Bird Pinkerton
speaker
1,078 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 4d ago
Bird Pinkerton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
She ran some more tests.
And again, the results seemed to suggest that some of these proteins just on their own might help speed up tissue repair.
So these were more exciting results, like lots of promising ideas to pursue further.
Except you can't find wound healing medicines based on Gemma's work out in the world today.
In part, because she didn't get to pursue these ideas further.
If you look at the numbers for the NIH in the U.S., for example, it only funds about 20% of the applications it gets for new research grants.
And those are the numbers for all types of research science.
Like reproductive health is especially underfunded within that.
And then within reproductive health, menstruation science is extra ignored.
Like one paper I looked at found that over the span of a decade, there are about 15,000 research papers with references to semen and about 400 papers referencing menstrual blood.
And like the simplest explanation for this seems to be that historically a lot of scientists were men and they just didn't want to investigate menstrual blood because it was considered gross and kind of taboo or because they just weren't interested.
So there hasn't been the same kind of scientific infrastructure and interest built up around menstruation as there has around other routine human processes.
And Gemma says she saw this in her day to day.
Now, to be clear, when she reflects on her efforts to get more funding for this particular project, Gemma does not think that, like, some Australian funding panel got the ick from menstrual fluid and refused to fund her work because of it.
She says that skin treatments were especially hard to get funded, and that was probably part of the problem.
And also, she thinks that just the idea of using proteins from menstrual fluid was maybe just too new.
As it was, Gemma and her colleagues looked for funding in a bunch of different places, couldn't find it.
She does clinical trial work now instead.
I don't want to end on total doom and gloom, though.
Especially because things are kind of changing around menstruation and menstrual fluid.
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