Throughout New York Times bestselling author and scientific researcher Cat Bohannon’s groundbreaking “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution,” she ponders why it’s taken so long for science to deal with the complexities of the female body.

Why hasn’t anyone written exhaustively about the uniqueness of a woman’s body and its specific origins? How have the differences from a male’s been so historically misunderstood and sometimes ignored, with very literal life and death stakes?

My knee-jerk answer? The patriarchy. But Bohannon, whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Science Magazine and more, says it goes even deeper.

“The majority of people on Earth are not white, and the majority are not exclusively male, and yet here we are with medical modality just starting to update,” she said. “Things need fixing.”

Bohannon will discuss “Eve” at The Johns Hopkins Center for Women’s Health, Sex and Gender Research on Tuesday followed by an appearance Wednesday at Charm City Books. The central theme of her 2023 book is that women, and the effects faulty research may have on them, have become afterthoughts because of the persistent and damaging tendency to base health, medicinal and other research on the average male body.

There are myriad ways in which the lack of scientific knowledge specific to women adversely affects us. The telltale signs of a heart attack can present differently based on gender. The success of certain drugs can vary. How long anesthesia is effective changes.

Bohannon remembers a scene from 2012’s “Aliens: Prometheus” where a female member of a space crew who has been impregnated by an alien realizes mid-crisis that, as the ship’s surgery pod’s error message reads, “This medpod is calibrated for male patients only.”

That’s a terrible way to find out that even futuristic, fake space scientists aren’t thinking about women. As she sat in the darkened theater, Bohannon realized “that I was one of the only people in the room who realized this part isn’t exactly science fiction.”

In her book, Bohannon goes back — way back — to bring to life the history and evolutionary backgrounds of a host of different female beings, or Eves. Each chapter follows an Eve’s development of a characteristic now standard in a biological women’s body, such as milk, wombs and menopause.

For instance, the science writer describes how the rodent-like Morganucodon, or Morgie, as she calls her, braved the elements and predators to feed herself and then her offspring as one of the first milk-producing mammals. By using vivid storytelling to relay Morgie’s tale, the very detailed information becomes less dense and more accessible. The depiction is also aided by Bohannon’s background as a poet and daughter of a pianist and a scientist.

The name of the book is a reference, of course, to the Biblical first woman famously created from the rib of her mate, Adam. But Bohannon’s book restores autonomy to the uniqueness of the female body, because we are not just spare male parts.

Science has been slow to catch up on that, however. According to the National Institutes of Health, women of childbearing potential were excluded from Phase 1 and early Phase 2 clinical drug trials until inclusion was insured by law in 1993. The numbers of women included in those trials grew in later phases, “but we just don’t know how many [medicines] might have been effective for women, because of insufficient testing of women,” Bohannon said.

The way she sees it, the more research using a diverse group of people the better, instead of “just studying the male body results in the Mr. Potato Head model, just swapping things in and out. We pretend there’s a huge way to examine everyone under the same umbrella, and that’s going to work.”

And scientific parity is not just as simple as comparing women to women, Bohannon pointed out. “Consider a pregnant woman versus a 12-year-old girl. They have different immune systems, though they are both female. Nuances have to be understood.”

The result of this evolution, and the disparity between the answers that men and women get in health care, is significant. According to a 2023 Deloitte study, women spend an average of $266 more annually on out-of-network expenses than men, totaling almost $15 billion more than men a year.

Bohannon said she initially thought those extra costs could be attributed to expenses surrounding childbirth, “but what it really comes down to is that female patients are diagnosed later, referred to specialists less often. It keeps coming back to that. I believe doctors are doing the best they can, but they’re just poorly armed with an understanding. We have to get the information out there.”

The big picture, she said, is that we are constantly learning new things about our bodies, and that new knowledge, even in the case of the current attack on research, will benefit us all.

“Science is flawed, or wrong, but we have to improve on it,” she said. “The whole point is to say, ‘This wasn’t quite right. Here’s actually how it works.' It helps us understand the bigger picture now that we are getting it right.”