Fund Black scientists
2021; Cell Press; Volume: 184; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/j.cell.2021.01.011
ISSN1097-4172
AutoresKelly R. Stevens, Kristyn S. Masters, P. I. Imoukhuede, Karmella A. Haynes, Lori A. Setton, Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernández, Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell, Padmini Rangamani, Shelly E. Sakiyama‐Elbert, Stacey D. Finley, Rebecca Kuntz Willits, Abigail N. Koppes, Naomi C. Chesler, Karen L. Christman, Josephine B. Allen, Joyce Wong, Hana El‐Samad, Tejal A. Desai, Omolola Eniola‐Adefeso,
Tópico(s)Radiology practices and education
ResumoOur nationwide network of BME women faculty collectively argue that racial funding disparity by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) remains the most insidious barrier to success of Black faculty in our profession. We thus refocus attention on this critical barrier and suggest solutions on how it can be dismantled. Our nationwide network of BME women faculty collectively argue that racial funding disparity by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) remains the most insidious barrier to success of Black faculty in our profession. We thus refocus attention on this critical barrier and suggest solutions on how it can be dismantled. We are at a historic moment in time: a mainstream awakening to the pain that stems from racial injustice, with our scientific communities openly acknowledging that our practices promote racial inequity and disparity (Barber et al., 2020Barber P.H. Hayes T.B. Johnson T.L. Márquez-Magaña L. 10,234 signatoriesSystemic racism in higher education.Science. 2020; 369: 1440-1441Crossref PubMed Google Scholar; Cell Editorial Team, 2020Cell Editorial TeamScience Has a Racism Problem.Cell. 2020; 181: 1443-1444Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (31) Google Scholar). To address racial injustice in our profession and society, we established a national network of 260+ women faculty in biomedical engineering from all academic ranks, including chairs, deans, and distinguished scientists, such as the few women of color elected into the National Academies. Over the past few months, we have exchanged >24,000 messages discussing racial inequities that pervade our profession. One issue keeps rising to the top throughout these discussions: our Black colleagues’ grief about insufficient National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for their research laboratories. These human experiences are backed by years of data. The first study documenting racial disparity in NIH funding hit the field like a shockwave in 2011 (Ginther et al., 2011Ginther D.K. Schaffer W.T. Schnell J. Masimore B. Liu F. Haak L.L. Kington R. Race, ethnicity, and NIH research awards.Science. 2011; 333: 1015-1019Crossref PubMed Scopus (582) Google Scholar). This study showed that award probability for Black principal investigators (PIs) in 2000–2006 was ∼55% that of white PIs of similar academic achievement (Ginther et al., 2011Ginther D.K. Schaffer W.T. Schnell J. Masimore B. Liu F. Haak L.L. Kington R. Race, ethnicity, and NIH research awards.Science. 2011; 333: 1015-1019Crossref PubMed Scopus (582) Google Scholar). NIH scrambled to study potential reasons for this injustice (Barber et al., 2020Barber P.H. Hayes T.B. Johnson T.L. Márquez-Magaña L. 10,234 signatoriesSystemic racism in higher education.Science. 2020; 369: 1440-1441Crossref PubMed Google Scholar; Erosheva et al., 2020Erosheva E.A. Grant S. Chen M.C. Lindner M.D. Nakamura R.K. Lee C.J. NIH peer review: Criterion scores completely account for racial disparities in overall impact scores.Sci Adv. 2020; 6: eaaz4868Crossref PubMed Scopus (40) Google Scholar). We, as scientists and engineers, wrote editorials and promised to do better. Yet, over a decade later, this gap persists (Barber et al., 2020Barber P.H. Hayes T.B. Johnson T.L. Márquez-Magaña L. 10,234 signatoriesSystemic racism in higher education.Science. 2020; 369: 1440-1441Crossref PubMed Google Scholar; Dzirasa, 2020Dzirasa K. Revising the a Priori Hypothesis: Systemic Racism Has Penetrated Scientific Funding.Cell. 2020; 183: 576-579Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (16) Google Scholar; Erosheva et al., 2020Erosheva E.A. Grant S. Chen M.C. Lindner M.D. Nakamura R.K. Lee C.J. NIH peer review: Criterion scores completely account for racial disparities in overall impact scores.Sci Adv. 2020; 6: eaaz4868Crossref PubMed Scopus (40) Google Scholar; Platt, 2020Platt M.O. We exist. We are your peers.Nat. Rev. Mater. 