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Biomedical research scientists send proposals to the National Institutes of Health in the hopes of being funded. A recent study of this process, published in Science by the University of Kansas’s Donna Ginther and her colleagues, revealed that proposals from black applicants are significantly less likely to be funded than proposals from white applicants. This disparity was apparent even when controlling for the applicant’s educational background, training, publication record, previous research awards and employer characteristics.
The authors conclude that racial bias is not a likely explanation for these findings because the race of the applicants is not provided to the reviewers. In an accompanying article in Science, several prominent black biomedical scientists also express doubts about racial bias, concluding that the NIH peer review grades only the science. But what, aside from bias, can explain the racial discrepancy? The study’s lead author admits she has no idea. Understanding what causes bias is essential for developing a program to address it.
One possible explanation is that NIH peer review is structured to promote bias not so much against a racial group as against the unfamiliar and unconventional. Expert reviewers are asked to provide detailed assessments of long, highly complex, extraordinarily technical documents, and they are given little time to do it. The reviewers are usually conversant with the specific area of research that the proposal addresses, which means that they come to the application with preconceived notions. Short deadlines encourage them to rely on established knowledge and sensibilities. In this scenario, reviewers are more comfortable with proposals from scientists they are familiar with—scientists they either know or know of.
Black researchers, at least in the biomedical sciences, are often unfamiliar to reviewers, and their ideas may tend to be unconventional. This situation is in part because of their typical background. For instance, blacks and whites have different prevalence rates for some illnesses, such as end-stage kidney disease and malignant melanoma. Therefore, blacks may propose studies involving a different set of diseases than whites do.
Breaking into the ranks of funded investigators supported by the NIH is increasingly difficult, the data show. The average age of recipients of a first major grant from the NIH had climbed to 43 years in 2007, from 35 years in 1970. Black scientists also tend to make up smaller and smaller minorities in higher branches of science. In the period Ginther and her colleagues studied, blacks submitted 1.4 percent of total proposals compared with 69.9 percent for whites.
This statistic conforms with data collected by the National Science Foundation that indicate only 2.6 percent of doctoral-level biological scientists in the U.S. in 2006 were black. My sense is that the underrepresentation of blacks in biomedical research is even more definitive at the upper echelons: department chairs, research award winners, editorial board members, study section reviewers and members of the National Academy of Sciences. Because blacks have not shared proportionally in the power structure, it stands to reason that funding has been uneven, too.
NIH directors have recognized their failure to fund unusual proposals and have initiated awards, such as the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and Pioneer Award Program, in response. These steps, though, have not gone far enough. One solution might be for the NIH to establish multiple, distinct mechanisms for making funding decisions. A lottery, for instance, would not result in racial disparity in grant awards. Neither would having rigorous sampling procedures for reviewers or peer review by crowdsourcing. Supplementing traditional peer review with new ways of screening grant applications may be the only way to eliminate the racial gap once and for all.
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21 Comments
Add CommentAuthors submit their photos along with academic submissions to the NIH? Are Korean, Japanese, and Chinese people also under represented in the NIH grants?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe authors imply that some branches of science are "higher" than others. What aspects of a given area of study would make it "higher" than others and what would this difference in altitude mean to us?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would seem to me that making peer review "blind" to race is just the point to avoid prejudice. Kaplan gives no evidence that it is due to "unconventional" ideas. Does unconventional make them better and deserving of higher scoring? There may be an occasional jewel mixed in with wacky ideas -- but most are just wacky. Do we have to do an analysis on every possible subgroup of researchers and find convoluted means to try to make them all come out "equal"? This post hoc egalitarianism is just --- wacky!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is en excellent example of PC commentary!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnly 1.4% of submitted proposals were used to generate a skin color bias conclusion of prejudice by supposedly white establishment peers. The author's awareness of the ludicrous opinion is the slyly inserted solution - a lottery. Assumed that it may attract more blacks?
Perhaps next month your editors could ask for an opinionated piece with bar graph of same data regarding height of researcher, possible title 'Science is not Normal'.
