A Discussion on Experiments and Experimentation: NIH to Balance Sex in Cell and Animal Studies

In 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a new policy to promote “sex parity” in research.  As an extension to the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act which mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials, the new NIH policy will require scientists to include “sex” as a variable in both animal model and in vitro cell line-based research.  The end goal is to ensure that NIH funded scientists “balance male and female cells and animals in preclinical studies in all future applications” (Clayton and Collins 2014, 283). The curators of this section asked four interdisciplinary scholars to discuss this proposed policy.