Tag: scientific paper

Research Fraud Allegations Loom Over Star Chinese Scientist

Just last week, Professor Xuetao Cao addressed a crowd of thousands at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the topic ‘Research Integrity’.

New Delhi: The former head of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and current president of Nankai University in Tianjin Professor Xuetao Cao is under fire for claims that he has falsified data in several research papers.

The alleged data duplication was first identified by microbiologist and data integrity expert Elisabeth Bik, who flagged manipulated images from papers on PubPeer, a peer-reviewed platform to evaluate scientific research, by a “big-name professor who is a Chinese Academician and president of a top tier Chinese university”.

Academician and immunologist Cao Xuetao is a fellow of the German Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Medicine, the US National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award for mentoring in science from the journal Nature.

Also read: CSIR Institute Under Scanner for Publishing Papers With Duplicate Images

The allegations are bound to be doubly discomforting for the Chinese scientific community as he has held the distinction of being the youngest medical professor in China, the youngest member of the Chinese academy of engineering and the youngest general in the Chinese armed forces (at different times). Last week, he addressed a crowd of thousands at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the topic ‘research integrity’.

In a Twitter post, Bik also said she was “not accusing anyone of misconduct” and that “these duplications might just be honest errors”. She had previously reported in 2014 a fraudulent paper from Cao’s lab to the journal that published it. After a small correction was issued in 2015, Bik decided to reexamine more of Cao’s published work.

However, after allegations of data manipulation went viral on social media in China, Cao told China Newsweek he would investigate the claims. According to a post on science journalist Leonid Schneider’s blog, Cao also responded to Bik on PubPeer saying he appreciated her “commitment to protecting the accuracy of scientific records and the integrity of research pursuits” and that he would “work with the relevant journal editorial office(s) immediately if our investigation indicates any risk to the highest degree of accuracy of the published records”.

The Good, Bad and the Ugly of Trapping ‘Pranayama’ Within Scientific Speak

Scientific American’s article and the reaction it has prompted offer more than an opportunity to outrage.

A recent article in Scientific American on the benefits of “proper breathing” for overall health has ignited anger across social media, with many in India accusing the magazine of rebranding or even appropriating the ancient Indian breathing technique of ‘pranayama’.

The outrage on display seems prompted by Scientific American‘s tweet, rather than the article itself, which makes multiple flattering references to pranayama, yoga and the knowledge of the East.

Of course, given the track record of the West, the outrage is perfectly understandable. Western scientists have frequently been guilty of (re)discovering something that’s been around for many centuries, attempting to package it as something new, and in the process depriving it of its cultural heritage in the name of sanitising it for scientific examination. There was a similar incident with banana leaves last year and with turmeric latte before that.

Also read: Why You Shouldn’t Measure Scientific Progress With Award-Winning Discoveries

However, Scientific American‘s article and the reaction it has prompted offer more than an opportunity to just outrage; they offer a chance to reflect on and unpack a lot of things going on here. One example that comes immediately to mind is the role of science in society, as opposed to science’s relation to society, as if it were a separate entity somehow.

‘Cardiac coherence breathing’, as the article characterises pranayama, is the language of a specialist within science. That doesn’t make it wrong, even though claiming it is something novel would be misguided, but that does remove the technique from the commons and away from the people, using language that isn’t very accessible, and making it sound more alien than it actually is. On the other hand, calling it ‘pranayama’ – by way of its storied relationship with yoga – keeps it within the commons.

This is simply a reflection of the scientist’s isolation from society’s broader goals, in the West as much as in the modern East. It’s also a reflection of the kind of language scientists have been trained to, and are encouraged to, use. For example, you no longer read scientific papers today that are easy to understand. The writing is predominantly in the passive voice, very dense and is typified by the overuse of ‘science-ese’ like “‘moreover,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘distinct’ and ‘underlying’”. The following is what some scientists have said about the scientific literature:

Typically, it is bloated, dense and so dry that no amount of chewing can make it tasty. (source)

That science has become more difficult for nonspecialists to understand is a truth universally acknowledged. (source)

Modern scientific texts are more impenetrable than they were over a century ago, suggests a team of researchers in Sweden. It’s easy to believe that. (source)

Fans of the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory will have seen this tendency mocked in the title of each episode: ‘The Allowance Evaporation’, ‘The Romance Recalibration’, ‘The Collaboration Contamination’, etc. So ‘cardiac coherence breathing’ sounds about right for pranayama.

