The Reference Maps Teaching AI What a Human Body Looks Like Are Six Times Too European

Among the samples that do, people of European ancestry appear roughly six times more often than global population figures would predict. The Same Skew in All Three ResourcesThe Human Cell Atlas, the Human Tumor Atlas Network, and the PsychAD Consortium all leaned in the same direction. "These gaps can be passed into AI models trained on the datasets, often without users of the AI models realizing it." Across more than 13,500 samples in three consortia, European ancestry was consistently overrepresented, and nearly 70% of Human Cell Atlas samples had no ancestry recorded at all. Recording ancestry metadata, which nearly 70% of Human Cell Atlas samples lack.