After decades of scientists primarily using male laboratory animals for medical research, the National Institutes of Health(NIH) is ending the gender bias practice in research. The shift, published in the journal Nature, will help minimize side effects and dosage miscalculations that were not discovered until after products hit the market. The new policy is an enormous change in the way all NIH-funded research will be done.

Two women from Northwestern's Women's Health Research Institute were driving forces behind requiring females be included in all preclinical research studies from cells to animals for the first time. We meet the director of the Women's Health Research Institute at Northwestern Medicine, Teresa Woodruff and Melina Kibbe, a Northwestern Medicine surgeon and professor of surgery and a vascular research scientist.