{"id":28029,"date":"2013-02-04T02:54:15","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T02:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=28029"},"modified":"2013-02-04T02:54:15","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T02:54:15","slug":"racial-medicine-not-so-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=28029","title":{"rendered":"Racial Medicine: Not So Fast"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racial Medicine: Not So Fast<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Daily Beast<\/a>
\n2008-08-19<\/p>\n

Sharon Begley<\/a><\/strong>, Senior Health and Science Correspondent
\nReuters<\/em><\/p>\n

Next time you want to start a bar fight, proclaim to everyone within earshot that \u201crace is not real; it is just a social and cultural construct and has no biological validity.\u201d Then duck before you get punched in the face. . . . but as you’re avoiding injury try to hand your would-be assailants a new paper published online this afternoon by the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics<\/em>, which concludes that classifying people by the crude category of race\u2014as in, of African, Asian or European ancestry\u2014for medical purposes, as some people want to do, is really, really stupid…<\/p>\n

…Which brings us to the new study. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute got the cool idea of analyzing the genomes of two white guys who, according to the conventional racial categories, belong to the same race. The two are Venter<\/a> himself and James Watson<\/a>, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. Venter led the private effort to sequence the human genome, winding up in a tie with the public project to do the same.<\/p>\n

It happens that the genomes of both men are in the public domain. Watson agreed to have his sequenced and published last year, with Venter right behind. So what do the genomes reveal?<\/p>\n

The two men metabolize drugs, including antidepressants, codeine, antipsychotics and the cancer drug tamoxifen, differently.<\/strong> Venter has two functional copies of the CYP2D6 form of the cytochrome P-450 gene, which metabolizes more than 75 percent of drugs, while Watson has two copies of the more-sluggish variant of the gene. That\u2019s rare for Caucasians (only 3 percent of whites have the sluggish version), but common in East Asians (49 percent of whom have it). Funny, Watson doesn\u2019t look Chinese. But if Watson\u2019s doctor decided to use race-based medicine to predict how he would metabolize drugs, she\u2019d say, well, we have a white guy here, and whites rarely have the sluggish version, so I\u2019ll assume Watson doesn\u2019t have it either. As a result, the drug would stay in Watson\u2019s system longer, with stronger effects compared to someone in whom the drug was quickly metabolized and cleared from the body. \u201cIt is unlikely that a doctor would guess that optimal drug dosages might differ for Drs. Watson and Venter,\u201d the scientists write.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Venter and colleagues conclude that race is too crude a proxy for what genetic group\u2014ethnicity or, as biologists say, population\u2014someone belongs to.<\/strong> It is imperative to \u201cgo beyond simplistic ethnic categorization,\u201d they write, since that can be seriously\u2014and perhaps fatally\u2014misleading. (In the U.S., some 100,000 people a year die of adverse drug reactions, many caused by an inability to properly metabolize the medication because of a particular CYP2D6 variation.) \u201cRace\/ethnicity should be considered only a makeshift solution for personalized genomics because it is too approximate,\u201d they write…<\/p>\n

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

Racial Medicine: Not So Fast The Daily Beast 2008-08-19 Sharon Begley, Senior Health and Science Correspondent Reuters Next time you want to start a bar fight, proclaim to everyone within earshot that \u201crace is not real; it is just a social and cultural construct and has no biological validity.\u201d Then duck before you get punched […]<\/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],"tags":[13563,13562,13561,13384],"class_list":["post-28029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-j-craig-venter","tag-james-watson","tag-sharon-begley","tag-the-daily-beast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28029","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=28029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}