ABOVE: FLICKR, NIH IMAGE GALLERY
Black scientists have been significantly less likely than white scientists to win grants from the National Institutes of Health, a gap first quantified in a 2011 study published in Science. One reason for this funding disparity might be that in grant applications black scientists tend to propose research on topics that are less likely to be funded than other fields are, researchers reported in Science Advances yesterday (October 9).
In the latest study, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) analyzed roughly 157,000 funding applications from 2011 to 2015 and found that grant winners tended to study cellular and molecular science. Black scientists tended to focus on community- or population-scale clinical research. That difference in focus accounts for 20 percent of the funding disparity and explains why white scientists were awarded funding at a rate 1.7 times higher than black scientists were, the researchers ...
