Black Scientists Less Likely to Secure U.S. Grants, Study Finds

"Medical researchers who are black are about one-third less likely than their white colleagues to win grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, a study commissioned by the government found.

A white scientist had about a 29 percent chance of winning the institutes’ primary grant,

Black scientists comparable in experience, education and other characteristics had about a 19 percent chance"

“This situation is not acceptable,” Collins said in a conference call with reporters. The institutes have “failed to recruit the best and brightest minds” and black scientists face “an inequity of some sort in the ability to achieve grants from NIH.”

"The report’s findings reflect the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the field, said Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. At any meeting of scientists “you can identify very quickly that there is a dearth of diversity among the audience and in particular those presenting the important information,” he said in a telephone interview.

“This doesn’t necessarily impugn the NIH or the review process,” said Yancy, who is black and sits on grant oversight boards for the institutes. “We need more qualified black scientists entering the scientific workforce and we need greater representation of especially young black scientists at all focused research institutions.”

www.bloomberg.com...

This is once again the perversion of science by the politically correct class. There is absolutely no science behind the conclusions that the approval process contains any bias at all. Surely the subject matter is the most relevant item related to approval. If blacks were applying for grants for the same type of study and being turned down, there might be a problem, but to look merely at the approval rates does not.

They clearly have done that research, since had they done it and it further proved bias, it would have been included in the article.

The solution? Of course it is the same solution as it always is. Institute a quota to give research grants to blacks, independant of the topic they wish to research and its applicability to modern science. Give more quota based scholarships to minorities. Science and hard science at that being governed by psuedo sciences.

These grants can absolutely make or break a scientists career. The proper solution is obviously to go to a numerical application only and let the chips fall where they may. Of course, where they do do that and the disparity continue to exist, they would move to a quota system, so we might as well just go there now.