Race in the Genome Age

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Contrary to stereotype, all scientists are not brainy nerds in white coats. They come in all flavors, textures and essences. Science demands discipline, hard work and brainpower. It also requires flights of imagination to achieve creative leaps of understanding. Yet for all their openness, scientists themselves are not immune to professional prejudices. Academics discriminate against biotech researchers and vice versa. Luckily, they enjoy a symbiotic relationship.

San Diego’s biotech sector now employs 23,000—a 100 percent increase between 1990 and 1998, says Cliff Numark, San Diego Regional Technology Alliance president. This is about 10 times faster than the overall job growth in San Diego—9 percent—during that period. Average pay of employees in this sector is $53,000 per year, nearly twice the $28,000 average income for all workers in San Diego. The gross annual payroll for the biotech and medical devices industry is $1.5 billion, about 1.5 percent of the total regional product.

“Biotech is a pillar of San Diego’s technology community and will continue to attract topflight researchers and employees,” says Numark, adding: “Genomics is a major thrust of our biotech industry.”

Research offers good jobs, but they require good education in math and science. And that’s a problem. In science and mathematics, American students in grades K-12 generally fall behind their peers in Europe and Japan. Lack of qualified candidates in the sciences and technology has forced the United States to offer visas for highly trained specialists.

Ironically, overseas “knowledge workers” are more likely to qualify for high-paying, high-tech jobs than African-American and Latino children growing up south of Interstate 8. The achievement gap is particularly problematic for San Diego’s minorities, which now constitute a majority in our schools. Roughly two out of three African-American and Latino students are below grade level in reading and mathematics.

The achievement gap must be closed if minority children are to find places in San Diego’s high-tech future. The San Diego Unified School District is now engaged in a historic and highly controversial effort to raise student achievement by focusing on literacy and mathematics with laser-beam intensity. Will it work? Preliminary statewide test results show improvement in basic skills, and San Diego is now the top urban district in California, ahead of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. But Superintendent Alan Bersin cautions, “The competition ain’t that good.”

Will the Genome Age end racial stereotyping as we know it and usher in a more complex vision and deeper appreciation of diversity? Or will it lead to genetic discrimination in jobs, insurance coverage and marriage? Will gene therapies and drugs prevent or even cure dread genetic diseases? Or will mad scientists create genetic Frankensteins or develop biological weapons that end life as we know it?

The laboratories humming with energy-consuming equipment are a fragile environment on the frontiers of human knowledge. If government funding dries up, venture capital flees or the lights go out, the institutes are as vulnerable as tropical fish in an aquarium when the oxygen hose is unplugged.

The last 20 years have nurtured the most spectacular growth of scientific institutions, thrusting San Diego to the forefront of biological discovery. Research has brought immigrants, cultures, dollars and dreams to our mesas and valleys. Yet this is just the beginning. May the next 20 years be a period of scientific achievement and social advancement. May the Genome Age evolve human understanding in San Diego.

Full disclosure: My wife, Isabelle Rooney, M.D., Ph.D., has been employed as a research scientist in Dr. Carl Ware’s lab at the La Jolla Institute of Allergy and Immunology since 1997. She recently accepted a position as senior research scientist at Structural Genomix, a San Diego biotech firm investigating the structure of proteins that may provide cures to diseases.

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