The quest to show that biological sex matters in the immune system
A handful of immunologists are pushing the field to take attributes such as sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and reproductive tissues into account.
By Sandeep RavindranarchiveAugust 15, 2022
Sabra Klein is deeply aware that sex matters. During her PhD research at Johns Hopkins University, Klein learned how sex hormones can influence the brain and behavior. “I naively thought: Everybody knows hormones can affect lots of physiological processes—our metabolism, our heart, our bone density. It must be affecting the immune system,” she says.
But when she graduated in 1998, she struggled to convince others that sex differences in the immune system were a worthy topic for her postdoctoral research. “I wasn’t able to find a microbiologist or an immunologist who was going to let me study sex differences,” she says.
She ultimately found a postdoctoral position in the lab of one of her thesis committee members. And in the years since, as she has established a lab of her own at the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, she has painstakingly made the case that sex—defined by biological attributes such as our sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and reproductive tissues—really does influence immune responses.
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