Physicians, researchers, CEOs, reporters, and more gathered in downtown Boston Wednesday night to celebrate STAT’s 2024 STATUS List, which features 50 leaders in the life sciences. Members of this year’s list (and a few past honorees) spoke about what issues in their fields — ranging from investment to clinical research to bedside treatment — need to be prioritized in order to improve health care across the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Equity and inclusion
To achieve true equity in medical science “requires us to divest our research from the ivory towers of elite institutions,” said 2023 honoree Jonathan Jackson, executive director of Community Access, Recruitment, and Engagement Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Too often, he says, researchers and advocates bring “the same solutions to the same institutions” who don’t prioritize the needs of marginalized populations.
Stuart Orkin, a professor at Harvard Medical School, similarly called out powerful institutions, saying that the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical industry underinvested in sickle cell research for decades. He has become what he called “an accidental equity spokesperson,” after performing research that offered the blueprint for Vertex’s gene therapy for sickle cell disease, which disproportionately impacts Black people.