The American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a repository of bacterial and viral strains, cell culture lines and cDNA clones, has quite a diverse staff. About 32 per cent of its staff are from minority groups. But Yvonne Reid, who oversees cell culturing at the facility in Manassas, Virginia, worries that the number is not representative of minorities in science nationwide. Recently, Reid has noticed a decline in the number of African American scientists at meetings and academic labs at predominantly white institutions such as Harvard, Brown and Yale.

The sixth of seven siblings, Reid grew up in a rural district of Jamaica. Her father was a farmer and her mother stayed at home. “They could read and write, but were not educated people. It was my generation that broke that pattern,” she says. During the 1950s and 1960s, when universal free education first became available in the country, the standardized curriculum meant that “the son or daughter of a labourer would have the same resources available in school as the son or daughter of a professor”.

Reid earned a PhD in zoology from Howard University, Washington DC, in 1986. Her older sister has a doctorate in education from the Catholic University of America, Washington DC, another sister is a nurse, a cousin is a chemist with a degree from the University of the West Indies, and a nephew is doing a residency in surgery in New Jersey.

Reflecting on her own background, in which only education could lead the way out of poverty, Reid says: “The key to achievement, not only for minority persons but everyone, is high-quality, equal-opportunity education starting at an early age.”