Intro: It's time for Ask A Scientist. I'm your host, Tanesha Nicole and I'm talking with Dr. Gary Gibbons, Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH about diversity in data science. 
TN: Dr. Gibbons, how does data science help individual patients? 
GG: Increasingly data science and artificial intelligence will enable clinicians to better tailor the diagnosis, prognosis, as well as the treatment of each individual patient. That's what we call precision medicine, where we tailor the treatment of the individual patient's particular characteristics in their health data. 
TN: Why is diversity important to data science? 
GG: Whether the tool works well or not depends on how that machine was trained.  The more diverse the training is, the better the prediction. 
TN: How can scientists ensure diversity? 
GG: A key part of the great power and utility of data science and artificial intelligence is to involve a diverse set of perspectives from the beginning. 
Outro: For more on data science, visit nhlbi.nih.gov