A Potential Solution to the Continuing Problem of Not Enough NIH RO1 Funding to Minority Investigators

Despite the efforts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to encourage racial diversity in science and increase training and funding opportunities in minority groups, there continues to be disparity in NIH RO1 type grant funding. Although traditional African American medical schools are relatively low on ranking of medical schools receiving NIH support in the U.S., these discrepancies hide a more serious problem, i.e., how so few African American investigators have individual NIH support. This serious issue is concealed by the total NIH and government support to these schools, derived from large NIH grants targeted to improve the infrastructure of minority institutions, even including training grants, which contribute the major fraction to their totals for NIH funding. The more important statistics, which drill down to the key area of disparity, which needs to be rectified, are those that show the reduced percentage of NIH research grants awarded to minority Principal Investigators, e.g., RO1 grants. We examined data from 6 minority medical schools, where their mean ± SE ranking for total NIH support for all medical schools in the U.S. was 227 ± 25, and compared these data with those from 6 non‐minority institutions with the same level of total NIH support, i.e., with an average ranking of 230 ± 2 of all medical schools in the U.S., similar to the ranking level of the minority institutions. Although the average total NIH funding was similar in the two groups ($14,622,989 for the minority schools vs. $11,779,546 for the non‐minority schools), the minority institutions received 85 ± 4% of their NIH funding from institutional grants designed to address gaps in infrastructure. In the minority medical schools only 15 ± 4% of the total NIH support went to RO1 type funding in the minority institutions, whereas 65 ± 11% of the total NIH support went to RO1 type funding at non‐minority institutions. Therefore, although NIH initiatives have been helpful in bridging the gap of funding for minority institutions, it has not corrected the problem of the reduced number NIH RO1 grants awarded to minority investigators. A potential novel solution to correct this discrepancy is to mentor the mentors simultaneously with mentoring the minority candidates, by a faculty mentor with a strong history of NIH RO1 funding. This is important because a large number of minority scientists reside at minority institutions, where the faculty have relatively few RO1s and are members of NIH study sections, which provide needed mentoring in writing and the review of NIH grants to the junior minority investigators. Therefore, it is our concept that there should be support for a novel program that provides for joint mentoring of minority doctoral and post‐doctoral candidates from their local mentor at the minority institution and well‐funded mentors from another institution. In this manner, both the student and the mentor from the minority institution, working together with senior well‐funded faculty at the non‐minority institution, will all benefit.