Another issue at play here is the seeming incompatibility of knowledge and the tests used to verify knowledge. India has had the former for a very, very long time, as have numerous other non-modern civilisations around the world.

On the other hand, the tests used to verify knowledge have evolved continuously, and the set of tests used today are of Western origin. Further, because of the West’s colonial mindset, knowledge that isn’t verifiable by their methods is treated as non-knowledge or pseudoscience.

Where we have come up short is in breaching this past/present divide – as Youyou Tu did – instead of dismissing one in favour of the other. But even here, it’s still only the regrettable global struggle for primacy at play, motivated by the incentives capitalism offers for it. As the philosopher Samir Chopra wrote:

Legal protections appropriate for tangible objects … are a disaster in the realm of culture, which relies on a richly populated, open-for-borrowing-and-reuse public domain. It is here, where our culture is born and grows and is reproduced, that the term ‘intellectual property’ holds sway and does considerable mischief.

Then again, one can’t just wish this complication away, and the (re)discovery of ‘cardiac coherence breathing’ might just be a good thing. It’s useful that scientists – anywhere, not just in India – are examining pranayama through the scientific method, with the potential to unlock some detail that an Indian, by virtue of her traditional knowledge alone, doesn’t already have.

As the Scientific American article goes on to note:

The method was developed based on the understanding that slow, deep breathing increases the activity of the vagus nerve, a part of parasympathetic nervous system; the vagus nerve controls and also measures the activity of many internal organs. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, calmness pervades the body: the heart rate slows and becomes regular; blood pressure decreases; muscles relax. When the vagus nerve informs the brain of these changes, it, too, relaxes, increasing feelings of peacefulness. Thus, the technique works through both neurobiological and psychological mechanisms.

This is certainly good to know. Where the ‘discovery’ errs is in passing it off as something new, where it runs the risk of being translocated from the commons to the specialists. Terms like ‘vagus nerve’, ‘parasympathetic’ and ‘neurobiological mechanisms’ aren’t exactly part of casual conversation.

Also read: The Conversation on Eastern Traditions of Science That Needs to Happen But Won’t

An attendant issue is that of cultural misappropriation. Many readers will remember the hoopla over Coldplay’s music video for ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ in 2016. In 2018, we discovered how the British author J.K. Rowling had shoehorned an Indonesian character, played by a Korean actress, into the script for the second Fantastic Beasts film in a bid to have diversity where none existed in her books. The only problem: the mythology she chose to draw from was of Indian origin.

The result, in the writer Achala Upendran’s words:

[Rowling] refuses to accept that her position as creator does not entitle her to rewrite cultural histories and rebrand different mythologies according to her own convenience, especially when this rebranding is so fraught with political implications.

In much the same way, many Western commentators and thinkers – if not scientists and policymakers – refuse to acknowledge that their cultural hegemony doesn’t give them the license to recast existing knowledge according to their convenience. Instead of slicing off one portion for scientific study and another to promote pseudoscience, we need scientists to work together with pranayama and yoga practitioners to marry technical inputs with cultural and spiritual rituals, and enhance their benefits for everyone’s sake.

35,000+ Scientific Papers May Need to Be Retracted for Image Duplication

While people commonly defer to science to provide an objective interpretation of the natural universe, the scientific record is continuously flawed and never perfect.

If 3.8% of the 8,778,928 biomedical publications indexed in PubMed from 2009-2016 contain a problematic image, and 10.6% of that group contain images of sufficient concern to warrant retraction, then we can estimate that approximately 35,000 papers are candidates for retraction due to image duplication.

This startling extrapolation comes from an analysis of inappropriate images in papers published in one journal in a seven-year span, performed by a group of American biologists. They uploaded their findings in the form of a preprint paper to the biorXiv server on June 24.

The journal in question is Molecular and Cellular Biology. The biologists analysed 960 papers published in the journal between 2009 and 2016, and found that 6.1% (59) of them contained “inappropriately duplicated” images. Of these 59, five were subsequently retracted from the journal, no action was taken in 12 cases and 42 of them were corrected without retraction.

