Re-Engineering Libraries: Racial bias revealed in NIH funding grants from Daily Kos

Racial bias revealed in NIH funding grants

by Laurence Lewis

Reposted from Laurence Lewis by Laurence Lewis

NIH Logo (Wikimedia Commons)

If any aspect of our society had evolved beyond racial bias one would have expected it to be the world of science, particularly government-funded science. Not so. A new study published in Science Magazine begins with this extract:

We investigated the association between a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 applicant’s self-identified race or ethnicity and the probability of receiving an award by using data from the NIH IMPAC II grant database, the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and other sources. Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally likely to be funded regardless of race, we find that Asians are 4 percentage points and black or African-American applicants are 13 percentage points less likely to receive NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared with whites. After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding. Our results suggest some leverage points for policy intervention.

The study was conducted by Donna K. Ginther of the Department of Economics and Center for Science, Technology & Economic Policy, Institute for Policy & Social Research, at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Her team included Raynard Kington, who was deputy director of the NIH and is currently president of Grinnell College, and Walter Schaffer, who is senior scientific adviser for extramural research at the NIH. They reviewed 83,188 applications for funding from 40,069 unique investigators during the 2000-2006 Fiscal Years, and controlled for several possible explanatory factors.

Throughout the education pipeline, blacks are less likely to graduate from high school, attend college and major in biomedical science, and obtain a Ph.D. in biomedical science. Nevertheless, upon entering the biomedical academic career track, black and white faculty members are equally likely to be tenured at institutions that grant doctorates and at Research I institutions. (3). Given our previous results, we expected to find that black scientists who made it to the stage of principal investigator would have similar chances of obtaining NIH funding, all other things being equal. We find it troubling that the typical measures of scientific achievement—NIH training, previous grants, publications, and citations—do not translate to the same level of application success across race and ethnic groups. Our models controlled for demographics, education and training, employer characteristics, NIH experience, and research productivity, yet they did not explain why blacks are 10 percentage points less likely to receive R01 funding compared with whites.
Although our models do not fully explain the funding gap, the greatest differences between blacks and whites that we observed were in the effect of previous training and the probability of receiving a priority score. Although more research is needed to discern the basis for the award differences, it is possible that cumulative advantage may be involved (15). Small differences in access to research resources and mentoring during training or at the beginning of a career may accumulate to become large between-group differences. This suggests that more analysis on the impact of NIH training may be warranted. In addition, further research into the review process could help to understand why variables that increased the likelihood of an application receiving a priority score for the full sample did not have the same impact for applications from black investigators.

More bluntly, as reported by Mará Rose Williams of the Kansas City Star:

“It wasn’t just a gap, it was a huge unexplained gap despite the best efforts of me and my research team trying to pound it into submission,” Ginther said.

The only good news also comes from Williams:

NIH Director Francis Collins told Science magazine he was “deeply dismayed” by the study findings. “This is simply unacceptable,” he said.
“As uncomfortable as it makes us, we must acknowledge that the differences observed may reflect biases that are insidiously interwoven into the basic fabric of the merit/reward system of science,” Collins said.

Institutional racism in the heart of academic science. And while Collins no doubt will conduct his own investigations, this also demands attention from the White House and Congress.