2020; 5: 783-784Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar). In 2014–2016, Black applicants’ award rates remained at ∼55% of those for white PIs (Figure 1A) (Erosheva et al., 2020Erosheva E.A. Grant S. Chen M.C. Lindner M.D. Nakamura R.K. Lee C.J. NIH peer review: Criterion scores completely account for racial disparities in overall impact scores.Sci Adv. 2020; 6: eaaz4868Crossref PubMed Scopus (40) Google Scholar). While we continue to nitpick about reasons for this disparity, one fact remains widely agreed upon: the disparity is real. Why does this matter? Promotion and tenure committees frequently use research grants, especially NIH R01-equivalent grants, to gauge a biomedical research program’s long-term viability. Thus, the racial disparity in NIH R01 awarding leads to failed tenure cases for Black faculty (Cropsey et al., 2008Cropsey K.L. Masho S.W. Shiang R. Sikka V. Kornstein S.G. Hampton C.L. Committee on the Status of Women and Minorities, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Medical College of Virginia CampusWhy do faculty leave? Reasons for attrition of women and minority faculty from a medical school: four-year results.J. Womens Health (Larchmt.). 2008; 17: 1111-1118Crossref PubMed Scopus (138) Google Scholar; Fang et al., 2000Fang D. Moy E. Colburn L. Hurley J. Racial and ethnic disparities in faculty promotion in academic medicine.JAMA. 2000; 284: 1085-1092Crossref PubMed Scopus (233) Google Scholar). Others burn out and exit the academy before reaching the tenure threshold (Cropsey et al., 2008Cropsey K.L. Masho S.W. Shiang R. Sikka V. Kornstein S.G. Hampton C.L. Committee on the Status of Women and Minorities, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Medical College of Virginia CampusWhy do faculty leave? Reasons for attrition of women and minority faculty from a medical school: four-year results.J. Womens Health (Larchmt.). 2008; 17: 1111-1118Crossref PubMed Scopus (138) Google Scholar). We thus ask our non-Black colleagues to consider being in our Black colleagues’ shoes for a moment: imagine needing to spend twice the amount of time grant writing to achieve the same funding level as white PIs, while also performing substantially more service (Hare, 2018Hare H.E. Service Work of Underrepresented Faculty. PhD thesis (UCLA).2018Google Scholar). This excessive burden no doubt leaves Black faculty less time to do research, publish papers, gain exposure, train and inspire diverse students, and attain the promotions and positions needed to achieve the highest levels of academic power (Dzirasa, 2020Dzirasa K. Revising the a Priori Hypothesis: Systemic Racism Has Penetrated Scientific Funding.Cell. 2020; 183: 576-579Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (16) Google Scholar; Erosheva et al., 2020Erosheva E.A. Grant S. Chen M.C. Lindner M.D. Nakamura R.K. Lee C.J. NIH peer review: Criterion scores completely account for racial disparities in overall impact scores.Sci Adv. 2020; 6: eaaz4868Crossref PubMed Scopus (40) Google Scholar; Fang et al., 2000Fang D. Moy E. Colburn L. Hurley J. Racial and ethnic disparities in faculty promotion in academic medicine.JAMA. 2000; 284: 1085-1092Crossref PubMed Scopus (233) Google Scholar; Platt, 2020Platt M.O. We exist. We are your peers.Nat. Rev. Mater. 2020; 5: 783-784Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar). To add salt to this wound, we worry that NIH does not fully understand the critical deleterious impact of this disparity. For example, we applaud the NIH Common Fund FIRST program, which offers $241 million to recruit new faculty committed to inclusive excellence. Yet, any new Black researcher recruited as a result of this program will be set up to fail if NIH doesn’t aggressively work to eliminate racial funding disparity. At least 10 editorials have been written about this NIH racial funding disparity (Dzirasa, 2020Dzirasa K. Revising the a Priori Hypothesis: Systemic Racism Has Penetrated Scientific Funding.Cell. 2020; 183: 576-579Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (16) Google Scholar; Platt, 2020Platt M.O. We exist. We are your peers.Nat. Rev. Mater. 