The findings advocate that journals should institute measures to screen and correct/remove problematic images from submitted manuscripts before publication instead of allowing them to published as-is and, once issues are identified, tackle them later. Apart from distorting the scientific record, the biologists also presented a revealing statistic: that pursuing remedial actions post-publication cost 6 hours of staff time per paper on average whereas pre-publication, the same time cost was 30 minutes.

Although projecting that 35,000 papers might have to be retracted sounds alarming, it’s certainly not surprising as far as the prevalence of mistakes is concerned. “My impression is that a majority of problems are the result of honest mistakes,” Arturo Casadevall, a professor of molecular biology at the Johns Hopkins School for Public Health, Baltimore, and one of the coauthors of the preprint, told The Hindu. “The fact that these papers could be corrected means that the figure problems did not affect the conclusions of the study.”

In October 2017, two scientists from the Netherlands reported that there were over 32,000 papers in the scientific literature that had described some finding or other drawn from analysis of contaminated cells. While the conclusions of these papers are not entirely void, they are not relevant to the pristine cells the papers authors’ thought they were working with. Compounding the problem was that over 500,000 other papers had cited these flawed ones to build on the conclusions, precipitating an avalanche of cascading mistakes.

While people commonly defer to science to provide an objective interpretation of the natural universe, and tout its purportedly self-correcting tendencies, the scientific record insofar as it is represented in the technical literature is continuously flawed and never perfect. Corrections to this record typically emerge in the order of decades, and it pays to be aware of these trends when we compose a concept of how science actually works and what leeway it deserves.

As Casadevall said, most mistakes pertaining to the images in their analysis were ‘honest’ – as they presumably were in the case of papers reporting findings based on contaminated cell lines. However, this isn’t to say there can’t be a more organised sickness in the system of scientific research in the form of researchers deliberately manipulating images to score papers.

A common – and not inappropriate – example festers in India. Here, due to a combination of factors too numerous, yet well known, to detail (see here and here, for example), researchers often publish sub-par papers in predatory journals that typically don’t subject these texts to peer review and, in fact, will publish anything at all for a substantial fee. An analysis of papers published by Indian authors in 2016 revealed that “India had a 1.93-times higher-than-predicted ratio of papers containing image duplication”.

A part of the problem here is the absence of a proper redressal or sanction mechanism. While universities include anti-misconduct pledges in policy documents, complaints of misconduct against a faculty member can only be directed towards the offender’s colleagues, and there are no extra-university regulations for what should happen next nor in what timeframe. As a result, swift and fitting action is almost unheard of, even against high-profile offenders.

Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and scientific editorial director of uBiome, a company that provides microbiome-based precision medicine services, led the 2016 analysis as well as was involved in the analysis of papers in Molecular and Cellular Biology. She wrote in the former paper, “Papers containing inappropriately duplicated images originated more frequently from China and India and less frequently from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, or Australia” and that “ongoing efforts at scientific ethics reform in China and India should pay particular attention to issues relating to figure preparation”.

The bulk of problematic papers emerging from India are marred by plagiarism and self-plagiarism. One study showed in 2010 that of every 100,000 papers published from India in the decade from 2001, 18 are fraudulent (the global average was 4). It only included data plagiarism in his analysis, and classified self-plagiarism and plagiarism of the text as ‘mistakes’. When the latter two factors are also classified as fraud, the fraud rate jumps to 44. According to another study, the fraction of retracted articles published from India jumped from 0.017% in 2001-2005 to 0.037% in 2006-2010.

T.A. Abinandanan, a materials scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, who performed the India analysis, has written on his blog, “Retraction of papers from Indian authors shows a steep fall since 2007 – either because Indian researchers know better now or because plagiarised papers are ever less likely to make it to print in the first place due to increasingly widespread use of plagiarism detecting software by journals.”

Scientific Study Says Science Papers Have Become Harder to Read Over Last Century

Daylighting this declining trend in readability should remind scientists that their choice of words is just as important as their decisions about data collection and statistics.

Daylighting this declining trend in readability should remind scientists that their choice of words is just as important as their decisions about data collection and statistics.

Credit: PublicDomainPictures/pixabay

Credit: PublicDomainPictures/pixabay

Lakshmi Supriya is a freelance science writer based in Bengaluru.

