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 ...
