A researcher proved genetics education could reduce racism. The NSF terminated both his grants anyway—and his team is now job hunting while he studies for nursing school.
image from Gemini Imagen 4
Brian Donovan, a science education researcher, conducted two rigorous randomized trials demonstrating that teaching the complexity of human genetic variation significantly reduced high school and college students' endorsement of genetic essentialism—the belief that race has defining biological essences. Despite publishing in Science and receiving peer acclaim for his methodology, the National Science Foundation abruptly terminated both his grants last April, leaving his team at BSCS Science Learning unemployed. The case illustrates how politically inconvenient research, even when methodologically sound, may face funding vulnerability.
Brian Donovan wanted to take a sledgehammer to prejudice. He spent two decades building the case that teaching genetics more accurately could blunt the biological essentialism that fuels racial animus — the idea that genes explain why people end up where they do. He ran the randomized trials. He published in Science. He won the award named for Elizabeth W. Jones, a recognition so settled it had come to feel like a career capstone for people near retirement.
Then the National Science Foundation terminated both his grants on a single day last April.
By the end of the summer, he and his team at BSCS Science Learning were out of work. Donovan is now taking classes and preparing to apply to nursing school.
The science worked. The funding did not.
The research Donovan produced is technically rigorous and politically inconvenient. His February 2024 paper in Science (EurekAlert) reported the results of a cluster-randomized crossover trial conducted with 15 teachers and 1,063 biology students across six states — Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts — between December 2019 and May 2022. The intervention: a curriculum that moved beyond Mendel's peas to teach the actual complexity of human genetic variation, including the finding that most genetic differences occur within, not between, populations. The control: standard high school genetics instruction. Students who received the humane genomics education showed measurably lower endorsement of genetic essentialism — the belief that racial groups have defining genetic essences that explain social outcomes. They were also more likely to view race as a social construct and racial inequality as a product of prejudice.
A parallel preregistered trial with roughly 1,000 undergraduates in the University of California system reached the same conclusion. The instruction could scale.
"The studies were stunningly impressive," Jon Shemwell, a science education professor at the University of Alabama, told STAT (STAT News). "This guy is a generational talent."
Andrei Cimpian, a cognitive development researcher at New York University and a former collaborator, described Donovan as someone uniquely equipped to translate findings about how humans think about race and genetics into teaching approaches that actually work in high school classrooms — rigorous enough for scientists, legible enough for teenagers.
"He was so conversant with these various literatures and could distill them into ways of talking about race and gender that was legible to high school kids while still being true to the scientific nuance," Cimpian said. "It's a unique set of skills I've not encountered in one person before."
What Donovan was threading was narrow and politically charged. The work required running randomized trials in public schools on one of the most contested topics in American life — race, genetics, and what children are taught about the difference. He did it through a pandemic. He did it through the national reckoning on race that followed the murder of George Floyd. He did it without compromising the science.
The NSF funded it — EHR Core Award #1660985, $1.29 million — which is part of why the termination letter felt so sharp. The agency cited its determination that the awards no longer "effectuate administration priorities." The same language appeared in termination notices sent to hundreds of other education researchers. At the NSF, science education grants accounted for 48 percent of all terminations and 65 percent of total funding cut, according to an analysis by Grant Watch (Hechinger Report). The Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM — the unit that housed many of these programs — was eliminated entirely in May. Terminated grants, the notices stated, were those "relying on DEI frameworks" or focused on "misinformation." Donovan's work sat at the intersection of all three.
The decision was final and not subject to appeal, the notices said. That ran counter to standard NSF procedure, which typically allows grantees to contest terminations before a final determination. Several universities have sued (C&EN).
For Donovan, the personal calculus shifted. In the current environment, his own words from the STAT interview land differently than he might have expected: "What I really wanted was to take a sledgehammer to prejudice. I was naive enough to think that we could teach genetics and actually make a real dent in this problem."
The curriculum his team developed — the teacher training, the classroom materials, the sequence of instruction — is not under active institutional management. Some collaborators with tenure positions are keeping fragments of the work alive on smaller scales. The program itself has no clear institutional home.
This is the part that does not show up in budget spreadsheets. When a field loses its standard-bearers — the people who can run a multi-site RCT on a politically radioactive topic and publish it in Science without flinching — the gap is not easily filled. Donovan described 15 years of effort to build something durable, an institution that could carry the work beyond him. The termination notice arrived before that happened.
Donovan is applying to nursing school. The Elizabeth W. Jones Award is his now. The sledgehammer is in storage.
Story entered the newsroom
Research completed — 7 sources registered. 1) Donovan published Science RCT Feb 2024 showing humane genomics education (beyond Mendel) significantly reduced genetic essentialist beliefs about r
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