Tag: GeneWatch

  • Rethinking 21st Century Racism on the Way Home GeneWatch Council for Responsible Genetics Volume 27, Issue 2 (May-July 2014) Victoria Massie, Ph.D. Candidate Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Returning home from fieldwork can be difficult when you find yourself caught between an unintended call back to your project and the impending reality that…

  • Who You Really Are GeneWatch Council for Responsible Genetics Volume 27, Issue 2 (May-July 2014) Robert Pollack, Professor of Biological Sciences, Earth Institute Professor, Adjunct Professor of Religion, Lecturer in Psychiatry Columbia University, New York, New York Patricia Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law Columbia University, New York, New York “International Biosciences offer a broad…

  • Tell Me a Story: Genomics vs. Indigenous Origin Narratives GeneWatch Council for Responsible Genetics Volume 26, Number 4, Religion & Genetics (Aug-Oct 2013) pages 11-13 Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology University of Texas, Austin On April 13, 2005 the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism issued a press release opposing the Genographic Project, which aimed…

  • In fact, of course, we’re all mutts—and as Americans, we’ve been mixing it up faster and more thoroughly than anyplace on earth. At the same time, we live in a state of tremendous denial about the rambunctiousness of our recent lineage. The language by which we assign racial category narrows or expands our perception of…

  • Race is a hierarchical social construct that assigns human value and group power. Social constructions are human inventions, the products of mind and circumstance. This is not to say that they are imaginary. Racialized taxonomies have real consequences upon biological functions, including the expression of genes. They affect the material conditions of survival-relative respect and…

  • The question of race is, at its core, a questioning of humanity itself.  In various eras and locales, race has been marked by color of skin, texture of hair, dress, musical prowess, digital dexterity, rote memorization, mien, mannerisms, disease, athletic ability, capacity to write poetry, sense of rhythm, sobriety, childlike cheerfulness, animal anger, language, continent…

  • Book Review: Race in a Bottle GeneWatch Council for Responsible Genetics Volume 26 Issue 1, March 2013 Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies Brown University In Race in a Bottle, Jonathan Kahn tracks the contentious history of BiDil, the first drug targeted specifically to African…

  • Biologically, there is only one human race. Race applied to human beings is a social grouping; it is a system originally devised in the 1700s to support slavery and colonialism that classifies people into a social hierarchy based on invented biological, cultural, and legal demarcations. Dorothy E. Roberts, “Breaking the Bonds of Race and Genomics,”…

  • Twenty years ago it appeared that mainstream science finally was abandoning the concept of biological human races. From 18th century typologists to 20th century eugenicists, scientists have always been instrumental in justifying the myth that the human species is naturally divided by race.

  • What can DNA tell us about our genetic lineage, and where does it fall short? What explains Vy Higgensen’s multiple results from different testing sites? Flawed methodology? Partial truths hyped as definitive findings? Did the testing companies use different methods or deploy different reference populations – or both?