When was the last time you used ‘novel’ in conversation with a friend? How about ‘robust’? Or ‘furthermore’? Even the things you usually read probably doesn’t have many such words. Unless – of course – you’ve been reading the scientific literature. Scientific papers have become more difficult to read and understand over the last century, according to new research, and use of such science-specific jargon may be one reason why.

Most people today believe that the scientific papers are written specifically for scientists and, with good reason, shy away from giving it a skim. Instead, they learn about new developments in science not by reading these papers but through articles in science magazines or newspapers that cut through the jargon and present it in a form everyone can understand. This difficulty in understanding science is perhaps what gave birth to popular science magazines, according to Donald Hayes, a sociologist.

Hayes analysed the readability of articles published in several science journals, popular science magazines and college science textbooks. Science and Nature, among the top science journals today by impact factor, started out as magazines that even people not trained in science could understand. They remained so for about 70 years. That changed quickly from the late 1940s, when their articles started becoming inaccessible to non-specialists. Even the content of the popular science magazine Scientific American became too difficult for the public starting about the 1970s. This led to a drop in its circulation, until it eased off on the professional scientific language.

Longer, tougher abstracts

However, sometimes, even scientists find it hard to understand just what a paper is trying to say. “It started out with us reading articles by one specific researcher, who does very good work but is very hard to read,” William Thompson, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, said about why he and three other students undertook a study of readability of the science literature. “We were curious if this researcher had always been hard to read. We looked up how we could quantify this. We soon realised that we could analyse readability for all abstracts from a journal.”

So Thompson and team evaluated more than 700,000 abstracts published in various international scientific journals covering general science, biomedical and life sciences between 1881 and 2015. They used two different metrics for determining the readability. The Flesch Reading Ease method uses the number of words in a sentence and the number of syllables in a word. The lower the score, the less readable the text. The New Dale-Chall Readability formula uses the number of words in a sentence and the percentage of difficult words. The higher the score – i.e. longer sentences and the use of tougher words – the less readable the text.

They found that over the years the words used in the abstracts became longer and more difficult, as did sentences, making the text harder to understand. So much so that, by 2015, texts had become so difficult that even if you had studied in English for 17 years, almost one-fifth of all the texts will remain beyond your grasp.

“It should come as no surprise that scientific articles are becoming more difficult to read,” Kristian Nielsen, a professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, who studies science communication, told The Wire. Scientific articles have become more specialised and make sentences more complicated by turning simple words into compound words, he said.

Also read: Here’s how to make science writing less boring

This is something the study also corroborated. Although science in itself has become more complicated, scientists routinely use science-specific jargon, words like ‘moreover,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘distinct’ and ‘underlying,’ which are not technical terms but make reading more difficult. This is a kind of ‘science-ese’, similar to legalese, and its evolution could explain why readability has been on the fall. This has been seen across all disciplines of science.

Although the study analysed only the abstracts of papers, which are more difficult in general to read compared to the full text, the researchers also evaluated the full texts of openly available articles. They found that if the abstract was unreadable, there is a good chance the full text will also be quite incomprehensible.

“Right or wrong, most scientists view the publication process as the mechanism by which new scientific discoveries are communicated to their peers, therefore they select their words very differently from what might be spoken during a dinner party,” Julian Olden, co-director of the Centre for Creative Conservation, University of Washington, who is also interested in science communication, said. “The real question is whether the presentation of scientific articles are needlessly complex.”

After all, it is important that people understand new scientific developments. “I think that it is uncontroversial to say that for a scientific discovery to be useful, people need to be able to understand it,” Thompson said. Other scientists should able to build upon or reproduce the work, journalists should be able to communicate it to the public, and it is important for policymakers to zero in on the right policy directions.

Overuse of jargon

However, not all is gloomy. Researchers have begun to recognise this trend of decreasing readability and make efforts to ease the problem. According to Olden, there is an increase in how scientists communicate their work to the broader society in the last decade. “Many scientists likely have renewed motivation to more vigorously engage with society to talk about the looming environmental and social challenges facing us all. Demonstrating the value of scientific discovery, while simultaneously making science more accessible, is now considered paramount in academia,” he said. With the advent of social media, scientists now have different methods to communicate their work. “Scientists may not necessarily be concerned with making their research publications more readable, but instead are showing more interest in translating and disseminating their work using different social media platforms.”

