A few weeks ago world leaders came together for a meeting at the United Nations building in New York to discuss a whole host of issues facing the global community ranging from the proliferation of nuclear weapons to climate change.  While, weeks later, the conference still may be most famous for its discussion of mushroom clouds the meeting also yielded a less covered but equally important fallout for the way policy makers address women’s issues.

The UN, at the conference, consolidated four separate agencies focussed on women’s issues into one much more powerful group, UNIFEM.  In addition to improving organizational efficiency, the new über-agency hopes to more quickly and effectively address global issues that disproportionately affect women.  Chief among these issues are health concerns.  UNIFEM cites, among other statistics that women in sub-Saharan Africa aged 15-24 are 6 times more likely than their male counterparts to test positive for HIV.

UNIFEM, though, is extending its sights far beyond HIV and even beyond addressing sexual assaults, poverty, and political representation, all of which are most certainly on the to-do list.  The agency seeks to expose and attack gender inequality issues wherever they exist, whether it be on the battlefield, in the halls of congress, or within the walls of a hospital.

This is, in many ways, an ambition shared by Oncofertility Consortium and The Institute for Women’s Health Research.  These two organizations have put their full efforts behind expanding clinical trials on women’s health issues and improving women’s fertility preservation options, already to tremendous success.  Whether it’s a new international agency, a nationwide collaboration between basic science researchers and clinicians, or as an ever-growing database in the state of Illinois, the potential of this increased attention to women’s issues on all levels and in all arenas is should be exciting to women (and men) everywhere.

(via CNN)

My name is Tyler Wellington and I operate the histology core facility that serves Dr. Woodruff’s lab as well as many of the Oncofertility Consortium investigators.  Histology in the core is an involved process that takes ovarian and other tissues dissected from research animals and processes it first into microscope slides, and ultimately into digital images that researchers can use to determine everything from the size and shape as the tissue, to its composition, to the location of specific proteins and other important cellular components.  I’ll admit that the day-to-day of the histology core can, on occasion, become tedious.  I’m the one that, in stock footage of a laboratory on the local news, is in the background wearing a long white lab coat cutting thin sections of tissue for a slide or pipetting small volumes of liquid from one tube to another.  These small tasks, though, can never distract me from the big picture.

Reconciling and remedying the mental and health-related stresses of women facing diagnoses of cancer and infertility are enormous tasks charged to the Consortium, which means the daily tasks of the lab, however small, are always pieces of a larger and more important puzzle.  Good ideas, no matter how good, cannot work without good science.  Small changes on the laboratory bench can often lead to big changes in scientific ideas, and big changes is scientific ideas can lead to important changes in smaller stories.  Whether it’s the girl’s decision to become a doctor after attending OSA or the patient’s renewed hope for fertility after cancer treatment, small science, big ideas, and personal stories are always very connected in the Oncofertility Consortium.  I hope to use my space on this blog to look this, to examine the different ways in which science, ideas, and personal stories interact.  I feel privileged to have this opportunity and I look forward to any comments you might have.

Tyler W.