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Medical Schools Are Starting to Diversify

June 17, 2019

But they’re learning hard lessons along the way. The numbers are encouraging, but only a start, educators say

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Medical Schools Are Starting to Diversify

Monday, June 17th, 2019

As medical students graduate this spring, American medical schools are celebrating the achievements of the nation’s newest doctors. They are also celebrating something else: an increase in the number of students from underrepresented populations.

From 2017 to 2018, the number of black students enrolled in U.S. medical schools rose by 4.6%, while the number of medical students identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native increased by 6.3%, according to data released by the Association of American Medical Colleges. It’s the latest evidence of a steady increase in the enrollment of nonwhite students over the past several years.

The numbers are encouraging, but only a start, educators say.

…continue reading ‘Medical Schools Are Starting to Diversify’

Thumb image via STAT Molly Ferguson for STAT

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STAT

How the Creators of a Database Are Stamping Out All-Male Panels

May 10, 2019

Developers of ‘Request a Woman Scientist’ hope that its 10,000 participants can help to boost gender diversity in scientific talks and in the media

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How the Creators of a Database Are Stamping Out All-Male Panels

Friday, May 10th, 2019

The number of participants listed in a database of female scientists has now reached 10,000, according to the site’s curators.

The creators of ‘Request a Woman Scientist’, which launched in January 2018, documented 7,500 researchers across 174 scientific disciplines and 133 countries in the database’s first 11 months, according to a study in PLoS Biology¹.

And the list continues to grow, says co-author Elizabeth McCullagh, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado–Anschutz in Aurora. McCullagh and her colleagues are members of 500 Women Scientists, a non-profit organization based in Boulder, Colorado, that is dedicated to making science more inclusive and accessible.

…continue reading ‘How the Creators of a Database Are Stamping Out All-Male Panels’

Thumbimage via Nature – Diane Keough/Getty

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Nature

Facing Up To Injustice in Genome Science

April 16, 2019

Researchers from under-represented groups are making genomics more inclusive by working with communities that have been overlooked or abused

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Facing Up To Injustice in Genome Science

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019

Néstor Ruiz Hernández has been fighting for recognition for decades. He grew up in a town near the Pacific coast of southern Mexico, where he and many others trace their ancestry to enslaved people brought across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa in the sixteenth century. They consider themselves Afromexican, but the group is not officially recognized by the Mexican government as a minority ethnic group. If it were, community members might receive government funding for cultural and public-health programmes. As it stands, they’re ignored.

Then in 2015, Ruiz Hernández met María Ávila, a population geneticist at Stanford University in California. Ávila wanted to analyse the DNA of people from Afromexican communities in Veracruz, Guerrero and Oaxaca states to identify the extent of their African ancestry. The project would prove challenging. When Ávila approached community members, she noticed that many couldn’t read or write — and not everyone identified as Afromexican. So she had to think carefully about how to report findings back to them.

…continue reading ‘Facing Up To Injustice in Genome Science’

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Nature

Whose History?

March 8, 2019

Scholars and students attempt to correct years of archival neglect at Johns Hopkins. After securing funding from the Berman Institute of Bioethics’ Exploration of Practical Ethics program, they reached out to existing organizations at the university, like the Black Faculty and Staff Association, to get their feedback

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Whose History?

Friday, March 8th, 2019

Flip through the institutional archives at the Johns Hopkins University, and you might notice something’s missing.

Save for a few examples, Johns Hopkins’s catalog of its own history is “very administrative, bureaucratic, and elite,” said N.D.B. Connolly, an associate professor of history. Evidence of the black people who’ve toiled at the university is largely concealed, he said. There’s mention of Vivien Theodore Thomas, a surgical technician who helped develop a treatment for cyanotic heart disease, and of Minnie Hargrove, a longtime assistant to university presidents. But for the most part, though they breathed life into the institution with their daily labor, Connolly said, African-American employees are invisible in the record books.

