Close up photo of scientist putting slide on microscope

Medicine’s Scott Williams calls for more diversity in genetic studies

Scott Williams, a professor of population and quantitative health sciences and genetics and genome sciences, co-wrote an article titled “The Missing Diversity in Human Genetic Studies” for Cell, a medical research journal. Williams argued that the lack of diversity limits the ability to make accurate predictions of a person’s disease risk based on genetics and to develop new and potentially more effective treatments.

About the article

Together with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, Williams argued that, despite efforts to include more diverse populations in research, people of northern European ancestry continue to be vastly overrepresented in human genetics studies, and most other populations are largely missing.

The researchers called for a concerted effort to increase diversity in human genomic studies, requiring funding that targets inclusion of ethnically diverse populations and development of infrastructure for doing clinical and genomics research in neglected populations.  

Read the article at the CellPress website.