http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1490.full To counter a racial tilt in the funding of basic research grants, the National Institutes of Health should launch a “continuous” review and take remedial steps against bias, a working group told NIH Director Francis Collins at a meeting on 14 June. These recommendations, laid out in a draft report to the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director, are aimed at correcting what the working group calls a “disturbing discrepancy”: Black applicants are less likely to win independent investigator grants (R01 awards) than whites. The panel—co-chaired by Reed Tuckson, executive vice president and chief of medical affairs at UnitedHealth Group in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and John Ruffin, director of NIH's Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities—laid out a wideranging agenda. But it offered few specifics and no cost estimates. Tuckson told reporters that it's too soon to nail down such details. But he said he would like to see NIH and other federal agencies get together on a major, multiyear effort to support institutions that train minority scientists. Collins asked his advisory group to dig into the issue after a study by economist Donna Ginther of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and colleagues found that black applicants for NIH grants in 2000 through 2006 were significantly less likely (by 10 percentage points) to be funded than white applicants (Science, 19 August 2011, p. 1015). Blacks were also less likely to apply for basic science funding, Ginther found. When the working group examined a set of grants from 2006 to 2010, it discovered similar biases. Of “particular significance,” the working group states, is that 73% of the applications from black researchers in 2006 through 2010 were rejected without a full discussion—or in NIH jargon, “triaged”—while 59% of applications from whites were rejected this way. The report notes, however, that “analyses and discussions did not point to a single, definitive cause for NIH funding disparities.” Still, the panel says, NIH needs to gather data and take action. It should create a new position of chief diversity officer, with “a suitable budget. ” It should set up a new working group of behavioral and social scientists to do research—for example, to examine reviewers' written comments on applications. NIH should also conduct pilot testing of “bias/diversity awareness training” for NIH review staff. And the agency should experiment with anonymous reviews, blanking out applicants' identities and institutions . Most importantly, NIH should establish mentorship networks to assist minority students early in their school careers and help fund more undergraduate scholarships. Collins said during the advisory committee meeting that he is committed to doing whatever it takes to reduce disparities in grant success rates. “This is a very serious issue,” Collins said. “To have this circumstance continue … is simply unacceptable.”