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<p>In 2016, the US National Institutes of Health implemented the Sex As a Biological Variable policy (SABV), mandating that researchers collect and report data about sex in preclinical biomedical research. Janet Rich-Edwards and Donna Maney ("Best practices to promote rigor and reproducibility in the era of sex-inclusive research." <i>Elife</i> 12 (2023): e90623) have recently drawn attention to an important distinction among research projects under this policy: while some seek to test hypotheses about sex differences, others are properly understood as exploratory. Here, I consider the consequences of this distinction for evaluating the pursuitworthiness of experiments under SABV. Because exploration under SABV piggybacks on confirmatory experimentation and constitutes a cross-contextual search for effects of sex, we should evaluate its pursuitworthiness under Pierre-Hugues Beauchemin and Kent Staley’s account of exploratory inquiry, which does not require exploration to take place in its own type of experiment ("The epistemological significance of exploratory experimentation: A pragmatist model of how practices matter philosophically." <i>European Journal for Philosophy of Science</i> 14, no. 4 (2024): 1–33). One upshot of this evaluation is that if exploratory surveillance under SABV involves openness to unanticipated findings, as exploration often does, it may be strategic for exploratory inquirers to retain loose, multidimensional conceptualizations of sex. I analyze how this might inform recent calls for scientists to make their operationalizations of sex theoretically-informed and precise. Precision may not be the best or the only way forward for sex in biomedicine.</p>

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Sex as a biological variable and the pursuitworthiness of exploratory inquiry

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年11月25日

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  • Marina DiMarco

摘要

In 2016, the US National Institutes of Health implemented the Sex As a Biological Variable policy (SABV), mandating that researchers collect and report data about sex in preclinical biomedical research. Janet Rich-Edwards and Donna Maney ("Best practices to promote rigor and reproducibility in the era of sex-inclusive research." Elife 12 (2023): e90623) have recently drawn attention to an important distinction among research projects under this policy: while some seek to test hypotheses about sex differences, others are properly understood as exploratory. Here, I consider the consequences of this distinction for evaluating the pursuitworthiness of experiments under SABV. Because exploration under SABV piggybacks on confirmatory experimentation and constitutes a cross-contextual search for effects of sex, we should evaluate its pursuitworthiness under Pierre-Hugues Beauchemin and Kent Staley’s account of exploratory inquiry, which does not require exploration to take place in its own type of experiment ("The epistemological significance of exploratory experimentation: A pragmatist model of how practices matter philosophically." European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14, no. 4 (2024): 1–33). One upshot of this evaluation is that if exploratory surveillance under SABV involves openness to unanticipated findings, as exploration often does, it may be strategic for exploratory inquirers to retain loose, multidimensional conceptualizations of sex. I analyze how this might inform recent calls for scientists to make their operationalizations of sex theoretically-informed and precise. Precision may not be the best or the only way forward for sex in biomedicine.