Issue | November 2006 | November 2006 | The Scientist Magazine®

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Diversity: Some Myths, and the Realities

Myth: Diversity is good for business. Reality: It's a bit more complicated than that. Research from MIT's Thomas Kochan showed-controversially-that ethnic and gender diversity can harm team and company performance if they're not managed effectively. (see "Diversity: The New Business Case") Myth: Blacks and Latinos don't consider careers in researc

FROM THE FIELD

FROM THE FIELD There are no easy answers when it comes to building a truly diverse workforce in the life science arena. Many feel we've made little progress toward that goal during the last few decades, rightfully pointing to the continued disparity in representation, inc

The Scientific Approach

By Clifton A. Poodry It's time to apply our scientific thinking to designing diversity programs. Here's how. Despite our scientific training, when we think about ways to build a more diverse biomedical research workforce, we may base our ideas on sentiments and preconceptions rather than the best evidence. One way to avoid this is to approa

Determining Program Efficacy

Determining Program Efficacy © PETER M. FISHER / CORBIS In 2004, NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) launched a research initiative to understand the efficacy of interventions intended to increase the number of minorities in bio

Losing Ground?

By Damaris Christensen Losing Ground? Educators fear small gains of affirmative action are under threat from reverse-discrimination lawsuits. In 2003, in its first ruling on affirmative action since 1978, the Supreme Court affirmed in its University of Michigan Law School decision that diversity in the classroom, in and of itself, is a compelling state inter

The Government's Assessment

The Government's Assessment In the current mixed legal climate, where diversity programs have been ruled constitutional and litigation continues over their appropriate boundaries, federal agencies are by and large continuing to fund programs aimed at increasing participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by underrepresented minorit

The Government's Assessment

Show Me the Money

1 Nothing much had changed by 2004, when another study of faculty in academic medicine showed that even when controlling for total publications, years of seniority, and hours worked per week, female faculty members were paid on average $12,000 less than their male peers. 2 The gender wage gap is frequently attributed to women taking time off to have children or working fewer hours a week to take care of their families. There may be s

Continental Shift

By Anne Harding Diversity efforts are unexplored territory for many European nations. The November 2005 riots across France made it clear why efforts to diversify Europe's workforce are important, and why these efforts may pose a particular challenge here. Frustrated at being shut out of the nation's economic and educational

Small World

By Ed Silverman Small World Globalization means broader definition of diversity, and broader opportunities. Weiyi Zheng says he loves his career in the New Jersey suburbs, but he wouldn't turn down an opportunity to return to his native China. And thanks to the increasing globalization of the pharma industry workforce, his employer just might give him the ch

The Feminine Touch

By Karen Pallarito The Feminine Touch Women are joining forces to invest in life science ventures, and getting results. "We feel there's a huge opportunity to be able to support the initiatives that these women are going to want to take in terms of entrepreneurship and growing businesses." — Donna

What We Can Learn from the Elite Controllers

What We Can Learn from the ELITE CONTROLLERS Infected nonprogressors are providing clues to the control, and potentially the eradication, of HIV By Gail Dutton FEATURE ARTICLES 25 Years with HIV ARTICLE EXTRAS Jeff Getty: Lessons in desperate measuresHow a risky experiment led to a new understanding of HIV HIV Shows ItselfA 1981 report in the MMWR marks the beginning The Impact of HIVIts progressions, 1981-2006 and beyond Why Monkeys Block HIVOld world monkeys don't

PROFILES

Profiles In this section we showcase ten exceptional life scientists from underrepresented groups in academia and industry who recount their lives and career paths. Their accomplishments, as unique as their histories, demonstrate first-hand how diversity enriches not only a specific discipline or field, but all of society. There is a sense of excitem

Benjamin Cuker

By E.J. Mundell Benjamin Cuker Professor, Marine and Environmental Science, Hampton University COURTESY OF BENJAMIN CUKER Benjamin Cuker was one of six white kids in his graduating class at Detroit's Mumford High. "And Mumford was putting more kids into colleg

Lyndon Mitnaul

By Kirsten Weir Lyndon Mitnaul Research Fellow, Division of Cardiovascular Diseases, Merck Research Laboratories COURTESY OF LYNDON MITNAUL Lyndon Mitnaul remembers falling in love. "Around tenth grade I took my first chemistry class," he says, "and I fell in love with science."

