Thank you for your interest in our letter to Science entitled "NIH must confront the use of race in science."

The letter was published in the 11 September 2020 issue.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6509/1313

We collected a first round of signatories, who are listed at the end of the letter below.

We are now seeking more signatories (sorry that we were unable to reach out to all of you on the first round).

If you would like to sign as a signatory below, please include your name, affiliation (academic or otherwise), city/state, and country (please scroll to the bottom to enter your information).

While this round of signatories will not be included in the publication, we believe that your support of this letter, and the support of a wider community with interest and investment in the issues we raise, will be noticed and acknowledged by the NIH. Ultimately, we are hopeful that our collective statement on this issue can make a difference.

Thank you again for your consideration,
Michael Yudell
Dorothy Roberts
Rob DeSalle
Sarah Tishkoff

NIH must confront the use of race in science

Recent protests across the United States and the world have called attention to anti-Black racism in policing, employment, housing, and education. Science and medicine also have long histories of racism (1, 2). This unfortunate, yet persistent, aspect of science and medicine includes the use of obsolete concepts of race to measure human biological difference and the false belief, by some, that differences in disease outcomes stem primarily from pathophysiological differences between racial groups (3, 4).

We are particularly concerned that explanations for the disproportionate rates of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other communities of color will mistakenly point to innate racial differences instead of longstanding institutionalized racism and other underlying social, structural, and environmental determinants. Although genetic risk factors may contribute to severity of COVID-19 (5, 6), race is a poor proxy to understand the population distribution of such risk factors (7). Compelling evidence shows that racism, not race, is the most relevant risk factor (8, 9). We are hopeful that scientists will not turn to racial science—a reflection of long-standing beliefs about superiority and inferiority that have no place in scientific and clinical practice (1, 10)—to explain COVID-19 disparities and justify policy responses to it. However, racial categories have been misused in the past.

In 2016, we called for the elimination of the use of race as a means to classify biological diversity in both laboratory and clinical research. Since that time, little has changed (11). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) made progress by releasing a request for applications in support of research leading to the creation of best practices for the study of race and other population identifiers (12). However, R01 awards could take years to address these issues, and NIH still offers no guidance about the use of racial and ethnic identifiers in research beyond recruitment. There is an urgent need for NIH to provide scientists with information about what utility racial data have beyond fostering diversity in research, how such information should or should not be used in data analysis, and what identifiers of human populations might be better suited for use in biomedical research.

To begin to address the misuse of racial measures in scientific and clinical practice, we urge the director of NIH to lead education efforts directed at both scientists and the public about the nature of human genetic diversity and the ongoing need and obligation to confront racism in science. In these troubled times, a clear statement regarding use and misuse of population identifiers in the pursuit of characterizing  human difference could help alleviate ongoing and widespread confusion on such matters.

NIH should then support the National Academy of Sciences to bring together a diverse group of scientists and scholars to develop a consensus statement on best practices in genetic, clinical, and social scientific studies for characterizing human genetic diversity, including guidance for using racial categories to study racism’s impact on human health. Guidelines for federally funded science should also include best practices for the integration of biological, social, structural, and environmental health determinants into the study of human health and disease.

NIH should continue and expand its work to hire more career scientists and clinicians from underrepresented minority groups. It should also substantially increase the extramural funding that supports scientists from underrepresented groups at every level of training and throughout career development. . We have the tools to remedy this challenge. The time to act is now.  

Michael Yudell1*, Dorothy Roberts2, Rob DeSalle3, Sarah Tishkoff4, and xxx signatories
1Department of Community Health and Prevention, Drexel University School of Public Health, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. 2Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. 3American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024, USA. 4Departments of Genetics and Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
*Corresponding author. Email: myudell@drexel.edu
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. D. Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, New York, 2012).
2. E. M. Hammonds, R. M. Herzig, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (MIT Press, 2008).
3. J. L. Graves Jr., The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2001).
4. D. A. Vyas, L. G. Eisenstein, D. S. Jones, N. Engl. J. Med. 10.1056/NEJMms2004740 (2020).
5. D. Ellinghaus et al., N. Engl. J. Med. 10.1056/NEJMoa2020283 (2020).
6. M. W. Hooper, A. M. Nápoles, E. J. Pérez-Stable, JAMA 323, 24 (2020).
7. C. W. Yancy, JAMA 323, 19 (2020).
8.  A. van Dorn, R. E. Cooney, M. L. Sabin, Lancet 395, 10232 (2020).
9. C. Wallis, “Why racism, not race, is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19,” Scientific American (2020).
10. T. Duster, Science 307, 5712 (2005).
11. M. Yudell, D. Roberts, R. DeSalle, S. Tishkoff, Science 351, 6273 (2016).
12. Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Research (R01 Clinical Trial Optional) (Department of Health and Human Services, 2020); https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-20-254.html.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
List of signatories
www.sciencemag.org/content/369/65xx/xx/suppl/DC1

