50 Years to Gender Parity: Can STEM Afford to Wait?: A Cardiologist and NIH Chief Officer of Scientific Workforce Diversity Reflects on What It Will Take to Keep Women in Biomedicine

The first spark of my desire to become a cardiologist came, believe it or not, in a third-grade art class where I was asked to draw and color the circulation of blood as depicted by 16th-century English physician William Harvey. This task enraptured me-seeing that something so beautiful could work so flawlessly. So, many years later, I remain intrigued by cardiac transplantation, the subspecialty in which I ultimately chose to anchor my career as a physician scientist. Each day I live in awe of the fact that you can remove someone's organ, place it in another, and still have that organ work beautifully, most of the time. But why does it sometimes fail?