{"id":27357,"date":"2013-01-08T16:33:36","date_gmt":"2013-01-08T16:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=27357"},"modified":"2013-01-08T16:34:20","modified_gmt":"2013-01-08T16:34:20","slug":"from-bang-to-whimper-a-heart-drug%e2%80%99s-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=27357","title":{"rendered":"From Bang to Whimper: A Heart Drug\u2019s Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/12\/25\/science\/from-bang-to-whimper-a-heart-drugs-story.html\" target=\"_blank\">From Bang to Whimper: A Heart Drug\u2019s Story<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><br \/>\n2012-12-24<\/p>\n<p><strong>Abigail Zuger, M.D.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jonathan Kahn, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=24433\" target=\"_blank\">Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age<\/a>.<\/em> Columbia University Press, December 2012, 336 pages.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>On June 23, 2005, American medicine managed to take a small step forward and a giant step backward at precisely the same time, with government approval of the first medication to be earmarked for a specific racial group. It was <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Isosorbide_dinitrate\/hydralazine\" target=\"_blank\">BiDil<\/a>, a drug designed to treat heart failure in blacks.<\/p>\n<p>Enthusiasts hailed BiDil\u2019s approval by the Food and Drug Administration as a landmark event in the nascent field of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pharmacogenomics\" target=\"_blank\">pharmacogenomics<\/a>, which aims to create drugs tailored to fit an individual\u2019s genetic makeup as precisely as a bespoke suit drapes its owner\u2019s shoulders. Critics just winced and clocked one more misstep in medicine\u2019s long history of race-related disasters.<\/p>\n<p>You would think that the elucidation of the human genome would have cleared up most of the hoary untruths surrounding race and health. But as <a href=\"http:\/\/law.hamline.edu\/dr-jonathan-kahn.html\" target=\"_blank\">Jonathan Kahn<\/a> makes clear in his worthy if convoluted review of the events surrounding the birth of BiDil, the genome has in many respects only made things worse.<\/p>\n<p>It has been clear for decades that race has minimal relevance to the body\u2019s inner workings. Research has repeatedly shown that the biologic variations among individuals of the same race are reliably great enough for race to retain little utility as a biologic predictor. You might as well sort people by height. Or, in the words of an editorial writer for <em>Nature Biotechnology<\/em> in 2005,<strong> \u201cPooling people in race silos is akin to zoologists grouping raccoons, tigers and okapis on the basis that they are all stripy.\u201d<\/strong>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/12\/25\/science\/from-bang-to-whimper-a-heart-drugs-story.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Bang to Whimper: A Heart Drug\u2019s Story The New York Times 2012-12-24 Abigail Zuger, M.D. Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age. Columbia University Press, December 2012, 336 pages. On June 23, 2005, American medicine managed to take a small step forward and a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,2039,8,20],"tags":[13299,2771,1265,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-27357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-abigail-zuger","tag-bidil","tag-jonathan-kahn","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27357","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=27357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}