“Racism in the Research Lab”
“One of us is a professor and neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University (soon to be the Chair of Neurologic Surgery at the Mayo Clinic), the other is a professor and a basic research scientist at Yale University.
Our minority trainees are exhausted. Training in biomedical research is taxing, but that is not what tires them. They are drained by the constant bombardment of narratives and stereotypes that compromise their ability to focus on their training. The prejudice is crushing their creativity and stifling their innovation. It is suffocating a generation of biomedical researchers.
In the biomedical sciences women earnmore than half of Ph.Ds. but represent just 33 percent of newly hired tenured and tenure-track professors. Minority scientists earn 10 percent of life science Ph.Ds. but represent only 2 percent of medical school basic science tenure/tenure-track faculty — a number unchanged since 1980…
conversations about why we lack diversity are frequently left to minority researchers. For others, these conversations are often uncomfortable, distracting, irrelevant, or a “waste of time.” Our academic centers offer few spaces where all participants of the biomedical workforce can have frank discussions about race and an ongoing legacy of racism in our institutions.”
