Analysis: Asian Researchers Scarce Among Biomedical Award Winners

Multiple prestigious US biomedical research awards have rarely or never been granted to a scientist with Asian ancestry, illustrating racial bias within American research societies and institutions, a researcher argues.

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A commentary article published Thursday (February 3) in Cell makes the data-driven argument that scientists of Asian descent are routinely overlooked for prominent biomedical research prizes, despite collectively making numerous valuable contributions to their respective research fields.

Yuh Nung Jan, a molecular physiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, gathered data on 15 prestigious biomedical prizes and awards conferred by US organizations and tallied how many winners were Asian, both over the course of the past decade and since each prize was first given, and uncovered what he describes as a dismaying underrepresentation of Asian researchers.

According to the paper, Jan adopted the National Institutes of Health’s definition of Asian: “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.”

A table summarizing Jan’s ...

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    Dan Robitzski

    Dan is a News Editor at The Scientist. He writes and edits for the news desk and oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. He has a background in neuroscience and earned his master's in science journalism at New York University.
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