The Better Half On the Genetic Superiority of Women - Sharon Moalem

INTRODUCTION

HERE ARE SOME BASIC FACTS: Women live longer than men. Women have stronger immune systems. Women are less likely to suffer from a developmental disability, are more likely to see the world in a wider variety of colors, and overall are better at fighting cancer. Women are simply stronger than men at every stage of life. But why?

I became fixated on this question one summer night as I lay inside an ambulance speeding toward the hospital after a serious car accident. Lying on the stretcher, hooked up to the monitors, I found myself reflecting on two specific events in my past that had become vivid memories. One occurred when I was a doctor treating premature babies in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and the other was ten years earlier, when I was focused on neurogenetics, working with people in their final years of life. The two events seemed connected in some way, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on how.

Then, amid the chaotic activity in the back of that ambulance, the realization hit me. We all have those life events that make us question certain basic assumptions; the two things I thought about that summer night, and the crystallizing moment that followed, all link to the argument I’ll be making in this book. And the thesis is this: women are genetically superior to men.

When I started doing research as a neurogeneticist (someone who specializes in the genetic mechanics of neurodegenerative disease), one of the unexpected challenges I experienced was recruiting sufficient numbers of healthy older adults to participate in the studies. Even with the perfect research questions and all the necessary financial support in place to test them, I’d often be stymied and have to delay because I couldn’t find healthy older age- and sex-matched volunteers. The recruitment process could take years.

Unless, of course, you’ve got Sarah on your side. Sarah is in her late eighties and has two titanium hips, but with her walker she’s pretty much unstoppable. Her weekly schedule consists of a watercolor course, swimming, and a cardio class, rounded out with a regular dancing soiree. If that isn’t enough, Sarah takes part in almost daily events at different senior centers across the city. She’s a member of a volunteer organization that visits hospitalized older adults who may not have any family or friends to spend time with them. She also happens to be my grandmother.

I’m often asked by family members if I’d be willing to speak to Sarah directly about slowing down. Everyone gets worried that she’s simply too busy. My response to them is always the same: it’s because she’s so active and draws so much meaning from her daily activities that she’s doing as well as she is. More important, if she stopped being social, I would quickly run out of older adult research volunteers.

My grandmother first started helping me recruit for my studies almost twenty years ago. She wasn’t shy about giving advice either. “You’ll never get one person wanting to help you with your study with that scary white lab coat and name tag on,” she said. “If I were you, I’d try taking it off. And your nurse too—no lab coats. They scare us. It reminds me of my surgeries, and why would I want that? Without it, you can just look like a normal person. After all, you’re asking people to give up a piece of themselves, and that’s a big deal. You’ll see—there are many people who want to help.”

So I listened, and I ditched the lab coat. It worked. After I, dressed like a civilian, gave a presentation to prospective volunteers, we had more than the number of research participants we needed. The only problem was that even if everyone in the room agreed to participate, there would always be a glaring shortage of individuals in one specific demographic group. There just weren’t enough men.

Elderly women on average outlive their male contemporaries by at least four to seven years. This longevity discrepancy becomes all the more striking as we start to approach the extreme end of the human life span. Over the age of eighty-five, women can outnumber men two to one. As for centenarians, women’s survival advantage is even more exaggerated: out of one hundred centenarians alive today, eighty are women and only twenty are men.*

* * *

FLASH FORWARD TEN YEARS to an early-autumn evening when the leaves had just started turning color. I was paged by the hospital to the NICU. Rebecca, the nurse on