ABOVE: Staff at genomics company 54gene work in a lab at the company’s Nigerian headquarters.
54GENE
Returning to his native Ghana after a postdoc in the United Kingdom, Yaw Bediako thought he had his future pretty much mapped out. “I felt everything was leading me to the usual model of academic research—full professor before I’m forty-five, with my own research group, a good grant portfolio, and students working for me,” the immunologist says.
But soon after his return in 2019, he began to feel stifled. Although his workplace, the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) in Accra, was one of the country’s foremost research institutions, its parent institution, the University of Ghana, had what Bediako experienced as cumbersome bureaucracy ill-suited for a hungry young scientist. And he describes a “crushing pressure” to obtain foreign research grants, which he says he needed to supplement his meager university ...
