A very unsettling news piece from the USA, suggesting that recruitment of people from different racial backgrounds may not be equal (read the news piece here). A related but different issue is the outsourcing of clinical trials to settings in developing countries (read here and here). There are many concerns, including data integrity (here), and ethical implications (here). And what of the applicability of data. The issue has not escaped the attention of the prestigious publication Scientific American, which earlier this year published an excellent discussion. There are many complexities, and a history that is at times shameful – for example, the infamous Tuskegee experiments