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Esteban Burchard is pissed. He’s angry that people of color are being sidelined by a medical revolution spawned by the Human Genome Project. He’s angry that when non-white scientists apply for federal dollars to try and turn things around, they find the deck stacked against them. And he’s angry that he, a middle-aged Latino man with a wrestler’s build, can’t walk his dogs without getting stopped by the police.
That happened a couple of months back, after Burchard had a heart procedure and was told by his doctor to take things easy. “I’m walking my dogs. I had a hoodie on. I got pulled over by two fucking cops, in my own neighborhood,” Burchard told BuzzFeed News last week, from his laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco.
Marquitta White, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab, lightened the mood. “He has little fluffy froo-froo dogs,” she said, starting to laugh.
Burchard regained his composure, and got back on message: “I know I’m going off on a tangent here, but it’s all interwoven.”
Burchard, White, and their colleagues...