African Americans in the biomedical sciences: new solutions to old problems - BI Forum

Black Issues in Higher Education, Dec 5, 2002 by Quincy Quick

When I first embarked on a career as an African American biomedical scientist, I felt a personal obligation and responsibility to conduct science with and market science to other African Americans in a productive and beneficial way via research. However, my commitment to fulfill this personal prophecy has been tainted somewhat by two detracting social issues present among the small population of African American biomedical scientists in this country. These issues are: 1) the lack of scientific funding at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and 2) the social interaction (or lack of) among African American life/biomedical scientists.

Much has been mentioned of the fact that most HBCUs lack the resources to perform competitive scientific research due to a lack of scientific funding. However, less attention has been given to the issue of monopolization of scientific resources and funding by institutions such as Howard University (HU), Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) and Meharry Medical College (MMC). From 1998-2002 these three institutions combined have received a total of $174 million (MSM, $68.1 million; HU, $62.3 million; MMC, $43.6 million) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary funding agency for biomedical research in the United States. By no means is this a sufficient amount of scientific funding to support any biomedical research infrastructure when compared to most research institutions in this country.

Johns Hopkins University, for example, received $203 million in 2002 from NIH. However, the amount of funding received by Morehouse, Howard and Meharry is significant when compared to biomedical research funding received by other HBCUs. The caveat is that a great majority of this money awarded by NIH to these three institutions has been for programs such as MARC (Minority Access to Research Careers), MBRS (Minority Biomedical Research Support Awards), RISE (Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement), SCORE (Support of Continuous Research Excellence) and RCMIs (Research Centers in Minority Institutions). All these programs foster the development and enhancement of individuals (i.e. minority students and faculty) in the biomedical sciences at minority institutions.

By and large, HBCUs with RCMIs have received the preponderance of biomedical funding from NIH. Of the 100 plus HBCUs in this country, eight have RCMIs, which are institutions that have one or more underrepresented minority groups constituting 50 percent or greater of the student body and offer doctoral degrees in the health-related sciences. Out of the eight HBCUs with RCMIs, Meharry, Howard and Morehouse received 235 percent more funding from NIH than the other five combined between 1998-2002. How can NIH and the HBCU community justify such an imbalance of funding? But more importantly, what does this say to an African American wanting to pursue an education in the life/biomedical sciences at an HBCU? A novel idea would be to establish a funding consortium between the RCMI/HBCUs where a pool of money is set aside for competitive applications from scientists at less well-funded HBCUs, thus circumventing the monopolization of monetary resources by RCMI/HBCUs for the study of biomedical science.

In addition to the abysmal funding of HBCUs another problematic issue affecting African American scientists, in particular African American biomedical scientists, is that of social interaction.

The socialization of African Americans at scientific meetings and within majority research institutions is disappointing to say the least, from my experience. Why don't we interact with each other as we should in scientific settings? There is one plausible answer to this question. African American scientists do not want their social interactions with each other in the scientific environment to be erroneously perceived as having some sort of underlying affirmative action agenda. Such a perception perpetuates an old stereotype that minorities are intellectually inferior in the sciences as compared to their majority colleagues. Couple that with an underlying resentment from scientists toward African Americans and other minorities alike, possibly because of funded opportunities available for minorities in the life/biomedical sciences, and one can make a reasonable assumption as to why there is a lack of social interaction among African American scientists.

Although the reasoning provided here for the lack of social interaction among African American scientists is plausible, it is still inexcusable. Our interactions with each other as African American scientists are vital to our career development and community. A suggestion to this problem is to form a national organization that fosters scientific socialization among African American life/biomedical scientists on a professional and personal level. An organization of such magnitude would be invaluable for networking and providing a central location for the recruitment of Black biomedical scientists to HBCUs. There are two such minority organizations that serve similar roles: SACNAS, for Chicano and American Indian scientists, and on a smaller scale the NIH Black Scientists Association, which could provide a paradigm for a national organization for African American life/biomedical scientists.