NIH Told to Get Serious About Giving Minorities a Hand: A National Academies' report says that these controversial programs can't be assessed without better data—and better management

摘要

After more than 3 decades of trying to increase the number of minority biomedical researchers, officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have a raft of anecdotal evidence that its training programs are working. One favorite success story isErich Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who, as an African-American student from Harlem, was supported by some of those programs and who in 2002 was named the nation's top young scientist. The program managers themselves exemplify NIH's goal of diversifying the nation's bio-medical research workforce. Clifton Poodry, head of the division of Minority Opportunities in Research at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian Reservation in Buffalo, New York, for example, and spent 2 decades as a successful academic researcher before joining NIH.