Black Scientists Are Critical Leaders for This Fight
‘What black Americans need is for leaders in the public-health, research, and medical communities to stand up alongside us — to engage us not as victims, but as leaders and problem-solvers’
Black scientists need a greater role in this fight. Adrianne Gladden-Young, a researcher in the Pardis Sabeti lab at the Broad Institute and Harvard University published a must-read essay in The Atlantic. “What black Americans need is for leaders in the public health, research, and medical communities to stand up alongside us — to engage us not as victims, but as leaders and problem-solvers,” she writes. “One way to do so is to collaborate with and recruit from the historically black health care and scientific institutions that serve us and know us.” Here’s an excerpt:
I am a scientist who, for the past nine weeks, has been studying the respiratory virus that is disproportionately killing people who look like me. “I can’t breathe” — the way George Floyd pleaded for mercy as a white police officer in Minneapolis killed him late last month — has become a slogan for those protesting against police violence and systemic racism in America. But it also captures the deep inequities that have allowed the coronavirus to claim so many black lives, and neither the scientific community nor the public health world is confronting the problem directly.
Read the full story below.
