NIH Responds to Racial Disparity in Minority Grant Numbers

The National Institutes of Health shocked itself in 2011 with a study that found a wide race-based variance in its grant awards.

One immediate question was whether the disparity—black scientists were found to be getting less than 1 percent of the main categories of NIH grants—was due primarily to bias in the NIH’s grant-review system or to the quality and quantity of grant applications from black researchers.

The nation’s largest funder of university research is not ruling out the former. But after two years of planning its response, the NIH is now moving ahead with a strategy aimed more at strengthening the nation’s cohort of minority scientists than at rooting out any internal biases against them.

In its most substantive reply to the 2011 study, the NIH last month invited universities to apply for a package of grants totaling $50-million a year to improve their mentoring of minority science students. Twelve grants are expected to be awarded by September.

The effort reflects the NIH’s realization that “we aren’t where we want to be” in terms of minority-student success, said Roderic I. Pettigrew, an NIH official named last year by the agency to initially fill the newly created position of chief NIH officer for scientific-work-force diversity.

The NIH remains less clear, however, about the direction of the other major avenue of response it announced following the 2011 study. Regarding the possibility of bias in its own handling of grant applications, the NIH has taken some initial steps, including giving its top leaders bias-awareness training. But a project promised by the NIH’s director, Francis S. Collins, to directly test for bias in the agency’s grant-evaluation systems has stalled, with officials stymied by the legal and scientific challenges of crafting such an experiment.

“The design of the studies has proven to be difficult,” said Richard K. Nakamura, director of the Center for Scientific Review, the NIH division that handles incoming grant applications.

Promises Made

The 2011 study of racial bias, led by Donna K. Ginther, a professor of economics at the University of Kansas, reviewed NIH grant data for 2000 through 2006. It found that the agency approved 29 percent of applications from white scientists and 16 percent of those from black scientists.

That 13-point gap narrowed, but only to 10 points, when Ms. Ginther’s team compared applications that were similar in all ways other than the race of the applicant. The study, based on proposals for R01 grants—the main category of NIH science award—also found that black scientists accounted for just 1.4 percent of all applications.

The study’s authors said, however, that they could reach no conclusion about whether the wide racial discrepancies were due to bias in the NIH system, lower ability among black applicants, or a combination of those factors.

Dr. Collins, in his immediate response to the Ginther study, promised to conduct pilot experiments in which NIH grant-review panels were given identical applications, one using existing protocols and another in which any possible clue to the applicant’s race—such as name or academic institution—had been removed.

“The well-described and insidious possibility of unconscious bias must be assessed,” Dr. Collins and his deputy, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote at the time.

The NIH, however, is still working on the problem, Mr. Nakamura said. It hopes to soon begin taking applications from researchers willing to carry out such a study of possible biases in NIH grant approvals, and the NIH also recently gave Molly Carnes, a professor of medicine, psychiatry, and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a grant to conduct her own investigation of the matter, Mr. Nakamura said.

The legal challenges include a requirement that applicants get a full airing of their submission, he said. The scientific challenges include figuring out ways to get an unvarnished assessment from a review panel whose members traditionally expect to know anyone qualified in the field, he said.

The delay does not reflect any doubt within the NIH that bias is in fact a problem needing to be dealt with, Mr. Nakamura said. “I could have rushed out something quickly and then got garbage results,” he said.

A Limited Look

University leaders with experience in the subject agree that the internal-bias issue needs more study. But they also encourage the NIH to keep looking externally, as the problem and its solutions extend far deeper than the agency’s own grant-review systems.

In that regard, there’s concern that the NIH may still not be looking in the right places. For the new package of mentoring grants, outlined last month, the NIH is inviting only institutions with less than $7.5-million a year in NIH research-grant support, and with at least 25 percent of their undergraduate students receiving Pell Grants.

The idea is to use those types of colleges to develop successful models for mentoring that can be used at other institutions, said Dr. Pettigrew, who also serves as director of the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

Not including larger institutions may be a lost opportunity, said Raynard S. Kington, a former NIH deputy director now serving as president of Grinnell College. Smaller institutions are important, Dr. Kington said, but the NIH may be overlooking the most obvious place to help large numbers of black students: the larger institutions where most of them are enrolled.

The nation’s historically black colleges and universities now produce only about 20 percent of black bachelor’s-degree holders, Dr. Kington said. If the NIH wants to help ensure that universities produce more and better-qualified applicants for its grants, it should help improve mentoring at the nation’s major research universities, he said. Currently, the nation’s top 10 producers of black doctorate recipients in science and engineering, according to government data, are still the historically black institutions (see table).

The NIH, however, already has dozens of programs to help minority science students at major universities, including a $60-million-a-year program of grant supplements designated for minority researchers, Dr. Pettigrew said.

It is hoped that the new $50-million-a-year program will help the NIH understand why its existing efforts to help minority students may not be working, he said. The possible solutions are “rather complex,” involving matters of sociology, psychology, and socioeconomics, he said.

Or, said Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, it might actually be simpler than imagined. UMBC is tied for 10th nationally in the production of black students who later earn doctorates in science and engineering—the highest number outside of historically black institutions—and Mr. Hrabowski emphasizes solutions that work for students of all races.

UMBC’s success is due to approaches that include getting research faculty members involved early with undergraduates, putting the undergraduates into labs, and ensuring students help one another, Mr. Hrabowski said.

Mentoring and coaching is essential, and helping historically black institutions is valuable, Mr. Hrabowski said. But any broad new NIH effort, he said, should put primary attention on “the majority of American higher education.”

Major Universities Lag in Preparing Black Doctorates