-
Here’s What Scientists Are Learning about Women’s Health from Other Female Animals
Projected on the massive screen behind me onstage, a herd of giraffes rushes across a sweep of savanna. With the video set to loop, the giraffes gallop endlessly, giving me time to slowly lean across the podium and ask my audience: “Did you spot the pregnant giraffes?” I am delivering a plenary lecture at the 2019 Nobel Conference in Stockholm. The theme of that year’s conference was bioinspired medicine—finding solutions in nature to human health problems—and I wanted to call attention to the connections between women and other female animals. As a cardiologist and evolutionary biologist, I’d been posing this question about the giraffes to medical students in my courses…