Dan Martin, MD - Recognition of Endometriosis

Hello. It was nice to see you. It was wonderful to be invited. Thank you for the kind words. And I continue to be so excited to see new directions in research in endo. I don't myself have endo. Although of course, like million people with female bodies, how do you get into a subject? There are a lot of people in this room who started their research journey because they'll lose somebody or because they themselves had a thing. They awkwardly found themselves in stirrups and thought, this could be better this moment of my life. But the reason I wrote that book, I'll be giving a talk on Monday and I don't want to detract too much from the research today, but I wrote this book because weirdly no such thing existed. Somehow the female, which is half the species in our species, was a side character in the stories that we tell about the evolution of our bodies, which is a little bit weird because these are the bodies that make the bodies that make the bodies.

So actually they are the fulcrum of revolutionary processes in really material ways actually. And sometimes having done it twice painful ways.

So I thought the book needed to exist in the first place, but while I was doing my PhD at Columbia University, the central thing that I discovered while I was there, which I had no idea, I grew up in a lab. My father was a research psychologist. And so I was helping him with his slides during my puberty. There was never any social hope for me. I was always going to be exactly this person. Thanks, dad. But there's so many female subjects in psychology. It's a kind of bubble, isn't it? Because we weren't working with animal models. There was no such thing as the male norm. There was sexism, but there was no such thing as the male norming biology in psychology where there were loads of female subjects, and of course always because who are the undergraduates in our studies anyway. But in so much of basic biological research, as I discovered in my PhD, Ru actually had been wildly leaving Bewavery Havers out of the picture for a very long time in different fields.

And because we get siloed in our fields as researchers, of course we always think only people it's just here. Only it's them, but actually in my lab, everything's great. And I totally study females and I totally, whatever. So it's fine. Solved, right? Not solved, not solved. Many good things, lots of wonderful progress, but not solved. So I thought, okay, I wanted to start somewhere foundational. There is something really important about the basics in basic research. And so first and foremost, bodies are these exquisitely nested things that are always already interacting with their environments in incredibly complex ways, incredibly responsive ways. These are complex systems working complexly, no surprise. There's no part of your body that is untouched by a thing like endo. There is no part of the body that is somehow untouched by the female sex if you happen to be a member of that class.

But the degrees to which and the impacts of which we are only just starting to uncover now. So I thought I'd do an evolutionary story to start. Okay. So right. So if a body is always made of where it came from, the long processes that helped it evolve, some of which get discarded, some of which get kept on, like strapping a bumper onto a car with duct tape in many cases, but fine, it's a body. Yes.

Then how actually finally considering that might it play out in some of the things we're finally starting to find out in the biology of sex differences now. And we're finally starting to find out in endo, one of the things I've really loved to do and we're about to learn a lot more exciting things about is simply saying, okay, we've been locked in the paradigm that somehow sex doesn't matter. So if we unlock that paradigm, then it seems to matter sort of everywhere, but okay, where though? But what I love about today is that we're actually thinking about endo in a way that isn't simply about the sex hormones, in a way that isn't simply about endometrial tissue and whether it does or does not map to, that we're thinking about the immunology of the thing, that we're thinking about the neural features of the thing.

Because in so many cases, simply being able to say, okay, female represent by female and looking chemo medicine to say females impact for many different body systems might give you something like an age though. Actually, maybe the nerves fascinating. Okay, what new research directions does that open up? What do new treatment paths could that open up? How can we ask these questions differently? That's what stepping outside the paradigm always does. So that's what I'll do. I'll talk more on some though. I wouldn't shut up so I can hear the people who are about to speak now. So I'm going to do that. Thank you.