{"id":19801,"date":"2012-04-23T23:44:53","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T23:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19801"},"modified":"2017-03-23T00:11:12","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T00:11:12","slug":"the-short-life-of-a-race-drug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19801","title":{"rendered":"The short life of a race drug"},"content":{"rendered":"

The short life of a race drug<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Lancet<\/a>
\nVolume 379, Issue 9811<\/a> (2012-01-14 through 2012-01-20)
\npages 114-115
\nDOI: 10.1016\/S0140-6736(12)60052-X<\/a><\/p>\n

Sheldon Krimsky<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor\u00a0of Public Health and Family Medicine
\nTufts School of Medicine<\/em>
\nTufts University, Medford, Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

The headlines back in June, 2005, read \u201cFDA approves a heart drug for African Americans\u201d. The decision that gave the company NitroMed approval for its drug BiDil<\/a> exclusively to a \u201cracial group\u201d represented a milestone in US drug policy. The decision ignited a debate that polarised the African American community, confounded proponents of personalised medicine, and dismayed groups opposed to reinscribing racial categories into science. Ever since Ashley Montagu<\/a> published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race<\/a><\/em> in 1964 [1942?], scientists have reached a broad consensus that \u201crace\u201d applied to human populations has no standing in science…<\/p>\n

…In a historical context too, the use of such racial classification is shown to be a subjective process. The concept of \u201crace\u201d in the USA grew out of slavery when state laws dictated racial identity by percentage admixture. A person who self-identifies as African American could have one great-grandfather (or about one-eighth of his or her genome) as the exclusive source of that identity. Homer Plessy<\/a> was the plaintiff in an 1896 US Supreme Court decision (Plessy v. Ferguson<\/a><\/em>) that established the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d foundations of segregation in the USA. Plessy, who was escorted off a train for whites only, was considered black based on the infamous \u201cone drop rule<\/a>\u201d, even though he considered himself seven-eighths white. By contrast, Jean Toomer<\/a>, author of the 1923 book Cane<\/a><\/em>, which chronicled the lives of black Americans, sometimes identified himself as black and sometimes as white. Thus, two individuals, both with one-eighth African ancestry, might either be defined by others as black or self-identify as white or black. Why should the drug’s approval for a differentiated group be based upon such quixotic criteria? Despite all the reasons why \u201crace\u201d has no role in science, it was a science-based agency that approved BiDil for a racial group…<\/p>\n

…While many commentators who supported the approval of BiDil for black patients state that \u201crace\u201d is not a scientifically precise term for identifying relevant genomic or physiological characteristics that differentiate population groups, nevertheless, they argue that \u201cself-identified race\u201d is a useful proxy for those characteristics. However, what is the evidence that the proxy \u201cself-identified race\u201d is a reliable surrogate? The best evidence derives from the fact that genetic variation conferring disease susceptibility is not equally distributed among ancestral populations. For example, sickle cell anaemia<\/a> is more prevalent in populations whose ancestry can be traced to sub-Saharan Africa. However, \u201cself-identified race\u201d is a subjective term, influenced by cultural factors, and not even grounded in the ancestral genomics of, for example, the International HapMap Project<\/a>. For the purpose of the clinical trials, \u201cself-identified race\u201d is interpreted as a dichotomous variable (black or non-black). If race were used as a proxy for ancestral African genomics it should be a continuous function (10%, 30%, 70%, etc). It makes no scientific sense to map a continuous function onto a dichotomous variable…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>\u00a0or here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The headlines back in June, 2005, read \u201cFDA approves a heart drug for African Americans\u201d. The decision that gave the company NitroMed approval for its drug BiDil exclusively to a \u201cracial group\u201d represented a milestone in US drug policy. The decision ignited a debate that polarised the African American community, confounded proponents of personalised medicine, and dismayed groups opposed to reinscribing racial categories into science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,8,26,20],"tags":[2771,9219,5251],"class_list":["post-19801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-bidil","tag-sheldon-krimsky","tag-the-lancet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19801"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52776,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19801\/revisions\/52776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}