SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown will be the guest speaker at the Fourth Annual Minority Student Opportunity Luncheon at the Experimental Biology Meeting Wednesday, April 22, 1998. U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, who had been scheduled as a speaker, was forced to cancel.
The meeting, designed to encourage minority students into biomedical research, is part of the Experimental Biology meeting in San Francisco. It is scheduled for noon at the ANA Motel, Metropolitan III, beginning at noon.
Students from the Bay Area will get to meet some of the premier researchers in the country to learn about opportunities. The aim of the program is to set at least 200 minority college students on a career path in research. Minority groups are greatly underrepresented in medical science research. According to federal figures the proportion of researchers from minority groups is strikingly lower than their percentage in the overall population. Although the number of minority graduates of medical schools has increased in the last decade, the percentage of those students going into research and teaching has not.
This will be the fourth annual luncheon held in conjunction with the meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which this year will draw some 14,000 biomedical researchers to the Moscone center. The convention, one of the largest science meetings in the world, runs from April 18-22.
The luncheon is co-sponsored by the American Association of Anatomists, the experimental biology federation, and the National Institutes of Health. The American Association of Anatomists is one of America's oldet and most prestigious professional scientific organizations, its members having earned seven Nobel Prizes and more than 100 memberships in the National Academy of Sciences.