Would you like to benefit from the massive, game-changing, groundbreaking genomic revolution, already well underway? If you’re white, you’re in luck. If you’re not, too bad—it wasn’t built for you.
For years, genetic research has mostly focused on people of European descent. Scientists and the media have been lamenting it for over a decade. Despite this, the inequality has actually worsened.
In 2017, the percentage of participants of European descent in genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which look for genetic variants associated with complex traits such as disease risk, stood at a whopping 90 percent, according to the GWAS Diversity Monitor, an online dashboard maintained by researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK.
As of this January, the percentage of European descendants had swelled to almost 96 percent.
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But now, scientists are coming up with clear, defined ways to redress the imbalance. In a paper published in February in Nature Medicine, six scientists map out the steps needed to fix this glaring bias. The authors were motivated by their own experiences conducting research in underrepresented populations of their own heritage, including communities in Africa and South Asia.
“It is very painful, and very, very frustrating,” says Segun Fatumo, the lead author and a geneticist from Nigeria.