Sonya Summerour Clemmons

By Karen Pallarito Sonya Summerour Clemmons Director of Business Development, MediVas, LLCBusiness Founder and Owner, SSC Enterprises © BLACK ENTERPRISE MAGAZINE Growing up in Gainesville, Ga., Sonya Summerour Clemmons could have easily made excuses not t

Proteomics: Promise and Problems

Proteomics: Promise and Problems By Jennifer H. Miller and Barnett S. Kramer FEATURE ARTICLE A Revolutionary Approach to Biomarker DiscoveryEMANUEL PETRICOIN and LANCE LIOTTA describe how their methods for discovery could solve the seeming end to the pipeline of disease detection biomarkers ARTICLE EXTRAS INFOGRAPHIC: The Peptidome Hypothesis:What does a disease signature look like in the blood? Serum Proteomics ScrutinizedSELDI-TOF still struggles to prove its worth as a clinic

Gwen D. Fewell, 40

By Kirsten Weir Gwen D. Fewell, 40 Open Biosystems, Huntsville, Alabama; RNAi Product Manager COURTESY OF OPEN BIOSYSTEMS EDUCATION: PhD in neuroscience from Florida State University HOMETOWN: Bombay, India WORK/RESEARCH: Fewell is in charge of developin

Sebastián Vélez, 33

By Chandra Shekhar Sebastián Vélez, 33 Third-year graduate student at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University COURTESY OF SEBASTIÁN VÉLEZ HOMETOWN: Bayamon, Puerto Rico WORK/RESEARCH: Vélez's research is centered o

Maria Thelma Ocampo, 29

By Juhi Yajnik Maria Thelma Ocampo, 29 Postdoc, London Research Institute COURTESY OF MARIA OCAMPO HOMETOWN: Manila, Philippines, until she was 8 years old, then Arleta, Calif. WORK/RESEARCH: Ocampo works on DNA packaging and the cohesion complex that holds sis

Andrea Stith, 33

By Juhi Yajnik Andrea Stith, 33 Program Officer for educational grant programs, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) COURTESY OF COLELLA PHOTOGRAPHY EDUCATION: PhD in biophysics, University of Virginia HOMETOWN: West Point, NY WORK/RESEARC

Toolkit

Do you have the right tools to create or reinvigorate a diversity initiative that's effective? Who is (or should be) responsible for its success and how do you measure that success? This section offers proven approaches to meeting these common challenges - in both business and academic settings - shared by those who've already experienced success. There's also a new business case for diversity that s

Shared Challenges, Shared Solutions

1 Another stereotype claims that inadequate K-12 education in the United States is to blame for students' lack of interest in pursuing college-level science study. Data from our own and other institutions indicate that students of color and from all educational and income levels enroll in introductory courses in biology and chemistry (the disciplines on which we have focused) at representative levels. Yet they disengage during their earliest experi

Hitting the Ground Running

By E.J. Mundell Hitting the Ground Running Summer 'boot camp' and early lab experience give Meyerhoff scholars a head start on the road to research. The Meyerhoffs (bottom right) with UMBC President and Mrs. Hrabowski, III, and Meyerhoff graduates. COURTESY OF JIM BURGER

Getting Results

By Charles Q. Choi Getting Results You've started a diversity program. But how do you know if it's having any effect? Harvard Medical School has offered a voluntary diversity-training program every year since 2000. Immediately after each session, organizers asked how much volunteers liked learning about the importance of diversity for organizations. People

Who's in Charge?

By Charles Q. Choi Who's in Charge? What it takes to manage diversity. © JENNIFER TRENCHARD Ten years ago, a chief diversity officer or vice president of diversity was almost unheard of, but today about one in five Fortune 1000 companies have diversity ma

Resources

Resources More Information The Athena Project www.athenaproject.org.uk Joint government/university effort to promote women's participation in science, engineering and technology in the UK. European Commission Science and Society

The Scientist 2006 Life Sciences Salary Survey

The Life Sciences Salary Survey Compensation soars as demand for highly-skilled professionals heats up. By Karen PallaritoRelated Articles: Salary by Highest Degree Earned Salary by Area of Specialization Salary by Gender Salary by Ethnicity Salary Map: salaries and costs of living in 19 US metropolitan areas Salary Charts Salary by Job Activity, type of research, age, and job title 2006 Salary Survey Methodology Salary Survey ArchiveThe que

2006 Salary Survey Methodology

The Life Sciences Salary Survey: Methodology By Karen PallaritoRelated Articles: Salary by Highest Degree Earned Salary by Area of Specialization Salary by Gender Salary by Ethnicity Salary Map: salaries and costs of living in 19 US metropolitan areas Salary Charts Salary by Job Activity, type of research, age, and job title 2006 Salary Survey Salary Survey ArchiveThe survey, ?Compensation of Life Scientists in the USA,? was conducted by Abbot

Diversity Supplement 2007: Cobbs Creek Slideshow

var FO = { movie:"http://images.the-scientist.com/supplements/20061101/xmlSlideshow.swf", width:"577", height:"600", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Cobbs Creek Slideshow Please download the Adobe Flash Player to view this content: To learn more about the center, visit CobbsCreek.org

Contributors

Lance Liotta (top) and Emanuel Petricoin (bottom) made a splash in 2002 when they used mass spec techniques coupled with pattern matching software to identify proteomic signatures indicative of ovarian cancer. Now co-directors of the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine at George Mason University, they continue searching for diagnostic signals in blood serum, which they write about on page 32. "In some ways we're even more optimistic as to the potential and

Editorial

End this Stem Cell Racket

Once the Bush Administration policy is fixed, there's another problem that's at least as large.

