Book Club Reflections on Eve with Dr. Cat Bohannon

CRS’s Summer 2026 book club featured this year’s selection, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution”. Written by Dr. Cat Bohannon, this book takes an interesting dive into how the female body has morphed, evolved, and adapted over time. Utilizing interesting stylistic nuance, the story of how female bodies are shaped is told through the various Eves across time. From a small early mammal to the modern human, this year’s book club members were guided through vignettes of evolution of the female body. 

In person and virtual groups had rousing discussions on the information presented in this book. Moderated by Gloria Kim (MS-RSM trainee in Dr. Julie Kim's Lab) and Maggie Stapleton (T32 trainee in Dr. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy's Lab), our community members discussed the merits of the information curated in this book, the authors stance on topics, and surprising insights that they gain while perusing the 600+ pages.  

 CRS was also treated to a virtual chat with Dr. Bohannon on August 18th. Moderated by Zainab Ghani (MS-RSM trainee in Dr. Julie Kim's Lab), Dr. Bohannon first discussed her motivation in compiling this tome. As a doctoral trainee, she was struck by the stark horror of watching a woman in a futuristic sci-fi movie having to under a brutal gynecologic procedure on instrumentation that was not necessarily designed for a female body, in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. With this moment engrained in her head, Dr. Bohannon dove down the rabbit hole of science and discovered the male standard in research. Female bodies, with its cycles of fluctuating hormones, provides too many confounding variables in research science, so male subjects were predominately used well into the end of the last century, a few decades from our present time. The second part of the virtual chat provided community members an opportunity to gain more insight into the genesis of this book. Dr. Bohannon proved to be an engaging and humorous speaker. She answered questions on the different Eves, the inspiration for the Eve’s she chose, and how she approached modifying this book for younger curious minds, as a young adult version is in the works. 

Overall, this year’s book club spurred interesting questions about how female bodies have come to be and how a scientist, during her years of graduate training was inspired to write a thesis and a book. We as scientists are taught that when we present our scientific discoveries, we are to guide the audience through our story. In Eve, Dr. Bohannan guided the readers through a millennia-spanning story of the female body.