife Trust was one of the first groups to complete
a county-wide survey of scientifically interesting sites (‘prime sites’),
with a view to finding out how much ground has been lost. In the past decade,
the survey found, Shropshire has lost 10 per cent – 1780 hectares – of its
prime sites.

Development is one, obvious, cause of losses. Sixty per cent of Shropshire’s
rock and quarry sites have disappeared in recent years, mostly as a result
of defunct quarries being filled in. Agriculture accounted for 93 per cent
of the losses of flower-rich grassland – the nostalgic hay meadows – and
more than 80 per cent of lost bogs and swamps. The amount of meadow lost
in Shropshire in the past decade, the report states, represents an area
equivalent to 74 miles of football pitches end to end; the amount of woodland
lost represents the equivalent of 22 miles of football pitches. The sorry
tale is repeated throughout Britain: thousands of football-pitch-equivalents
of valuable wildlife sites disappearing under warehouses and supermarkets,
and as marshes are drained for arable crops.

I suspect that one reason why domestic losses receive less attention
than those abroad is that none of us wants to be branded as a NIMBY, opposing
developments only in our own back yards. Conservationists often find themselves
being accused of putting nostalgia for a pastoral idyll before houses, jobs,
roads or progress. We are reminded of ‘conflicts of interest’ as plans to
widen motorways threaten an SSSI in Hampshire, or as afforestation in Western
Scotland threatens half the European population of the bog orchid.

Well, I know I’m guilty of trying to defend my own back yard. Quirks
of the underlying geology allow my local SSSI (an ancient broadleaved wood)
to support an unusual diversity of habitats and hence species: for me, at
least, therein lies its charm. But charm does not always protect the countryside.

The trouble for the wood in my back yard (well, down the road) is that
bugs there are a-plenty, but photogenic, furry animals are rather scarce.
Biological diversity may be interesting to biologists, but it lacks media
appeal. Kinswood’s insects, mosses and fungi cannot compete with Save-A-Seal
campaigns and rainforests. Adding to the wood’s diversity, and problems,
are a variety of huts, barbed wire fences and an artificial lake. Rusty
cars, too, have propagated faster than the lily-of-the-valley. None of us
likes this sort of thing in our local bit of greenery. That’s what makes
local stories rather boring: the same old tales of woe. And if a few oaks
are felled – well, it’s all a bit less dramatic than thousands of hectares
of rainforest in Belize, isn’t it? A little while ago, I heard a joke about
ex-President Reagan. Why, he is said to have wondered, did conservationists
make such a fuss about planting trees? After all, we only need a few of
each variety to go and look at.

When I first heard that story, I laughed like everyone else. Now I don’t.
I find it too close for comfort. It is too close to the idea that we can
afford to lose, say, a few thousand hectares of heathland in Britain, because
we still have plenty left. As long as there is some left, the belief goes,
‘other interests’ (usually commercial) can make some gains.

Now, as long as local conservation is seen primarily as balancing a
nostalgia for ‘our heritage’ against the interests of progress, then that
sort of philistinism carries some weight. As long as you preserve one or
two old hay meadows for people to go and see – a kind of living museum –
then that should satisfy nostalgia.

But the reason why losing these habitats is so important is their scientific,
more than their nostalgic, interest. It is diversity – lots of it – that
matters scientifically; losing even a little heathland to build a factory
is to des troy that diversity. Diversity is the linchpin of biology: we
simply cannot do good biology if we are left with ‘just a few’ of everything.
Losing even some of what we have left could mean losing our living laboratories.
And how can you do good science with only ‘a few’ of whatever it is you’re
studying? Immense diversity is what makes rainforests important to biologists.
But we have our own diversity in Britain, too. And the field work that most
of us did as undergraduates was not done in rainforests: it was done in
many of those meadows, bogs, woods and so forth that have long since disappeared.
While we are criticising the Brazilian government and meritocracy for destroying
the Amazon basin, we should be attacking our own for its complacency as
our habitat’s diversity disappears. Those losses are to biology what spending
cuts are to the rest of British science: they destroy its basis.

Lynda Birke works in the Department of Continuing Education at the University
of Warwick.

WHY DO animals switch from one activity to another? What makes them
stop feeding, say, and start scratching? Assessing why or how animals make
behavioural decisions is central to ethology, the study of animal behaviour.
But ethologists have found some aspects of animal motivation particularly
troubling. Why, for example, do animals sleep? How can we tell if animals’
behaviour has purpose, or whether they suffer? Problems of Animal Behaviour
addresses some of these elusive questions.

