{"id":40980,"date":"2015-04-27T19:24:12","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T19:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=40980"},"modified":"2015-04-29T20:11:20","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T20:11:20","slug":"genes-dont-cause-racial-health-disparities-society-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=40980","title":{"rendered":"Genes Don’t Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does"},"content":{"rendered":"

Genes Don’t Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/a>
\n2015-04-13<\/p>\n

Jason Silverstein<\/strong><\/a>, Teaching Fellow in Anthropology
\nHarvard University<\/em><\/p>\n

Researchers are looking in the wrong place: White people live longer not because of their DNA but because of inequality.<\/em><\/p>\n

On April 24, 2003, shortly after the completion<\/a> of the human genome project, its director Francis Collins<\/a> and his team posed<\/a> 15 grand challenges to the scientific community. They dared researchers to harness the genome to crack puzzles of biology, health, and society. In particular, they called for genome-based tools to close health disparities. Since then, the United States has pumped<\/a> more than $1 billion a year into genomics research. What do we have to show for it?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found in the literature published from 2007 to 2013 was basically nothing,\u201d said Jay Kaufman<\/a>, the lead author of the first study<\/a> to examine available genetic data for evidence that explains a major racial-health disparity. For many years, researchers speculated that what they couldn\u2019t explain about disparities must be the fingerprint of some mysterious genetic component<\/a>. But since they are now able to scan the entire genome, this speculation appears both lazy and wrong. When it comes to why many black people die earlier than white people in the U.S., Kaufman and his colleagues show we’ve been looking for answers in the wrong places: We shouldn’t be looking in the twists of the double helix, but the grinding inequality of the environment.<\/p>\n

It is no secret that a longer life is a white privilege in the U.S. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a> (CDC) reported<\/a> that white men lived more than four years longer than black men, and white women lived more than three years longer than black women. The main reason for the racial mortality gap is heart disease<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge number of years of life lost because some people have the black life expectancy and not the white life expectancy,\u201d Kaufman said. \u201cIt\u2019s killing people prematurely on the basis of race.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,8,20],"tags":[19980,8735,6001],"class_list":["post-40980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-jason-silverstein","tag-jay-kaufman","tag-the-atlantic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40980","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=40980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}