Consequences due to the lack of research diversity

    In Mary Makarious' talk, she explained the research behind a lot of the Parkinson's research that has been going on, especially about the fact that a lot of the genetic information and data that there is about Parkinson's is from northern Europe.  In the paper "Tackling a disease on a global scale, the Global Parkinson's Genetics program, G2P: A new generation of opportunities" by Dr.Cornelius Blauwendraat, they highlight this issue stating that "the need for more diversity in research in a widely recognized problem, especially in genetics and genomics field" (Blauwendraat). He then talks about the creation of G2P, which is a program that aims to broaden the genetic data that we have outside of just northern Europe by doing research groups worldwide collaborate with them to be able to get more data.  

Another example would be in the paper “Tackling the lack of diversity in cancer research” by Christian Molina-Aguilar and C. Daniela Robles-Espinoza. It looks at the fact that most of cancer research data is done in European population and African American and Latinos. The paper goes into the bias in cancer catalogues saying that “More than 80% of samples analyzed by The Cancer Genome Atlas, an international effort that aimed to characterize the genomic profile of more than 30 cancer types, were classified as being of European ancestry” (Molina-Aguilar). They then talk about persisting bias that is going on not only in cancer research, but a lot of research that does not represent minority groups.  

These papers highlights a major issue within the research community as a whole. Alot of funding has been cut in research due to the new administration, and most of that funding deals with research that involves minority groups or diverse groups in general. The defunding of research plus the fact that DEI is no longer a thing is a huge detriment to research as a whole. It does not allow us to look into specific disorders or issues that harm minority groups such as generational trauma. It also sets a certain bias towards children as well, in the sense that say a Latino child was being rowdy in class, he would probably be labeled as a distraction or problem child and no help would be given instead of looking closer at the situation and realizing that he might just have a learning disability or things might be going on at home. Not being able to research social constructs that negatively or positively impact minorities is a detriment to all of society. 

Blauwendraat, Cornelis, et al. “Tackling a disease on a global scale, the global parkinson’s Genetics Program, GP2: A new generation of opportunities.” The American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 112, no. 9, Sept. 2025, pp. 1988–2000, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.07.014. 

Christian Molina-Aguilar, C. Daniela Robles-Espinoza; Tackling the lack of diversity in cancer research. Dis Model Mech 1 September 2023; 16 (9): dmm050275. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.050275