A PhD student says “no thank you”
Throughout my public school years, the scientists I learned about were white men: Greek men invented science and gave it to European men who brought it to American men. Somewhere in the curriculum was a mention of Marie Curie and George Washington Carver.
The social lens of science might have been forced open since the 1960s, but when it comes to how women in science are treated, the knuckle-draggers are still out there, often in positions of power. In the 1980s a friend of mine dropped out of her PhD program rather than face the unrelenting belittling by the men around her. In the last two years alone, women support staff at the U.S. McMurdo station in Antarctica have described an unsafe, toxic work environment, and allegations of sexual harassment have surfaced at South Africa’s Sanae IV research station, also in Antarctica.
Here we are in 2025 and Dr. Rachel Los, who recently received her PhD in biophysics, was so fed up with the dehumanization she received during her time at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, that she included an “anti-acknowledgment” section in her dissertation. Here it is in full:
No thank you to the physics study association that made me sing songs about how women couldn’t study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a “stripper name” within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of “computer girl.” No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to “apologise” months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so “no hard feelings remain hopefully.” And no thank you to him for attending every conference I’ve been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was “surprising” that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with “you should consider it.” No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists “don’t know how to design an experiment.” No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the executive board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted.
I wish I could tell you this has all made me stronger somehow but in reality it has only shattered my confidence. You have made me feel like I do not belong in science and I cannot forgive you for that.
Pregnancy’s toll on the body
I am amazed that human beings with the necessary reproductive system volunteer to go through the processes of pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. Describing those processes as “natural” or “normal” belies the extraordinary amounts and kinds of biological, chemical, and physical stresses on the body during a relatively brief amount of time. Miscarriage, fetal death, placental insufficiency, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, genetic mutation, postpartum hemorrhage, and maternal and infant mortality are ever-present concerns. Add in the amounts and kinds of social stress imposed on the body, and the perinatal period is just frightening. That those in power would force other human beings to go through these processes is just disgusting.
A recent study by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel looked at anonymized lab data from more than 300,000 births between 2003 and 2020. The lab data comprised 76 tests and 44 million measurements covering each week from 20 weeks preconception to 80 weeks postpartum. Nature noted:
The study suggests that the postnatal period in the body is much longer than people tend to assume, says Jennifer Hall, who researches reproductive health at University College London. There’s a societal expectation that you bounce back quickly after childbirth, she says. “This is like the biological proof that you don’t.”
The results also suggest that it might be possible to identify women at risk of certain common complications of pregnancy — including the blood-pressure condition pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes — before conception. Currently, these conditions are diagnosed during pregnancy.
The study noted that the postpartum process is not simply a reversal of the previous processes, but has its own physiology. I hope this study helps stimulate further research that leads to improved health for women before, during and after pregnancy.
Nature also noted that “To build up a picture of a typical pregnancy, [the researchers] used test results only from women aged 20–35 years who were not taking medication or experiencing chronic disease.” But what is a typical pregnancy? Preeclampsia is 60 percent higher among Black women than among white women in the United States and “African American women who develop gestational diabetes mellitus during pregnancy face a 52 percent increased risk of developing diabetes in the future compared to white women who develop GDM during pregnancy.” Whether these disparities are social or biological in origin, they call into question the concept of a typical pregnancy.
I also wonder whether the researchers’ definition of “chronic disease” includes stress. As one study noted, “Black Americans were exposed to greater cumulative stress [than white Americans], which was associated with reduced engagement in preventative health behaviors, which was, in turn, associated with greater inflammation and reduced physical health.”
None of the study’s seven authors are Palestinian. Although the authors state that “We obtained data from Clalit Healthcare, the largest health maintenance organization (HMO) in Israel, with over 5 million members as of 2024, with broad socioeconomic and ethnic demographics,” the only demographics they provide are age and body mass index. The authors don’t indicate how many of the 5 million members (or the 300,000 women in the study) are Palestinian citizens of Israel, or Mizrahi Jews (from the Middle East and North Africa).
The Israeli healthcare system excludes Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, territories over which Israel is the occupying power and for which Israel is responsible under international law. A study of health outcomes of 300,000 women in one Israeli HMO, which does not acknowledge Israel’s responsibility for the health of all the people — in this case, all the women — between the river and the sea, is an abdication of moral responsibility.
After all, what does a “typical pregnancy” look like in Gaza?
Noisy neighbors
Two unrelated studies provide more evidence that the noise pollution we put into the environment forces our animal relatives to change their behaviors.
One study looked at how yellow warblers on the Galápagos Islands were affected by noise from rapidly increasing human populations and their traffic. Male warblers warn each other by singing, which also reduces the amount of physical aggression the birds have to use to defend their territories. Researchers chose study sites that were almost equally divided between locations within 165 feet of a road and locations more than 330 feet from a road. In each location the researchers played songs over a speaker to make the birds think that a male intruder was nearby. They measured the length of the birds’ songs and “aggressive behaviours such as approaching the speaker closely and making repeated flights across it.”
.jpg){kind=link}
The researchers found that the birds “increased the duration of their songs, increased the minimum frequencies of their songs (to reduce overlap with the traffic noise), and birds living close to roads displayed increased physical aggression” because the noise interfered with their ability to hear and be heard.
The other study looked at how rural and urban funnel-weaving spiders adapt to increased noise levels. These spiders “build tapered, tube-shaped webs that aren’t sticky. They wait until unsuspecting prey enters the funnel before quickly moving to bite and immobilize their meal… This technique depends on the spider being able to instantaneously detect the vibration when an insect has bumped into its web. Any outside noise could make that harder” by causing vibrations on the web strands that mask vibrations caused by potential prey.
The researchers reported that
Essentially, city spiders responded to noise by soundproofing — their webs seemingly muffled the sounds of the environment. Those webs, overall, sent fewer vibrations to the spider. While this adaptation might also block out the sounds of potential mates or some prey… it also could allow the city spiders to pick up on nearby prey without becoming overstimulated.
Meanwhile, rural spiders that weren’t used to the din reacted by making their webs more sensitive to try to detect prey amid the constant noise. For the spiders from out of town, it was like turning the volume up to better hear the radio while running a blender.
How the spiders actually alter the construction of their webs is not known, but the scientists think it might have to do with “the placement of anchor points, tension on the silk, or the overall structure of the web.”