Science has been considered a purely objective field of study that has produced research to cure diseases, map out the anatomies of living things and explore our planet and the universe. But UC Berkeley Bioengineering Professor Aaron Streets says it is important for those who conduct that research “to represent the full diversity of human genetic variation.”
And while equity and justice are important, he said, it goes beyond that.
“Scientific research runs the risk of not comprehensively addressing the broad range of public need if our scientists only represent a narrow range of genotypes,” said Streets, whose bioengineering lab on campus conducts research on microscopy, microfluidics and single-cell genomics. “It matters who is doing the science.”
Streets was recently honored with Berkeley’s 2023 Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Equity and Excellence. While certain states around the country are currently moving to eliminate public education funding for various diversity, equity and inclusion programs — efforts led by politicians who devalue the importance of that work and research — Streets has been a tireless advocate for increasing diversity in STEM.
Through his Next Generation Faculty Symposium — a joint initiative between Berkeley, Stanford University and UC San Francisco that aims to diversify faculty recruitment pools at universities — Streets has given STEM postdoctoral candidates from underrepresented communities an opportunity to showcase their work and research to the masses.
And Streets’ Bioengineering Scholars Program has introduced first-year undergraduates — many from historically underrepresented groups — to STEM research through a mentoring program focused on recruitment and support.
Berkeley News spoke with Streets recently about why Berkeley has become an ideal place for DEI work, how diversity can help bring new and necessary perspectives to STEM research and academia, and the intersection of his two passions, art and science.
If researchers represent only a narrow composition of genotypes, then the things that those biologists and those doctors care about might only be applicable to a narrow range of stakeholders. Historically, we have seen researchers focus solely on demographics that reflect their own genotypes.
But as we get more into the age of genomics, personalized medicine and rare diseases, there are potentially blind spots to that approach.
What are those blind spots, and how do they impact society as a whole?
Scientific experts, like biologists and bioengineers, are people that the government looks to for policy decisions and decisions about epidemiological responses, for example. We saw that especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
If they’re looking to our STEM academic community as experts to guide policy decisions, it’s important that we collectively understand the implications of those policy decisions in different ethnic and socioeconomic communities.
Another example is if we’re trying to understand the relationship between one’s genome and the likelihood of getting a disease, and we’re only studying one sliver of genotype — one ethnicity, one type of ancestry — then we’re only going to understand the relationship between the disease and that specific group of people.
Going even further, if we come up with a drug or therapeutic approach to that disease, and we test the efficacy of that intervention on a homogeneous sample of human genomes, our data might not apply to a broader population. That is a huge blind spot, because we won’t know the implications for people with different genotypes or from different ethnic groups or different lifestyle behaviors and diets.
Our research is incomplete if our subjects aren’t diverse. And, oftentimes, it takes a researcher from those underrepresented groups in STEM to point this out.