10.1126/science.abd4842



Signatories

Sarah Ackerman
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
USA

Katrina Armstrong
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA
USA

Ruha Benjamin
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
USA

Danielle Bessett
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH
USA

Sarah Blacker
York University
Toronto, ON
Canada

Deborah Bolnick
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT
USA

Lundy Braun
Brown University
Providence, RI
USA

Kyle Brothers
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY
USA

Arthur L. Caplan
New York University School of Medicine
New York, NY
USA

Aravinda Chakravarti
New York University Grossman School of Medicine
New York, NY
USA

Mildred Cho
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
USA

Merlin Chowkwanyun
Columbia University
New York, NY
USA

Nathaniel Comfort
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD
USA

Graham Coop
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA
USA

Richard Cooper
Loyola University Chicago
Chicago, IL
USA

Anna Di Rienzo
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
USA

Troy Duster
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
USA

Chandra Ford
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA
USA

Agustin Fuentes
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
USA

Joan Fujimura
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI
USA

Stephanie M. Fullerton
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
USA

Duana Fullwiley
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
USA

Vanessa Northington Gamble
George Washington University
Washington, DC
USA

Nanibaa' Garrison
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA
USA

Alan Goodman
Hampshire College
Hampshire, MA
USA

Joseph L. Graves Jr.
North Carolina A&T State University
Greensboro, NC
USA

Clarence C. Gravlee
University of Florida
Gainsville, FL
USA

Evelynn M. Hammonds
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
USA

Neil Hanchard
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX
USA

Helena Hansen
New York University
New York, NY
USA

Nina T. Harawa
University of California Los Angeles
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
Los Angeles, CA
USA

David E. Hayes-Bautista
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA
USA

Gillian Hooker
Concert Genetics
Nashville, TN
USA

Nina Jablonski
The Penn State University
University Park, PA
USA

Sherman A. James
Duke University
Durham, NC
USA

David S. Jones
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
USA

Jonathan Kahn
Northeastern University
Boston, MA
USA

Jay S. Kaufman
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

Barbara A. Koenig
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
USA

Stephanie Kraft
University of Washington School of Medicine
Seattle, WA
USA

Nancy Krieger
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Boston, MA
USA


Christopher Kuzawa
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL
USA

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee
Columbia University
New York, NY
USA

Thomas McDade
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL
USA

Jonathan Marks
UNC-Charlotte
Charlotte, NC
USA

Ann Morning
New York University
New York, NY
USA

Gregory Miller
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL
USA

Alondra Nelson
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ
USA

Osagie K. Obasogie
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
USA

Simon M Outram
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
USA

Aaron Panofsky
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA
USA

Sharon Plon
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX
USA

Molly Przeworski
Columbia University
New York, NY
USA

Maanasa Raghavan
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
USA

Jenny Reardon
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA
USA

Timothy Rebbeck
Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
Dana Farber Cancer Institute
Boston, MA
USA

Susan M. Reverby
Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA
USA

Samuel Kelton Roberts
Columbia University
New York, NY
USA

Jill Oliver Robinson
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, TX
USA

Wendy D. Roth
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
USA

Charmaine D.M. Royal
Duke University
Durham, NC
USA

Oliver Rollins
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY
USA

David Rosner
Columbia University
New York, NY
USA

Kim Tallbear
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada

Ian Tattersall
American Museum of Natural History
New York, NY
USA

Joseph W. Thornton
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
USA

France Winddance Twine
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA
USA

J. Craig Venter
J. Craig Venter Institute
La Jolla, CA
USA

Kamala Visweswaran
Rice University
Houston, TX
USA

Keith Wailoo
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
USA