Nevertheless, “Authors should try to make their texts more readable,” says James Hartley, an emeritus professor at Keele University in the UK, who researched student-learning and the design of didactic material. “The more readable the better!” One way he suggests of ensuring this is to get their copies read by a few appropriate readers before finalising them.

Nielsen proposes a different approach. “Rather than targeting scientific publications at wider audiences, I think it’s better to have skilled science communicators who know how to identify interesting research and communicate it to scientists in other fields and the public,” he says. However, there is no reason why scientists shouldn’t be able to write more plainly, he adds. Training young researchers in science communication will also help.

Journals also have a responsibility to ensure that their articles are comprehensible. “Unreadable articles should be rejected,” says Hartley. Publication of lay summaries is a practice now followed by several leading journals, which has helped make texts more accessible.

“But really the daylighting of this declining trend in readability may be enough to remind scientists that their choice of words is just as important as their decisions regarding data collection and statistical analysis,” according to Olden.

Thompson stresses that he and his team do not think that every single person will be able to understand every single article. “Science is hard because the subject matter is hard. We do not think that the general scientific jargon words should be forbidden, but they should not be overused. The aim should be to maximise how many people can understand a scientific text.”

Are Women Depressed by the Pill – or Depressed Because Women Only Have This Pill?

“I’m still gobsmacked that this is 2017 and we still haven’t reached an effective method of birth control that doesn’t compromise women’s well-being in some way.”

“I’m still gobsmacked that this is 2017 and we still haven’t reached an effective method of birth control that doesn’t compromise women’s well-being in some way.”

Credit: GabiSanda/pixabay

Credit: GabiSanda/pixabay

Like many women around the world, Radha D, a 27-year-old Mumbai-based editor, has a complicated relationship with the contraceptive pill. And it’s not even a relationship that began with the need for contraception.

“I first started taking the combined oral contraceptive pill when I was in class 12. I had been misdiagnosed with PCOS and had extremely heavy periods, but from the very beginning I faced all the symptoms that are listed on the ridiculously small piece of paper that comes with the pill. Nausea, bloating, headaches, period cramps, and bad mood swings,” she says. PCOS stands for polycystic ovary syndrome.

Living with the birth control pill is a constant battle, but Radha has since then been correctly diagnosed with endometriosis and has been told that she can’t do without it.

The pill occupies this ‘frenemy’ status in the lives of a significant number of its users, besides Radha’s. From the time of the birth control pill’s approval in 1960 to now, the pill has simultaneously been vociferously marketed as the ‘key to the temple of liberty’ for women – while being dogged by speculation about its side-effects.

When first created, it was tested with less-than-informed consent on women in an institution for the mentally ill in Massachusetts and working class women of colour in Puerto Rico and Haiti. The side-effects the women experienced included blood clots, nausea, bloating, dizziness and immense mood swings. Although the reduction in estrogen dosages of hormones lessened some of these impacts, and the pill now comes in a range of formulations, the question of what the pill does to women’s mental health is still being debated today, over 50 years later.

Over the years, there have been ominous mutterings about its repercussions, right from 1969 when health activist Barbara Seaman’s book The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill prompted hearings that investigated the safety of the combined contraceptive pill. Supposed consequences like weight gain (which have been disproved by the scarce studies that address it) to those bordering on the surreal, like women finding partners’ faces less attractive once they’re off the pill, have been discussed.

For a pill being used by 100 million women around the globe, there is still astoundingly scanty information on the subject of its side-effects, although it appears that we are finally making some headway.

In April, a major new study led by Angelica Linden Hirschberg, a professor at the Department of Women and Children’s Health at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, confirmed for the first time that the combined contraceptive pill (a pill that combines the hormones oestrogen and progestogen) has a negative impact on a woman’s well-being.

In the study, 340 healthy women between the ages of 18 and 35 were treated for three months. Approximately half of them were given placebo pills. The other half was given a combined pill (containing the chemicals etinylestradiol and levonorgestrel), which is apparently one of the most widely recommended pills in several countries, including India. They were then asked questions that were constructed according to global scales like the psychological general well-being index (PGWBI) and self-report ratings like the 21-item Beck Depression Inventory (BDI).