2020; 5: 783-784Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar) with no sign of real effort from NIH or other entities to dismantle it. Meanwhile, our Black colleagues continue to be disenfranchised. We need radical solutions that produce racial funding equity now. Our hope is that this commentary refocuses attention on this critical issue. We also suggest solutions on how this barrier can be dismantled. The NIH director and leadership must recognize that its previous approaches, most of which have focused on filling the “pipeline” without simultaneously addressing our profession’s systemic racism, have failed. NIH must change course. We suggest the following: Thousands of Black voices have long lamented the racism prevalent in this country. We refer readers to the thousands of reports, studies, and personal introspections written on this topic (Dzirasa, 2020Dzirasa K. Revising the a Priori Hypothesis: Systemic Racism Has Penetrated Scientific Funding.Cell. 2020; 183: 576-579Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (16) Google Scholar; Erosheva et al., 2020Erosheva E.A. Grant S. Chen M.C. Lindner M.D. Nakamura R.K. Lee C.J. NIH peer review: Criterion scores completely account for racial disparities in overall impact scores.Sci Adv. 2020; 6: eaaz4868Crossref PubMed Scopus (40) Google Scholar; Henry et al., 2017Henry F. Dua E. James C.E. Kobayashi A. Li P. Ramos H. Smith M. The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities. UBC Press, 2017Google Scholar; Platt, 2020Platt M.O. We exist. We are your peers.Nat. Rev. Mater. 2020; 5: 783-784Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar). More recently, 10,234 of our faculty colleagues, including the authors here, signed a statement acknowledging the presence of systemic racism in academia (Barber et al., 2020Barber P.H. Hayes T.B. Johnson T.L. Márquez-Magaña L. 10,234 signatoriesSystemic racism in higher education.Science. 2020; 369: 1440-1441Crossref PubMed Google Scholar). However, the silence from NIH on this topic remains deafening. We ask: if racism is present in academia, how can it not be present in NIH grant review and research, which are performed by academics? NIH must break its cycle of denial, which in the words of leading antiracism scholar Ibram X. Kendi, is “the heartbeat of racism.” NIH must acknowledge that racism exists in order to build the foundation of understanding needed to overcome it. We urge NIH to release a public statement signed by the NIH director that:•Acknowledges that racism persists in the US academic research enterprise and that it must be expelled.•Describes metrics, a timeline, a plan for public progress updates, and funds committed for how NIH will build and fund a scientific workforce that reflects the diversity of the US population. Afterall, all Americans pay the tax dollars that fund NIH. Inequitable distribution of these dollars is discrimination.•Describes how NIH will invest in understanding the impact of racism in NIH grant review. For example, the NIH should study the cultural competency and unconscious bias harbored by its reviewers, differential review practices and funding disparity between NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and why “matching criteria” (Erosheva et al., 2020Erosheva E.A. Grant S. Chen M.C. Lindner M.D. Nakamura R.K. Lee C.J. NIH peer review: Criterion scores completely account for racial disparities in overall impact scores.Sci Adv. 2020; 6: eaaz4868Crossref PubMed Scopus (40) Google Scholar) affect the funding disparity gap. These studies should be done in parallel with and not before immediate dismantling of racial funding disparity using approaches such as those below. Interestingly, solutions to similar funding disparities have been demonstrated elsewhere at NIH. The best example is the NIH Early Stage Investigator (ESI) Program policy, which funds additional R01 applications from early-stage investigators with scores above the funding pay-line. This program has successfully “leveled the playing field” by supporting early-career scientists at a success rate similar to established investigators. We call attention to the first line of background of the NIH ESI Policy website, which states: “Fostering the creative discoveries and innovative research … requires NIH to take steps to promote the growth, stability, and diversity of the biomedical research workforce.”
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