Presented as a series of essays aimed at the ‘advanced student’ or researcher
in animal behaviour, the book sets out to analyse ‘motivational problems
requiring functional explanation’. David McFarland’s concern is to look
at behaviour both as mech anism (how decision-making works now) and in terms
of evolutionary function – how the mechanism has evolved.

Sleep is one example. Animals are clearly motivated to sleep, yet what
function it serves – either for the individual animal or in evolutionary
terms – remains a subject of much debate. As McFarland notes, it is not
too surprising that animals rest, thereby conserving valuable energy. But
what is puzzling is why they should do so in such a peculiar manner, shutting
down sensory input, losing muscle tone and so risking predation.

As a series of topics for discussion, the book is admirable. It begins
by addressing what is perhaps the most fundamental question about motivation:
how priorities are decided. If an animal is hungry and thirsty, for example,
but a mate comes along, what does it do? Priorities, moreover, may change
over time, as may the costs and benefits. Many ethologists, including McFarland,
have addressed these complex questions experimentally. Yet, as he admits,
‘How all these considerations are fitted together in the design of an animal
remains a problem’ for ethological theory.

Other, perhaps equally problematic, topics McFarland considers are:
animal suffering; the economics of altruism (when does it pay to be altruistic?);
whether behaviour is goal directed or purposive; and cognition, or animal
awareness. Each of these provokes debate, and sometimes disagreement, between
biologists.

McFarland’s position in regard to these disparate questions is consistent.
He focuses upon the mechanisms that might underlie particular behavioural
processes, refusing to accept claims that go beyond available evidence.

It is this refusal that makes these essays good material for debate.
It will also provoke many of those who are dissatisfied with mechanistic
explanations of animal behaviour. In discussing whether an animal’s behaviour
can be said to be directed towards some goal, McFarland concludes that positing
goal-directedness, or purpose, is not necessary. Apparent goals may be achieved
as a consequence of the behaviour, without supposing that the animal ‘had
in mind’ what it wanted to achieve.

Arguing for animal awareness or cognition may also be going too far:
McFarland emphasises that even apparently intelligent solutions do not necessarily
imply that the animal is thinking. Animals can behave remarkably like robots,
even if they are highly intelligent ones.

McFarland claims that our desire to attribute to animals concepts such
as purpose needs explanation: ‘Humans,’ he says, may ‘have a predilection
for such teleological explanation.’ In discussing behaviour that appears
to be deliberately deceitful, for example, he asks whether ‘humans (are)
designed (by natural selection) to assume that deceitful acts . . . by others
are intentional?’

Yet other, equally persistent, beliefs also need explaining. One is
the parallel drawn here, and elsewhere, between concepts in ethology and
economics. This is hardly surprising, because ethologists drew explicitly
on economic ideas in developing recent theory. Yet there is a tendency in
some writing on ethology to see the parallel as rather more than the descriptive
device that it is, a tendency that needs explaining. The parallel is imperfect:
‘We cannot expect to find animal millionaires.’

Good topics for debate these may be, but the structure of the book puzzled
me. There seems little attempt to link chapters, even on themes with some
overlap. Sleep, for example, seems to present problems of motivational priorities:
yet it is not discussed until the fourth chapter. Animal suffering, too,
overlaps with debates about cognition. Perhaps few readers will do as I
did, and read straight through. But for those that do, more guidance would
have been helpful.

Basing a book on rather unconnected essays also introduces the risk
of repetition: for example, McFarland’s analogy of humans shopping for coffee
in supermarkets came up three times. Yet the themes of this book do raise
important questions for anyone interested in why animals or people do what
they do. Many of these questions may be unanswerable. The problem with thinking
about goal-directedness, McFarland says, is that we never can have good
evidence that ‘goals’ are represented inside another’s head, be that animal
or human; but social life may require that we behave ‘as if’ they did. If
intentionality did not exist, we would have to invent it.

Lynda Birke is a lecturer in continuing education at the University
of Warwick.

N THE 1870s one Alabama doctor claimed: ‘Beware! Science pronounces
that the woman who studies is lost,’ in response to feminist agitation for
higher education. So, too, science can provide the antidote to more recent
demands for women’s emancipation; if male dominance is all nature’s fault,
then patriarchy is inevitable and feminists misguided.

BrainSex is in this genre. Like its predecessors, it asserts that science
has clearly shown differences in the way that men’s and women’s brains function;
these, moreover, determine differences in behaviour and intellectual ability.
If we remain unaware of this all-encompassing dictate of our biology, then
that is due to the power of prevailing beliefs in ‘cultural conditioning’.
The sexes are not the same; to believe otherwise is to ‘build a society
based on a biological and scientific lie’.

