May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, so today, as we applaud the passage of legislation addressing the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, we’re also honoring the contributions to the sciences of so many members of the AAPI community.
This afternoon, President Biden will sign into law the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which addresses the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the past year by designating a point person at Justice to expedite review of hate crimes related to COVID and providing new resources for reporting them, explains NPR.
BIO celebrates the passage of this important legislation—and as we’ve written previously, the contributions of the AAPI community to the biotech sector, including in medicine, pharmaceutical, and medical manufacturing, and the food supply chain.
Here are five AAPI scientists and biotech innovators you should know:
1. Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010) was the first native Hawaiian woman to earn a Ph.D. and a Stanford marine botanist who became one of the world’s leading experts on “limu,” the Hawaiian word for seaweed. She was known for integrating seaweed into her cooking and educating others about Hawaiian culture by exposing them to its culinary traditions, which culminated in a pivotal 1987 article about her work in Gourmet.
2. Steven Chu (1948-) is the first Chinese American to serve as the U.S. Secretary of Energy, as well as the first Nobel Prize winner and first scientist to be appointed to a cabinet position. Prior to serving as Energy Secretary (2009-2013), Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he pursued alternative and renewable energy technologies. As a physics professor at Stanford University, he helped launch Bio-X, a multi-disciplinary institute combining the physical and biological sciences with medicine and engineering. Chu is the co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on atom trapping and laser cooling.
3. David Ho (1952-) is a virologist and physician whose HIV research in the 1990s led to breakthroughs in understanding how the virus replicates. Ho advocated for using drugs to stop HIV replication before patients got sick, which led in large part to HIV/AIDS becoming a chronic condition for many instead of a death sentence. In 1996, he was the first medical professional to be named the TIME Person of the Year. Today, he’s a microbiology and immunology professor and director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University; he’s also developing a drug that can interrupt the ability of COVID-19 to replicate.
4. Ellison Onizuka (1946-1986) was the first Asian American in space, a member of NASA’s Astronaut Class of 1978. Prior to joining NASA, Colonel Onizuka had a distinguished career in the United States Air Force, where he was both a test pilot and a flight test engineer. His first space mission was aboard Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985. Sadly, Onizuka’s life was cut short on January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch.
5. Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University in 1944, just eight years after arriving to the U.S. from China. She was awarded the first-ever Wolf Prize in Physics for dismantling the idea that there was such a thing as perfect mathematical symmetry in all “subatomic processes,” in an experiment that would be known as the “Wu Experiment.” She also became the first person to prove the theory of beta decay. She advised fellow researchers Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang through the “Wu Experiment,” for which they would win the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Read: Confronting the Epidemic of Hate Against AAPI Communities
P.S. Today's International Clinical Trials Day, recognizing scientists who conduct clinical trials and the role they play in public health. But there’s still a lot of work to do to ensure clinical trials are inclusive. On June 24-25, BIO will host a special event, Building a Sustainable and Equitable Clinical Development Ecosystem—save the date!