Mail

Letters

Are we training too many scientists? It's not that we're training too many scientists,1,2 but that we are not training too many scientists well. My institution receives hundreds of applications for faculty position openings, but most of them do not even make the first cut. I believe that this is because many principal investigators (PIs) are irresponsibly allowing people to earn PhDs without really deserving them. In the lab where I got my PhD, of every four students who started a

Notebook

Snyder, sludge fighter

Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER" />Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER It was sometime in the late 1990s that Caroline Snyder first read news reports about a couple in Greenland, NH, who were blaming recycled sewage sludge - also known as biosolids - for the death of their son. Although she was an environmental scientist, Snyder didn't really know anything about sludge, but the story piqued her interest because she had recently retired to New Hampshi

Making science fresh

On a brisk August morning in southern Australia, 16 recent PhD graduates and postdocs from around the country are sitting in a windowless room, fretting about the way science is portrayed in the media. They're attending a weeklong media-training boot camp, and the fraying of their nerves is palpable as they talk about what worries them most: the superficial way their research might be handled, overhyping, and how to handle difficult questions. "What's the point of science communicati

Arabidopsis in space

When the space shuttles Discovery and Atlantis blasted off in the direction of the International Space Station (ISS) this year, passengers of a more botanical variety vastly outnumbered the seven astronauts on board. Secured in small seed cassettes, some 1600 seeds of the cress species, Arabidopsis thaliana, took the flight for a research project designed to help tease out the tropic influences of gravity and light on plant growth, while perhaps helping to find a way to grow crops for lo

White Paper

The New Federalism in Life Sciences Policy

What states and the Federal government should do to ensure progress in the life sciences.

Column

Working With Stem Cells? Pay Up

What the Wisconsin patent stranglehold means for researchers.

Saving Bison, Losing Tigers

Wildlife conservation approaches to anthrax and poaching have divergent results.

Six Things You Won't Find in the MAQC

The MicroArray Quality Control consortium released gigabytes of data and two exhaustively characterized RNAs, but little actionable guidance.

Profile

The Fast Track to Success

Laura Landweber was 33 when she received tenure at Princeton. Oxytricha, beware: She's got a lot of science ahead of her.

Books etc.

On the Trail of a Point Mutation

The discovery of a blood-cancer gene raises tantalizing questions

Hot Paper

SNPs for diabetes

The paper: K. Silander et al., "Genetic variation near the hepatocyte nuclear factor-4á gene predicts susceptibility to type 2 diabetes," Diabetes, 53:1141-9, 2004. (Cited in 68 papers) The finding: A team of Finnish and US researchers, led by University of Michigan professor Michael Boehnke, found that several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) around the transcription factor, hepatocyte nuclear factor-4á (HNF4A), were associated with dia

Why hormone therapy fails

Finasteride, an antiandrogen Credit: © 2003 DIVISION OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION, AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY" />Finasteride, an antiandrogen Credit: © 2003 DIVISION OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION, AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY The paper: C. Chen et al., "Molecular determinants of resistance to antiandrogen therapy," Nat Med, 10:33-9, 2004. (Cited in 176 papers) The finding: Using gene-expression profiling, Charles Sawyers then at the University of California, Los Angel

BioBusiness

Getting Your Gates

How one company used the growing nonprofit funding pot to jump-start its development program, and how you can do the same.

Pulse Oximeter

Classified Ad Confidential

To attract not just more candidates but the right ones, pay attention to the basics and follow these tips.

Russian Scientists Test New Merit Bonus System

Russian scientists are testing a proposed system to bring a more merit-based approach to the doling out of funds supplementing basic salaries. The effort by the Russian Ministry of Science is meant to address criticism of the current system, "a crazy combination of uniformly low pay with distribution of extras by the will of the management," says Mikhail Gelfand, a scientist at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow. Paychecks for Russian post-docs are about 5,000-

Third-tier Grads Do Better Than Mid-ranked Grads

Graduating from a mid-ranked university may put you at even more of a disadvantage than finishing a life sciences doctorate at a lower-ranked school, according to research by Laurel Smith-Doerr, an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University. Smith Doerr sampled 2,062 life scientists who were on average 5 years out of grad school. As she reports in the June issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, those who had completed their PhDs at elite universities were mu

Making Better Leaders Out of Alpha Males and Females

Credit: © JAMES PAULS" /> Credit: © JAMES PAULS Ellen McMahon was a rising star as leader of the cardiovascular research group at Pharmacia before its merger with Pfizer. But she started to get grumbling from her team, and talks about management style from her bosses. McMahon says her staff "was struggling with my leadership, they didn?t feel involved in making decisions. I was more in the mode of driving towards goals rather than considering team dynamics." McMahon, an acknowledg

Foundations

The Discovery of Estrogen Receptor β

In situ hybridization showing ERβ expression in prostatic epithelium (near left) and ovarian granulosa cells (far left). Below is a notebook page describing the phenotypes of ERβ knockout mice. Credit: IN SITU IMAGES: © 1996 THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES / NOTEBOOK: COURTESY OF JAN-ǺKE GUSTAFSSON" />In situ hybridization showing ERβ expression in prostatic epithelium (near left) and ovarian granulosa cells (far left). Below is a notebook page describing the phenotyp