Babies in biomedical research.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending the traditional closing dinner of the 119th semiannual meeting of The Salt and Water Club*– held for the first time in Pittsburgh, and attended for the first time by a Club member from Cleveland (although elected while in New Haven). The dinner conversation–at first rather wide ranging– became focused when Mark Knepper of the NIH raised the casual (although probably not accidental) question as to why, as a member of a search committee, he was seeing so few applications from women. After all, in the US, women and men have been for several years near parity in biomedical PhD programs. Fresh from having written my previous editorial on “Sustainability in Biomedical Research” (1), I piped in that the NIH funding system is “brutal” and dissuades from principal-investigatordom all but the most determined potential candidates, including women who happen to be– or who are interested in becoming–mothers. Nuria Pastor-Soler opined that, from her perspective as a principal investigator (PI)-mother, an equally negative factor was the paucity of quality day-care facilities on our campuses. As the conversation gained steam, I realized that the seeds of my next editorial were sprouting . . . I extracted my trusty pen from my shirt pocket, grabbed a menu, and started taking notes. I am writing this Editorial from the perspective of a dinner conversation, so I will not attempt to justify each statement with statistics or advance polling methodology. Rather, I will summarize the impressions that I gleaned from my fellow diners who seemed genuinely concerned by the aforementioned gender imbalance here in the US. Not all of the issues that I discuss will be germane for those in other countries, but I imagine that many of the issues that we face are not unique to the US. The Issue