Growing up with a mom who survived cancer, I learned early on the life-changing impact of cutting-edge research. I worshipped doctors. Nevertheless, all childhood fantasies come crashing down at some point, including my belief that science exists in a perfect politics-free vacuum. Scientists, doctors, and researchers are often protectors of humanity, fighting invisible killers with increasing efficacy. However, the politics they operate under can thwart their efforts, by infecting medical research with biases that lead to the systematic exclusion of oppressed and neglected communities from equitable scientific research, including women and minorities. When governments with extreme and intolerant ideologies are allowed to dictate scientific research and interpretation, they even have the power to kill millions.
The goal of scientific research is to preserve life, but at times scientific research has been perverted to end or neglect lives. When the Nazis were in power, they abused research in just this way. According to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the Nazis used pseudosciences to justify the death of Jews and other minority groups they deemed inferior. Yet, pseudoscience is not the only way that scientific research has failed. Today, the systematic exclusion of historically marginalized groups from equitable scientific research increases health disparities and mortality rates for communities in the United States.
While a 2023 review of Michael D. Gordin’s book Pseudoscience by the Princeton University History Department defines a pseudoscience as “something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven,” the science does not have to be false to be dangerous or to do harm. As the NHGRI describes, in the early 20th century, the Nazi regime used pseudosciences like eugenics and scientific racism, which are rooted in misinterpretations of legitimate scientific advancements in genomics, anatomy, and statistics, to justify their racist ideology, leading to the systemic sterilization and euthanization of millions of minorities. As the Nazis’ ideology of intolerance and racism spread into their view of science, their usage and practices of research devolved. Unfortunately, even after the Nazi regime fell, intolerance, biases, and extreme ideologies continue to affect scientific research, tainting many medical breakthroughs.
In modern research, misogyny and implicit bias against women have detrimentally affected women’s health. Women have historically been underrepresented in research trials. In the past, the aversion to including women in scientific research and clinical trials ran so deep that some scientists even avoided testing on female mice, unwilling to study their drug’s effects with female mice’s fluctuating hormones. As a result, many drugs and medical devices are insufficiently tested on women, often leading to less favorable outcomes for women as biological sex can play an important role in their effectiveness. At worst, that difference may be lethal.
It was not until the 1990s that policies began to change, with leaders insisting on the inclusion of women in scientific research and clinical trials. Nevertheless, as Bridget Balch reported in the Association of American Medical Colleges’ news site, AAMCNews, in 2024, the gender gap in research still exists today and must be addressed through continuing research into women's health.
Medical research has also failed to represent diverse communities when it comes to race. In a 2021 AAMCNews article, Patrick Boyle reported that “most drugs have been tested primarily on White men, casting doubt about their efficacy for others.” This disparity poses even greater threats to public health today as advances in genomics have led to the creation of precision medicines that may lead to increased health disparities for people of color. For context, the Cleveland Clinic defines precision medicine as a new medical field that uses a patient’s unique genetic makeup, environmental and lifestyle factors, to determine the most effective treatment for disease. However, a research publication by Maret alum Rebecca Pollard (’24) in Frontiers in Medicine revealed that precision medicine might actually be harmful to people of color because of our white-dominated database.
Pollard and her colleagues analyzed the largest public cancer mutations database and found that many mutations that are cancer-causing in Europeans are actually completely normal and harmless in non-European populations. As a result of these misclassifications, there is a higher likelihood of misdiagnoses and mistreatment of cancer in non-European patients (the majority of the world), turning the scientific breakthrough of precision medicine into a possible death sentence for them.
The lack of scientific research including women, people of non-European ancestry, and people of color has created implicit biases almost as harmful as pseudoscience. Fortunately, in the last few decades, initiatives to fill these research gaps have given the scientific community hope of diminishing health disparities in underrepresented communities, especially addressing their higher rates of cancer and heart disease.
However, as a part of President Donald Trump’s goal in ending Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies and initiatives, the NIH recently terminated hundreds of grants funding research aimed at addressing these health disparities. Roni Caryn Rabin and Irena Hwang reported in The New York Times that each scientist received a letter from the NIH alongside the termination of their funding, claiming that their research goals “harm the health of Americans” and “do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
These actions by the Trump administration reveal that the intersection of science and intolerance does not have to be pseudoscience to systematically oppress and kill vulnerable groups. Most of the time, intolerance is an invisible killer in science, based on the underrepresentation in research. Yet, when the attempts at remedying the gap in research caused by this intolerance are systemically ended, the intolerance is no longer implicit but enforced. When research aimed at strengthening health outcomes for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and impoverished Americans is labeled as a “harm [to] the health of Americans” by the NIH, it begs the question: who does our government no longer consider to be American?
Science does not have to be misinterpreted by our government to justify the murder and mistreatment of minority groups; the outright, purposeful, and systematic exclusion of minority groups and women in research may be just as deadly.