Racial Disparity in K99 Awards and R00 Transitions

Oh, what a shocker.

In the wake of the 2011 Ginther finding [see archives on Ginther if you have been living under a rock] that there was a significant racial bias in NIH grant review, the concrete response of the NIH was to blame the pipeline. Their only real dollar, funded initiatives were to attempt to get more African-American trainees into the science pipeline. The obvious subtext here was that the current PIs, against whom the grant review bias was defined, must be the problem, not the victim. Right? If you spend all your time insisting that since there were not red-fanged, white-hooded peer reviewers overtly proclaiming their hate for black people that peer review can’t be the problem, and you put your tepid money initiatives into scraping up more trainees of color, you are saying the current black PIs deserve their fate. Current example: NIGMS trying to transition more underrepresented individuals into faculty ranks, rather than funding the ones that already exist.

Well, we have some news. The Rescuing Biomedical Research blog has a new post up on Examining the distribution of K99/R00 awards by race authored by Chris Pickett.

It reviews success rates of K99 applicants from 2007-2017. Application PI demographics broke down to nearly 2/3 White, ~1/3 Asian, 2% multiracial and 2% black. Success rates: White, 31%, Multiracial, 30.7%, Asian, 26.7%, Black, 16.2%. Conversion to R00 phase rates: White, 80%, Multiracial, 77%, Asian, 76%, Black, 60%.

In terms of Hispanic ethnicity, 26.9% success for K99 and 77% conversion rate, neither significantly different from the nonHispanic rates.

Of course, seeing as how the RBR people are the VerySeriousPeople considering the future of biomedical careers (sorry Jeremy Berg but you hang with these people), the Discussion is the usual throwing up of hands and excuse making.

“The source of this bias is not clear…”. ” an analysis …could address”. “There are several potential explanations for these data”.

and of course
“put the onus on universities”

No. Heeeeeeyyyyyuuullll no. The onus is on the NIH. They are the ones with the problem.

And, as per usual, the fix is extraordinarily simple. As I repeatedly observe in the context of the Ginther finding, the NIH responded to a perception of a disparity in the funding of new investigators with immediate heavy handed top-down quota based affirmative action for many applications from ESI investigators. And now we have Round2 where they are inventing up new quota based affirmative action policies for the second round of funding for these self-same applicants. Note well: the statistical beneficiaries of ESI affirmative action polices are white investigators.

The number of K99 applications from black candidates was 154 over 10 years. 25 of these were funded. To bring this up to the success rate enjoyed by white applicants, the NIH need only have funded 23 more K99s. Across 28 Institutes and Centers. Across 10 years, aka 30 funding cycles. One more per IC per decade to fix the disparity. Fixing the Asian bias would be a little steeper, they’d need to fund another 97, let’s round that to 10 per year. Across all 28 ICs.

Now that they know about this, just as with Ginther, the fix is duck soup. The Director pulls each IC Director aside in quiet moment and says ‘fix this’. That’s it. That’s all that would be required. And the Directors just commit to pick up one more Asian application every year or so and one more black application every, checks notes, decade and this is fixed.

This is what makes the NIH response to all of this so damn disturbing. It’s rounding error. They pick up grants all the time for reasons way more biased and disturbing than this. Saving a BSD lab that allegedly ran out of funding. Handing out under the table Administrative Supplements for gawd knows what random purpose. Prioritizing the F32 applications from some labs over others. Ditto the K99 apps.

They just need to apply their usual set of glad handing biases to redress this systematic problem with the review and funding of people of color.

And they steadfastly refuse to do so.

For this one specific area of declared Programmatic interest.

When they pick up many, many more grants out of order of review for all their other varied Programmatic interests.

You* have to wonder why.
__
h/t @biochembelle

*and those people you are trying to lure into the pipeline, NIH? They are also wondering why they should join a rigged game like this one.