Carlos Slim Gives $74 Million To Make Genomic Research Less Ethnically-Biased Erin Carlyle - Forbes
go to original October 30, 2013

Carlos Slim (R) was the world’s-richest man for four years, but Bill Gates overtook him back in May. Bill Gates topped the 2013 Forbes 400 list, released in September. (Forbes)

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Hélu, the world’s 2nd-richest man, is giving an additional $74 million to a genomics center in Boston in order to right a bias in the field - a kind of scientific racism, you might call it. The problem: most samples of DNA analyzed in biomedical research come from people of European descent.

“It’s like doing science with one eye closed,” Dr. Eric Lander, president and director of the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT, the organization receiving Slim’s gift, said in a statement. “There are many discoveries that can only be made by studying non-European populations.”

Slim’s gift brings the Mexican tycoon’s total contributions to the institute to $139 million.

Not looking at DNA from a variety of ethnic backgrounds could cause researchers to miss significant, genetic causes of disease in non-European populations - including disease like diabetes that disproportionately affect Latinos. The new donation will fund the SIGMA 2 project, which attempts to develop new biomedical approaches to public health problems including cancer, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease.

Read the rest at Forbes

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