They'd Liketo Thank the Academy…

For 10 years, Dr. Regina M. Benjamin volunteered her services at a rural health clinic she founded in southern
Alabama, moonlighting in emergency rooms to support herself and the clinic.
Her efforts went largely unheralded until Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg featured her in a 1995 New York Times story, "Angel in a White Coat." The Times feature was followed by articles in other national publications including Time, which placed her on its list of "The Nation's 50 Leaders Age 40 and Under." Then came appearances on CBS This Morning, which named her Woman of the Year, and ABC World News Tonight, which dubbed her Person of the Week.
Media attention aside, this rural practitioner, who still heads a clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala., has one more major credit to her name. In 1997, she received one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon physicians in the United States: election to the elite Institute of Medicine, or IOM.
Dr. Benjamin clearly is a standout in the medical profession, and uniquely so, because she practices medicine among the poor, the uninsured, the elderly and other patients who are typically under-served. A graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana, the Morehouse School of Medicine and the University of Alabama Birmingham Medical School, she also is associate dean for rural health at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine. With her election to the Institute, she became one of a handful of minorities in the National Academies, an over-arching organization that includes the Institute of Medicine, the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering, or AOE. The highly respected National Research Council is its operational arm.
More than an honorary society of intellectuals, the National Academies serve as advisers to the federal government on policy issues. The National Academy of Sciences, established by President Lincoln in 1863, was the original academy; the research council, medical Institute and engineering Academy were added over the years.
But if Dr. Benjamin's election to IOM represents the Research Council's growing interest in under-represented communities, that's not yet represented in the number of minorities currently included in the elite organization's membership.
While hard numbers are unobtainable because Academy officials say they don't keep such records, "there has been extremely limited progress and improvement for under-represented minorities in the Academies," says Dr. Richard Tapia, a Latino researcher in the Academy of Engineering.
Perhaps more unsettling is that there don't appear to be any big movements afoot to change that course. Still, the few minorities who are members of the organization today say the prestige their membership affords them has the potential to greatly expand the reach of Black scholarship.