Now, a cohort of scholars and students are correcting what they see as systemic archival neglect. Through a project called “Housing Our Story: Towards Archival Justice for Black Baltimore,” they’re building a new collection of oral interviews with African-American employees at Johns Hopkins. They’ve asked workers to detail minute aspects of their lives on and off campus. And in asking the small questions, the scholars have touched on a big one. Whose history gets told in higher education, and why?

…continue reading ‘Whose History?’

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Chronicle of Higher Education

Midday on Ethics with Dr. Jeffrey Kahn: Diversity in Clinical Trials

June 14, 2017

Midday’s Tom Hall talks with Dr. Jeffrey Kahn about clinical trials and diversity. Why is so much medical research still done with white subjects — and more often with men rather than women — and what are the consequences of that, particularly for women and people of color?

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Midday on Ethics with Dr. Jeffrey Kahn: Diversity in Clinical Trials

Wednesday, June 14th, 2017

LISTEN NOW

Today, Tom talks with bioethicist Dr. Jeffrey Kahn about clinical trials and diversity. Why is so much medical research still done with white subjects — and more often with men rather than women — and what are the consequences of that, particularly for women and people of color?

If clinical trials are done by examining only parts of our society, what does that mean for the efficacy of the findings, and how reliably can those results be extrapolated to apply to the rest of the population?

And what are the consequences when that research is then used to develop treatments? Will they be effective for everyone, or primarily just for the group at the heart of the research?

To wit: African Americans have a far greater incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease and a far lower rate of inclusion in clinical trials. What, if any, is the connection between those two realities?

Dr. Jeffrey Kahn is the Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and he stops by Midday from time to time to talk about how ethicists help us frame complex questions like these.

…More

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WYPR

NIH Isn’t Ensuring That Clinical Trials Account For Different Outcomes By Sex

December 4, 2015

Twenty-two years after Congress ordered the National Institutes of Health to include women in the clinical trials it funds to test medical treatments, women make up more than half the participants in those trials

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NIH Isn’t Ensuring That Clinical Trials Account For Different Outcomes By Sex

Friday, December 4th, 2015

That’s the good news. Unfortunately, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, NIH can’t tell whether researchers are also examining outcomes by sex to see whether men and women are affected differently by what’s being tested.

That’s important because, for example, a drug or dosage appropriate for a man might be less effective or even lead to harm when taken by a woman.

This KHN story also ran in The Washington Post. It can be republished for free (details).

But NIH does not make available usable information on which studies have separated results by sex and what those results are. NIH “does not maintain, analyze or report summary data to oversee whether analysis of outcomes by sex are planned or conducted,” the report found.

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KHN

Women, Minorities Still Underrepresented in Medical Specialties

August 25, 2015

Too few women and minorities are entering certain medical specialties in the U.S., researchers say

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Women, Minorities Still Underrepresented in Medical Specialties

Tuesday, August 25th, 2015

Diversifying the physician workforce may be key to addressing health disparities and inequities, Dr. Curtiland Deville of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who worked on the study, said in an email.

“Minority physicians continue to provide the majority of care for underserved and non-English speaking populations,” Dr. Deville added.

Yet “in no specialties . . . were the percentages of black or Hispanic trainees comparable with the representation of these groups in the US population,” he and his colleagues wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.

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Reuters

Medical Schools Are Starting to Diversify

Medical Schools Are Starting to Diversify

How the Creators of a Database Are Stamping Out All-Male Panels

How the Creators of a Database Are Stamping Out All-Male Panels

Facing Up To Injustice in Genome Science

Facing Up To Injustice in Genome Science

Whose History?

Whose History?

Midday on Ethics with Dr. Jeffrey Kahn: Diversity in Clinical Trials

Midday on Ethics with Dr. Jeffrey Kahn: Diversity in Clinical Trials

NIH Isn’t Ensuring That Clinical Trials Account For Different Outcomes By Sex

NIH Isn’t Ensuring That Clinical Trials Account For Different Outcomes By Sex

Women, Minorities Still Underrepresented in Medical Specialties

Women, Minorities Still Underrepresented in Medical Specialties

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