Anne Moir and David Jessel claim that men’s and women’s brains are ‘wired’
differently as a result of exposure to different levels of sex hormones
before birth. This wiring ensures that their brains work along different
lines from the moment they are born; so, for example, girlsacquire verbal
skills morequickly, and boys develop greater spatial ability. The result,
Moir and Jessel suggest, is that boys excel in maths and science, while
girls are more concerned with communicating with other people.

As adults, male brains ensure that their owners singlemindedly pursue
careers. ‘It is men,’ say Moir and Jessel, ‘who feel driven to discover
the secret clockwork of Creation itself, the laws of physics, motion (or)
gravity.’ The drive stems from greater amounts of testosterone, the ‘aggression
and dominance hormone’. Hormones, meanwhile, induce females to become maternal;
and they ensure that women are naturally ‘fastidious’ and so more suited
to domestic work, like stacking the dishwasher.

Hyperbole is an obvious risk of popular accounts of science. Thus, ‘virtually
every’ neuroscientist believes that fetal brains are ‘awash’ with hormones,
exerting a powerful ‘prenatal mind control’. ‘Literally hundreds of studies’
show sex differences in spatial ability. The rising ‘hormonal sap of puberty’
helps to continue the differences into adulthood.

That is heady stuff. Science as incontrovertible truth is a powerful
idea, and one often invoked in response to woolly sociological notions that
we might work to change society. But what has science had to say about brains
and sex? Prenatal hormones do seem to influence how some parts of the brain
develop. One small area of the hypothalamus, for example, appears to be
larger and to have more connections between nerve cells in male mammals
than in females. But this is not too surprising: one job the hypothalamus
does is to organise the body’s production of sex hormones. In females, this
is cyclic, while in males it is not. Unambiguous evidence of structural
differences in the rest of the brain, however, is scant.

Researchers have not suppressed the evidence that does exist: on the
contrary, the discovery of differences in the hypothalamus received extensive
media coverage at the time. But one reason why it has not received more
accolades is that many scientists are more cautious in extrapolating from
cells to human society.

Not only are some scientists more cautious; several have also pointed
to the methodological difficulties that inevitably beset studies of human
development. It is rarely possible to control variables, such as the behaviour
of parents towards children, for example. And if some – not ‘literally hundreds’
– studies show that males tend to outscorefemales on tests of spatial ability,
how can we unravel the many cultural influences at work? Meccano sets have
a lot to answer for.

The cause of scientific truth is not helped by reducing the complexities
of human development to chemical cocktails. Hyperbole allows that cause
to slip even further away. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), for instance,
is a condition in which the adrenal glands, situated adjacent to the kidneys,
secrete excessive levels of particular hormones during early development.
But even popular accounts of science should not refer to CAH as an abnormality
of ‘the kidneys’. Nor do ‘we know how to make homosexual rats and monkeys’;
what ‘we’ can do with hormones, rather, is to alter the frequency of certain
patterns of behaviour, such as mounting. That does not createa homosexual,
be it rat or anything else.

Explanations of sex differences that uphold the status quoare familiar
enough. The biastowards accounting for only some observed differences, such
as male predominance in science, is familiar, too. I doubt if dressmaking,
for example, could be accomplished without spatial skills, yet that is stereotypically
the preserve of women.

What is less familiar is the alleged extreme environmentalism against
which Moir and Jessel argue. Few indeed are the liberals, feminists or woolly
sociologists who would attribute all gender divisions solely to ‘cultural
conditioning’ onto the ‘blank slate’ of infancy. Among the other factors
they might consider are social class and power. Loss of money, suggest Moir
and Jessel, presents a terrible threat to the (hormonally based) masculine
self: stockbrokers might even jump out of Wall Street skyscrapers. And so,
of course, might a woman living below the poverty line, struggling to raise
a family on what is left of child benefit. She may not even know how to
stack a dishwasher.

We should, Moir and Jessel urge, abandon the pursuit of equal opportunities;
rather, we should celebrate difference. I must admit that I was not aware
that feminists, liberals and so forth had even denied difference: what they
have said, rather, is that difference should have nothing to do with equality
and human rights.

‘Liberal’ educators would agree with one claim, that tailoring science
teaching to girls’ experience and needs is desirable. But I doubt if they
would agree with many of the other suggestions. Affirmative action, for
example, they imply willmean inefficiency, with lesscompetent women in positionsof
responsibility. ‘Would you,’ they ask, ‘let your children fly on an affirmative
action airline?’

I must confess that I did not try the quiz: ‘What sex is your brain?’
As a woman scientist who hates housework, I think I can guess the result.

