Category: Health/Medicine/Genetics

  • As we harvest ever more human genomes one fact remains unshakeable: race does not exist

  • I had always understood my ancestry to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans—but in what proportion?

  • Proving My Blackness The New York Times Magazine 2015-05-24 Mat Johnson I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia, during the Black Power movement. I put my dashiki on…

  • The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman (review) Journal of Interdisciplinary History Volume 46, Number 1, Summer 2015 pages 109-111 Ruth Clifford Engs, Professor Emeritus of Applied Health Science Indiana University, Bloomington Sussman, Robert Wald, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge:…

  • The Case for Black Doctors The New York Times 2015-05-15 Damon Tweedy, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Duke University, Durham, North Carolina DURHAM, N.C. — IN virtually every field of medicine, black patients as a group fare the worst. This was one of my first and most painful lessons as a medical student…

  • DNA survey finds all humans are 99.9pc the same The Telegraph 2002-12-20 Roger Highfield, Science Editor Whether you hail from Surbiton, Ulan Bator or Nairobi, your genetic make-up is strikingly similar to that of every other person on Earth, an analysis concludes today. Although scientists have long recognised that, despite physical differences, all human populations…

  • Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life Ashgate September 2014 148 pages 234 x 156 mm Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4094-4498-5 eBook PDF ISBN: 978-1-4094-4499-2 eBook ePUB ISBN: 978-1-4724-0107-6 Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political…

  • UCLA researchers say Japanese-Americans’ healthier golden years could be a model for other seniors UCLA Newsroom University of California, Los Angeles 2015-04-29 Venetia Lai Nearly 1 in 4 Japanese-Americans are 65 and older — nearly twice the proportion of seniors in the overall U.S. population. The facts that they are likelier to live longer than…

  • Ancient DNA Tells a New Human Story The Wall Street Journal 2015-05-01 Matt Ridley Armed with old bones and new DNA sequencing technology, scientists are getting a much better understanding of the prehistory of the human species, writes Matt Ridley Imagine what it must have been like to look through the first telescopes or the…

  • Genes Don’t Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does The Atlantic 2015-04-13 Jason Silverstein, Teaching Fellow in Anthropology Harvard University Researchers are looking in the wrong place: White people live longer not because of their DNA but because of inequality. On April 24, 2003, shortly after the completion of the human genome project, its director Francis Collins…