The women in the study who were given the combined pill experienced dips in their moods, self-control, energy levels and ‘quality of life’. It is important to note that there is no indication that the oral contraceptive increases depressive symptoms or puts women at the risk of developing depression.

This study, being randomised and placebo-controlled, is ostensibly more reliable than a previous study published by researchers at the University of Copenhagen last year, which suggested an association between combined contraceptives and depression.

Although previous research hadn’t found depression to be a frequent consequence of using the pill, the 2016 Danish study created ripples by claiming that women using the combined oral contraceptive were 23% more likely to use anti-depressants. While many women at the time felt vindicated that they had proof that the pill messed with their moods, experts also jumped to point out several limitations of the Danish study.

One, that it was a cohort study (medical research that answers a hypothesis, and establishes links between risks and outcomes) rather than a case-controlled one (a comparative study which examines patients who have a disease with those who do not). Two, that an association between the pill and depression can’t be taken to mean a direct causal relationship. Three, that anti-depressant prescriptions and similar secondary data aren’t necessarily the best indicators of depression.

The new Swedish study doesn’t have these limitations – but scientists themselves pointed out that the results should be “interpreted with a certain amount of caution”. In fact, one of the leaders of the studies suggested that a contributing cause for lower well-being could be that women were taking the pills in an irregular or erratic way.

So where does that leave us?

Bengaluru-based psychiatrist Sabina Rao said that from her understanding of the study, evidence pointed to the fact that women were not staying compliant on the pill. “The study does not make a direct co-relation that says oral contraceptives are causing depression. So at no level should we be telling our patients to not take oral contraceptives because it might worsen their depression, but I do mention that contraceptives could impact your mood.”

Shaibya Saldanha, a gynaecologist in the same city, said that she tends to advise her patients to decide based on their family history. “I often tell patients if they’ve had depression previously, or a history of breast cancer in the family, to avoid the pill. The same goes for patients who feel symptoms like migraine. The pill can, in rare cases, cause deep vein thrombosis or other complications, in the way that even medicines like paracetamol have caused kidney failure for some people. So it’s best to ask patients to look at family history and symptoms.”

Unfortunately, informed choice is not the hallmark of reproductive healthcare in India. In our country, where some families even insist their daughters pop the pill to temporarily delay their periods because they aren’t allowed to visit temples while menstruating, there are a range of factors that impact women’s choices to take the pill. It’s not clear how many of these categories of users know that mood swings or fatigue may be coming their way.

Women we spoke to, who are regular users of the pill, sounded far from alarmed. Two told us with resignation that the benefits of the pill outweighed its risks and inconveniences. They’d rather use it than other bothersome contraceptive measures.

Some women say they haven’t experienced mood swings at all. Sixteen-year-old Deepti, who had been using the pill for contraceptive purposes for over a year, had felt nothing besides the standard pre-menstrual mood fluctuations. Anasua, a London-based academic, hadn’t faced any mood swings either but said the study gave her pause because of the apparent links between the pill and low-energy levels and fatigue.

For some women, their indifference to the study was simply due to them being stuck with the next best alternative to period pain or dysmenorrhea. Radha, for instance, has noticed very extreme mood swings and crippling bouts of depression, amongst other troubling side-effects. But with her endometriosis, she has been advised not to get off it by her doctors.

For others, the pill had introduced different complications into their lives, and had subsequently been abandoned. Twenty-nine-year old Anahita Muthuswamy said she took the combined contraceptive for PCOS: “I initially thought it was the best thing that happened to me because I normally have a very heavy, very messy period and dysmenorrhea to boot. On the pill, I was not only bleeding less but also experiencing significantly less pain. The flip side was that I was losing a lot of hair, so I decided to look for other alternatives.”

The vote, then, seems to be in favour of waiting for further evidence before signing off the pill. Should we be resigned to the pill in the same way that millennia before the human race was resigned to no easy, scientific method of contraception for women?

As Anahita says, “I’m still gobsmacked that this is 2017, and we still haven’t reached an effective method of birth control that doesn’t compromise women’s health and well-being in some way or the other.”

While we await more information about the pill and its relationship with depression and mood swings, we have cause enough to be depressed that we still only have this pill.

In arrangement with The Ladies Finger