‘Helicopter research’ doesn’t happen just when researchers from rich countries swoop in and exploit the resources of low-income ones — rich universities are increasingly taking advantage of poorer institutions in the same country, and often in the same neighbourhood.

Marylin Fraser, the head of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, a non-profit organization in New York City that focuses on community health and education, has experienced this at first hand. Several times a year, she says, researchers at prestigious US institutions come to her asking to recruit study participants from her community.

Fraser turns many away for neglecting to consider the community’s input or failing to recognize and compensate the work that the institution would contribute by facilitating collaboration. She now accepts only the proposals that share funding and project leadership with researchers at Arthur Ashe. It’s exhausting, says Fraser. “You feel as though you are always in a constant fight.”

This experience is not unique. Around the world, many resource-poor institutions that support marginalized communities, such as Indigenous peoples or Black and Latine groups, are courted by staff and researchers at nearby well-off institutions who lack the understanding to create equitable partnerships. “The issue is that a privileged person is taking advantage of a less-privileged one. It can be very patronizing,” says Adriana Romero-Olivares, a microbial ecologist at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Described as ‘domestic helicopter research’ in Cell last year¹, the term refers to a well-documented scenario in which scientists from wealthy countries conduct research in low- or middle-income countries with little to no involvement of local communities and researchers. The “helicopter” or “parachute” collaborators leave, taking data and expertise from local people instead of working to ensure that they are engaged with and benefit from the research.

Domestic helicopter research — often focused on race, ethnicity or genetic ancestry — occurs when unequal partnerships form between researchers in the same country. It results in the “erosion of trust between researchers and the communities they aim to serve”, wrote Marcus Lambert, a public-health epidemiologist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in New York City, and his co-authors in the Cell commentary. A major concern, he says, is that the practice seems to be on the rise in the United States and elsewhere.

Harmful effects

One damaging aspect of domestic helicopter research is that it “saps funding” from poorer institutions, Lambert and his co-authors say. In the past three years, less than one-third of funding from the US National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities — a department that aims to address health challenges faced by minority racial and ethnic groups, rural populations and those with low socio-economic status — has gone to the poorer institutions that serve these communities.

Researchers are also concerned that such work often doesn’t serve the people who were asked to participate, and can sometimes harm them.

A 2020 paper led by Brandon Brown, a public-health researcher at the University of California, Riverside, describes a case study in which a community leader had agreed to work with a researcher from a US university on a survey about HIV and ageing². The local leader was expected to recruit participants and pay for a space to conduct the survey. He then had to fight to get access to the resulting survey material, which he discovered contained stigmatizing and outdated terminology. He also found out that there were no plans to disseminate the data or results in a way that might help the participants or their wider community.

When Brown presented the paper at a conference, he received criticism from some attendees for naming the researchers involved. “I responded that this is why it keeps happening — because it’s invisible,” he says.

Lambert and his colleagues say that the COVID-19 pandemic — which brought US health disparities into sharp focus — has led to an increase in domestic helicopter research across the country. Health-equity studies gained more funding as a result of the pandemic, and the recipients sought out more researchers and participants from poorer communities. This has led to surging cases of domestic helicopter research, the Cell commentary states.

There are no data on the incidence of domestic helicopter research worldwide, but Fernanda Adame, an environmental scientist at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, says that it’s likely to be more common in countries that have large wealth disparities. “If you don’t address it, your research is not going to be as good, as you will have limited information and limited impact,” she adds. “If you didn’t speak to the people involved [in the research], they are less likely to use that information.”

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