Although AIDS in the nation's black community has evolved into a full-blown epidemic, less than 1 percent of U.S. biomedical researchers are black, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder HIV researcher.
Patrick Allen, a research associate in CU-Boulder's molecular, cellular and developmental biology department, said the disparity is caused in part by social, cultural and economic differences and a historical mistrust of the biomedical community by the black community. Allen, who is black, has a $1.2 million National Institutes of Health grant to define the structure of the HIV virus and search for HIV inhibitors to target specific proteins, a tricky task given the rapid mutation rate of the virus. But he hopes the research may eventually help in designing new drugs to fight HIV.
Allen, who along with CU colleague Larry Gold had a patent approved in 1997 to create specific RNA binding sites to inhibit HIV, said a massive cultural shift needs to take place to include the black community in biomedicine. "But the fear and suspicion in the black community of the biomedical establishment is a public health problem that reaches beyond HIV, hypertension, sickle-cell anemia, heart disease or cancer," he said.
According to a 1998 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, Calif., the annual HIV infection rate of AIDS rate among black men is six times that of white men. Nearly one-third of new AIDS cases in black men have resulted from intravenous drug use, compared to one-fourth of new U.S. cases in white men.
The rate of HIV infection for black women is now 16 times that of white women. Among black women, heterosexual contact is the primary mode of transmission, and two-thirds of children born with the virus in America are black.
As another avenue to fight the epidemic, Allen is spearheading the Black Biomedical Research Movement to involve more blacks in biomedical research. "This is not about affirmative action, religion, politics or racism," he said.
"In its simplest form, this is a science outreach program with the black community being the primary target group," said Allen, the only black biologist in the nation who is a principal investigator on an HIV project.
The ultimate goal is to promote black health consciousness at all ages across the country and have more black people participate in the discovery of new drugs to treat diseases like HIV, sickle-cell anemia and hypertension that disproportionately affect their community, he said. "Ideally, I would like to see black people make the same kind of progress that women have made in participating in research affecting their own health. But it may take 50 years for a change like that to happen."
In his quest to get the fledgling Black Biomedical Research Movement rolling, Allen has spoken with U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, and a host of other administrative policy makers and HIV researchers around the nation. He also has attended a number of national biomedical meetings, seeking support for the movement.
In addition, Allen has received a commitment from Roche Biosciences of Palo Alto, Calif., to donate laboratory chemicals and reagents to graduate school labs where young black researchers are learning the newest biomedical techniques.
Allen notes there already are a number of minority-based programs to encourage black people and other minorities to go into the biomedical sciences through scholarships and stipends. "But the overall state of black peoples' health is so poor, I believe we need a grand-scale program that results in a new generation of black biomedical researchers to help create a more health-conscious black community."
Progress was made in 1997 when President Clinton apologized to the black community regarding the Tuskegee experiments on black men from the 1930s to the 1970s, Allen said. In response to a request for a state of emergency declaration by the black community, Clinton recently tabbed $156 million for black HIV outreach.
A native of Jamaica, Allen received a bachelor's degree from Springfield College in Massachusetts --where he also was an NCAA All-American wrestler -- and a doctorate from the University of California-Santa Cruz.
His honors include a Sloan-Kettering Undergraduate Internship and a University of California Dissertation Year Fellowship. He also was a Franklin and Marshall College Distinguished Minority Scholar and a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow.
In addition to his CU-Boulder faculty position, Allen was a consultant to NexStar Pharmaceuticals, a Boulder research and pharmaceutical company founded by Gold and that targets AIDS and cancer.