Lynda Birke is a biologist and science writer.

STUDENTS of physiology will know how prevalent are mechanical analogies
to explain how our bodies work – brains as central controllers, hormones
like radio transmitters, kidneys as waste disposal systems. The familiarity
of such trappings of modern technology undoubtedly makes these analogies
useful aides memoires. But do they help us to understand our bodies?

Emily Martin’s book is concerned with women’s experiences of bodily
events, such as menstruation, menopause and childbirth, and how these correspond
to the largely mechanical metaphors abounding in medical texts. On the whole,
the accounts of the women whom Martin interviewed suggest that they do not.
What is striking about Martin’s account is the extent to which women actively
resist the passive role that medical practice – and the mechanical metaphors
– place upon them.

Medical descriptions of women’s reproductive processes are rooted in
metaphors of production: the woman ‘labours’ to achieve the ‘product’; and
the role of the doctor is to ‘manage’ labour. So menopause and menstruation
are portrayed as ‘failed’ reproduction. During labour, too, western women
perceive contractions as somehow separate from the self – a profound consequence,
Martin suggests, of medical beliefs in the uterus as ‘involuntary’ muscle
over which the woman has little control.

The language used to describe women’s reproductive processes is not
neutral: menstruation is about ‘degeneration’, ‘dying’, and ‘loss’ of egg
or uterine lining. Medical texts describe sperm production, by contrast,
as ‘remarkable’, ‘amazing’ by its ‘sheer magnitude’. No mention there of
the several billion sperm that never make it to the production line.

The ‘purpose’ of the menstrual cycle, according to dominant belief,
is the implantation of a fertilised egg. But a woman, Martin suggests, may
see things differently; unless she wants to be pregnant, the ‘purpose’ of
her cycle – to her – may instead be the production of menstrual blood. And
many of the women interviewed did indeed see it that way. In explaining
how they would describe menstruation to a young girl, these women, who were
predominantly working class, emphasised the bodily and practical experiences.
Women from middle-class backgrounds, by contrast, rooted their answers in
mechanism and purpose. But what these ‘educated’ answers omit, Martin points
out, is how the bodily events are actually experienced. It is not surprising,
then, that many middle-class women remembered panic and anxiety during puberty,
a feeling of not being adequately prepared for the practicalities. Mechanical
descriptions of failed production do not speak about how we live in our
bodies.

Medical imagery of hierarchical systems also restricts our choices:
‘One woman I talked to said her doctor gave her two choices for treatment
of the menopause: she could take oestrogen and get cancer or she could not
take it and have her bones dissolve,’ (that is, osteoporosis). The choice
is stark but largely, because of the language of menopause as failure, a
logic that requires restoration of control by hormones.

Just as workers in production sometimes seek ways of controlling the
pace in their work in defiance of management, so too do women in labour.
Even if all other choices seem impossible, women can still use denial as
a means of retaining control over the experience. Martin recounts one woman’s
amazing experience: wanting to avoid a second Caesarian section, the woman
‘managed to conceal what was happening from her husband, doctor, mother
and stepfather through four days and nights of labour in a two-bedroomed
cottage in the middle of a snowy winter’. Worker resistance indeed.

Martin’s book is an excellent account of the disparity between medical
descriptions and human experiences. Some of the disparity applies to both
genders: the bodily experiences of all of us are often far removed from
the supposedly objective and neutral facts of scientific accounts. But it
is female physiology that is particularly denigrated, portrayed as lack.
What this discrepancy underlines, says Martin, is the partiality of the
seemingly abstract scientific account.

One strategy adopted by many critics of mechanistic accounts is to emphasise
how, in human development, different components (hormones, genes, environmental
influences and so on) interact as ingredients do when we bake a cake. A
fine example to counteract deterministic beliefs – but, Martin notes, it
is still one that underplays the meanings we give to the ingredients of
our lives. The cake analogy, she believes, would be more enlightening if
we were told that it was ‘chocolate, baked by a 64-year-old widow on the
occasion of her only daughter’s departure . . . abroad . . . We would be
hard pressed to say how much the bittersweet taste of the finished cake
was due to the chocolate and how much was due to the social significance
of the occasion.’

The meanings we give to human experiences, whether ‘bodily’ or not,
are missing from the abstract, mechanistic tone of scientific accounts.
In response, women typically ‘assert an alternative view of their bodies’.
There are, moreover, a multiplicity of meanings. These tell, says Martin,
‘of many visions of life, different for different women and powerfully different
from the reality that now holds sway.’

Lynda Birke is a freelance science writer and a biologist.