Where are the women? That's what some sci-entists are asking after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) picked nine men to receive the inaugural Director's Pioneer Award for innovative research (Science, 8 October, p. 220). The 5-year, $500,000-a-year awards are part of NIH's "roadmap" for increasing the payoff from the agency's $28 billion budget, and Director Elias Zerhouni has compared the winners to famed U.S. explorers Merri-weather Lewis and William Clark for their willingness "to explore uncharted territory." Within hours of the 29 September announcement, however, some researchers had begun to bristle at the gender imbalance in that first class of biomedical pioneers.
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