Lillian Eva Dyck is a First Nations woman of Cree heritage, a neuroscientist, and a Canadian senator, and she brings to her work the ancient traditions of native Northern cultures. In a lecture Friday at the AAAS Annual Meeting, she urged researchers and educators to look beyond the science of facts and figures for other realms of insight and understanding.

In her 45-minute lecture, she described her own entry into science decades ago: There were very few women involved, and almost all laboratories were dominated by men, the powerful principal investigators who were in charge of most laboratories, projects, and departments in universities and other science centers. But now, after years of struggle, women are becoming far more prominent in the sciences, she said. In the life sciences, women make up a majority of workforce. And she's working to see similar progress, someday, for the native peoples.

For the central theme of her talk, Dyck chose the ancient spiritual symbol, a medicine wheel, devised during past ages by the native people, primarily the plains Indians, as a model for a variety of new approaches to understanding the world. By going beyond complete reliance on solid, documented facts, she said, there are additional ways to make progress through hunches, dreams, serendipitous observations--and even mistakes.

“Facts do not exist in a vacuum,” she said. “We are all subject to the cultural and other biases that we were brought up in.”  And, she added, sticking rigorously only to “the facts” can sometimes lead to errors that persist, and mislead, for decades.

For example, half a century ago, in 1962, a researcher at the University of Michigan reported that Native Americans—and especially Arizona’s Pima Indians—suffer greatly elevated rates of obesity, and he had discovered why. His research indicated that Pima people, and some members of other tribes, must harbor a genetic trait called the “thrifty gene.”

It was of survival value for people living on very meager diets, he reasoned. But when food becomes plentiful, the mutant gene promotes massive fat accumulation. This seemed especially true for people who've left their native diets and adopted the rich foods consumed by most of the American population.

Of course that scientific myth persisted for decades, taken almost as gospel among geneticists until recently, when modern studies disproved it. The diet part seems all plausible—a fat diet can lead to fat people—but the “thrifty gene” notion is now discredited.

Dyck cited another example of how chance observations, informed by ancient lore, can impact science: In 1993, there was a sudden outbreak of a new viral disease in New Mexico and Arizona. The origin of the ailment and how it spread was a mystery, and remained so even after scientists isolated a culprit: the Hanta virus.

Its animal carrier remained unidentified until a Native American happened to see a sand painting of a mouse. It was an inspiration that led him to suggest wild mice as the culprits, which turned out to be correct.

In time, research showed that the virus spread most readily in episodes of especially wet weather—El Niño events—that encouraged strong growth of the piñon pine trees, and thus ultra-abundant production of pine nuts. This enabled mouse populations to explode, leading to the birth of many more mice, and the spread of disease-carrying mice into people's homes.

Thus the Hanta outbreak mystery was solved in part by a sand painting and native intuition. “There are ancestral ways of knowing,” Dyck said. “There are oral traditions, so there's a lot of practice and training that is going on.”

As for the role of women in science, she noted that “20 or 30 years ago medical research studies were done almost solely on men, and we had to push to get women to be involved in the science. Women were discriminated against in research as subjects.” Also, even if women doing research work came up with new ideas, Dyck said, “their ideas weren't necessarily accepted.”

The bottom line is that science as a culture has gradually changed, she said, and “we should be smart to acknowledge that and take advantage of it.”