Remember, the first study, the one that found black women died of breast cancer 19% more than white women, controlled for socioeconomic factors. I’d love to know if the study that found wide disparity in recommended treatment did the same.

1. Scientists have to become a lot smarter in framing their grant requests
2. Basic science is not sexy

#2 is the mantra of people like me, who have struggled for many years to get grants on important scientific studies and watched as the smarter researchers got funding for some ridiculous avenue of study because they framed it in terms of breast cancer.

As for strategies to help this type of research along….The limiting factor for all biological research is grant money, which is doled out primarily by government institutions (NIH happens to be particularly parsimonious right now), which have quite a bit of leeway in choosing projects to fund. That said, they do tend to give money to research topics that focus on human health, so genetic epidemiology, although a small field, can rake in quite a bit of money. I think encouraging researchers to focus on genetic epidemiology and similar topics could help….although I’ve noticed that the majority of professors in my department are female, which could also be a factor. Moreover, recent advances in technology are allowing complicated genetic analyses that simply weren’t available before and in quantities that allow for statistical modeling. Suffice to say, there are a variety of reasons related to the current structure of biotech and biomedical research that prevent the type of research to which you’re referring..

But the thing that gets me is, before they’re even in med school, they’re being given this biology education that never even talks about bias or the strange idea that maybe the way we design studies is based on our culture’s perception of what’s important.

And that sticks with them whether they become doctors — where this issue is a matter of life and death — or whether they become animal behaviorists who essentially interpret other animals through socialized human eyes and then all too often turn it back and use that work to say something about “natural” human behavior (props to those who don’t, but I’ve seen it happen, and it’s never pretty).

Dunno, maybe it’s just a major pet peeve of mine because I have to listen to it too often.

At any rate, I think as long as we act like white and male are the normal human condition, I think we’re going to have these problems in studies — personally, I get pissed everytime I see sections for “health” and “women’s health” in anything. And you and many others are already clearly far too aware that that has a direct impact on people’s lives.

I’m sorry about your mom, too, zuzu. I should have said that.

Thanks, I’m sorry about yours, too.

Spit, interesting about your background informing your scientific studies. Medical education, from what I’ve been told, tends to do things in certain ways because that’s how they’ve always been done — such as 36-hour shifts during residency. It’s easy to see how that would stifle efforts to expose bias.

I also personally wish that every undergrad in the life sciences had to take a class on science’s interactions with society — both in terms of the effects on society of “pop science” and of the effects on science of widespread social bias. I come at my current sciency-ness from a decently strong background in sociology and gender studies, and I just cannot believe the assumptions that get made by students all the time — hell, even by some of the profs. They really think that their scientific reasoning is immune from bias. That’s how we keep getting really stupid studies on race and gender that have fundamental flaws not just in methodology but in the initial questions themselves.

That’s sort of peripheral, but I think that “we’re above social bias” thing is part of what feeds the lack of focus on the differential treatment that people receive, at least within the medical community.