Amid both promising and worrying signs in the development of treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, and in the context of a considerable amount of scrutiny of medical research, some researchers, ethicists, and advocates are working to make sure science doesn’t lose sight of a critical issue: diversity in the clinical trial participant pool. The distribution of research benefits to participants—and the consideration of race in subject selection—is tightly woven into the Belmont Report and has been a mainstay in research ethics discussion ever since. But despite the decades-long consideration of race and ethnicity in clinical trials, many trials still don’t enroll populations that reflect the diversity of the general populace or the group affected by the condition being studied. Read more