Most genetic research is done on people of European descent. That’s led to misdiagnoses, inaccurate tests, and missed opportunities for new treatments.
than their white counterparts. It can be difficult to get international studies funded, or it’s simply easier to do them at home; one of the common excuses Fatumo hears is that a study should be done in a developed country—because doing it in Africa would be more expensive. “I don't think this is appropriate,” he says.
As a second step, Fatumo’s paper calls for powerful funding bodies—those like the Gates Foundation, US National Institutes of Health, or the Wellcome Trust—to prioritize researchers doing work in underrepresented populations, especially if the researchers are members of those populations themselves. “It would be unfair to many of them to compete with scientists from the UK and other populations,” says Fatumo.
Perhaps the most successful example of this kind of initiative is the Human Heredity and Health in Africa consortium, or H3Africa, established by the NIH and the Wellcome Trust in 2012, which pushes for African scientists to perform genetic researchthe continent. Fatumo credits H3Africa for his academic success, which enabled him to continue his training in the UK.
Janitza Montalvo-Ortiz, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale who hails from Puerto Rico, entered the field in the mid-2010s into the so-called genomic revolution, but quickly realized that Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans weren’t part of it. “I thought, ‘Since we're not represented in the studies, what does that mean for people like us?’” she asks.
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