What Science Is Missing

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The big picture: Latino and Black students leave science degree programs at higher rates than white students and receive fewer Ph.D.s.

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• People of color are underrepresented on university faculties and, in some fields, they are funded at rates lower than their white colleagues.

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• {snip} Indigenous knowledge about the history of repeated earthquakes predates scientific records in some places and can be used to reconstruct how often events occur, says geologist Rachel Bernard of Amherst College.

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• Population genetics, which identifies the genetic differences among racial and ethnic groups, has a dark past in eugenics. Today, it aims to link those differences to a predisposition for disease.
• That has produced a dominant fundamental framework of the biological world as one driven “strongly and preeminently by genes,” with less incorporation of experience, culture and systemic forces, says C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor at Yale University who studies disease evolution and ecology.
• “It isn’t flatly and flagrantly racist,” he said. “But the perspective shakes out of a racist view of the world.”

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• The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would authorize the National Science Foundation, which administers about a quarter of the total federal funding for basic science at U.S. universities and colleges, to lead on bringing more diversity to science.
• A program founded by Vashan Wright of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, called Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE), aims to educate geoscientists about racism and develop policies to fight it in a field that has been historically among the least diverse in science.

Between the lines: Improving representation alone won’t solve racial injustices in science, Ogbunu and Bernard say.

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• There is a view of science advancing through the work of lone geniuses, typically white men, when in reality it’s a highly collaborative endeavor.
• “If you just put butts in seats, you are going to create person-of-color versions of those scientists, and that isn’t what you want. You want to change the whole thing,” says Ogbunu.