This seems to be very typical of the news and periodicals these days. If you want to shake things up and put everyone on the defensive, yell Racial Bias. Kaplan’s article is void of any proof of bias, it fact, it accidentally justifies NIH's approach as being racially independent. Kaplan is trying to stir up something that really doesn't exist - just yell racial prejudice - and things stop and people start looking for fixes even when something isn’t broke. Since when is pure science antiquated? My friends, who have participated in NIH programs, have also failed on many submissions. They win some and lose some. I can't believe that Scientific American would stoop so low in their articles as to print this Kaplan accusation which is based on conjecture and emotion with no visible or real evidence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe study's lead author won't venture an opinion about the cause of the racial discrepancy? Imagine that. Luckily the argument from ignorance saves the day. If she won't offer an explanation, racial bias must be the answer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe term race, in refering to human sub divisions, is relatively recent. Blumenbach, the father of Anthropology coined it after Darwin published the Origin of Species. He named the five "races" according to their color. We know that human species who developed in the Equatorial regions have more melanin in their skin cotributin to skin color. Other than this, we are all of "one blood" as the bible says. Genesis use the word "family" in describing the distribution of humans to the world. We should do the same. David Kaplan says, "One possible explanation is that NIH peer review is structured to promote bias, not so much against a racial group, as against the unfamiliar and unconventional." It's the first law of nature - survival. We trust the familiar, first and forenost example, family's facial features learned from our mother's breas. And tend to judge others by other standards we learned from nurture or environment. David Kaplan's last line in article is my prayer,"to eliminate the racial gap once and for all." But, I won't hold my breath.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere comes the race card again during an election year. This rag fails to realize, as this article did, that we have a black president that was elected by the majority of Americans. I voted for Obama because I thought he was the smartest of the candidates and I thought he would make an excellent president...and he has. You did notice that I said that I thought that Obama was the smartest of all the candidates? Do think that also could apply to issuing grants to the scientific community and it has nothing to do with race?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you replace "biomedical research scientists sending proposals" with "dogs doing tricks", "funding" with "doggie biscuits", "black applicants" with "Basset Hounds" and "white applicants" with "Australian Shepherds", there'll be no controversy at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI object to the use of terms such as "race" in the article. Everybody knows human "races" do not exist except as social constructs divorced from physical reality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also object to the term "breed", when discussing domestic canines. Dogs are people too.
Why does the NIH even know the colour of the applicants? It seems that should be completely irrelevant in a decision of whether to make a grant. If they don't know the race of the submitting applicant they shouldn't be able to consciously or subconsciously make a racist decision.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow, I suppose names can be a giveaway. Name your child "La"-something or something-"equa" are you are submitting your child to a lifetime of extra racism.
Personally, I highly doubt that there is a conscious effort to be racist here- but perhaps it comes down to language used in writing up the proposals. Computers can pick out with quite high certainty the demographics of people based on their writing styles. It could be that authors of different races use some words slightly differently- and a white-dominated NIH would be more culturally biased towards picking out language which sounds more like their own... not that they are consciously picking it that way for that reason. People are known to associate more and relate better to others who are more similar to themselves than dissimilar.
well said - it's time to move past putting all issues into the context of racism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe comments above make me wonder if anyone actually read the article, or if they just saw the word "race" and went into righteous indignation mode. To summarize:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) Proposals African-American researchers are approved at demonstrably lower rates proposals of white researchers regardless of quality or qualifications.
2)NIH does not know the race of researchers.
3)African-American researchers tend to study diseases that affect African-Americans
THEREFORE: NIH is disproportionately under-funding research into diseases that tend to affect minorities and is therefore under-serving the citizens that fund it. Just as a panel of male doctors might prioritize prostate cancer research over breast cancer research, it shouldn't be surprising that a panel of all white doctors prioritizes diseases that mostly affect white people over those that affect mostly minorities.
No one is condemning white doctors, it's the disproportional allocation of funds that's an issue. I'm sure you wouldn't be happy if someone decided that we should ignore Tay-Sachs because it only affects white people. Similarly we shouldn't ignore diseases that primarily affect minorities. Our efforts should go to combating diseases based on the impact on our society as a whole, not toward one demographic over another.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould the problem be one of dialect or other language considerations? Such issues are not always reduced by education, particularly when used by a native-born speaker/writer who may not, as in "My Fair Lady," been asked by their peers to conform to pro forma standards.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCurrent (2010) U.S. demographics
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhite (63.7%)
Latino (16.3%)
Black/African-American (12.2%)
Asian/etc. (4.7%)
Two or more (1.9%)
Indian/Native (0.7%)
Hawian/Pacific (0.2%)
Other (0.2%)
Whites are barely over represented. It sounds more like somebody else is even more over represented the Whites.
@Vaivars
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe you have misinterpreted the article. They looked at more than 1.4% of the submitted proposals.
Is the representation for afro americans in any field always supposed to mimic their population percentage? Clearly this is not the case with marathon running or rape and homicide. perhaps this issue can be decided by disparate impact legislation. Also very amusing that in attempting to bend over backwards to be enlightened and pc the author suggests that there is negro science (unconventional, unfamiliar) much like the nazi's decried enstein's physics as jewish physics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have been a participant in one way or another with STEM most of my life and the bias is obvious. Even programs that have been proven to work for recruiting Blacks have been ignored by white researchers and "Happy Negroes" they allow to get tenure. I know from personal experience that when we earn our PhDs (even with distinction), we are often stereotyped by other races, even by dumb white PhD students. Everybody knows this has been going on for years. 400 years of racial thought and the "Bell Curve" effect is still being perpetuated. We all know the reason so let's stop the bull!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince you asked, in my uneducated opinion, the higher sciences are experimental sciences in which hypothesis can be falsified: physics, chemistry, experimental biology, etc. These days people think that any subject which utilizes expensive technical equipment is "science." Nothing regarding history or the arts is "science" and this includes prehistoric studies and observations which can not be duplicated or repeated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt least on the Left Coast, I think another few generations and the largest majority will be people with a nice, brownish color. The old social prohibitions are gone, "black" is a self-designated characteristic in many cases, and people are mating on the basis of IQ, education, and ambition - or the lack there of.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fictional "middle class" bubble has popped. We are self-segregating into a blue/white collar class and a leader/manager class.