{"id":52922,"date":"2017-03-25T20:30:19","date_gmt":"2017-03-25T20:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52922"},"modified":"2017-03-25T20:30:19","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T20:30:19","slug":"dr-sandra-soo-jin-lee-toward-a-more-precise-genetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52922","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee: Toward a More Precise Genetics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee: Toward a More Precise Genetics<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Guernica \/ a magazine of global arts & politics<\/a>
\n2017-02-27<\/p>\n

Lynette Chiu<\/strong><\/a>
\nBrooklyn, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The medical anthropologist<\/a> on the imperative to move beyond race in genetic research and the explanatory power of life experience and inequality.<\/em><\/p>\n

For decades, the idea that excavating the genetic origins of disease could transform treatment of the body has lived in the sea of public imagination, buoyant but as yet unrealized. The Human Genome Project<\/a>, a landmark initiative undertaken between 1990 and 2003, identified and analyzed all the genes found in humans, and sowed the potential for new understanding of major illnesses. It engendered hope of a future in which genetic makeup could be the primary factor in determining a person\u2019s care. Researchers could make endless shapes out of a sandbox of data that was blind to race\u2014that problematic and omnipresent variable in the biomedical sphere.<\/p>\n

But it is not a simple thing to scrub race from human tissue samples or from the minds of the experts seeking answers, and it remains stubbornly inextricable from genetic research. Investigating the history, intricacies, and implications of this is Dr. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee<\/a>, a medical anthropologist and senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University<\/a>, who has been studying the role of race in genomic science since the late 1990s. One of her principal interests is biobanks<\/a>\u2014the various repositories of samples that scientists turn to to test their hypotheses. She identifies them as chronicles of society\u2019s evolving efforts to distinguish between groups; the sorting and labeling of their contents are a collision of the biological and the sociopolitical. The result is the physical matter of thousands upon thousands of individuals demarcated by an inconsistent jumble of terms such as \u201cnationality,\u201d \u201cethnicity,\u201d and \u201cskin color.\u201d.<\/p>\n

In her 2015 paper \u201cThe Biobank as Political Artifact: The Struggle Over Race in Categorizing Genetic Difference<\/a>,\u201d published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science<\/em><\/a>, Dr. Lee is forthright about the dangers of genetic studies built around samples identified by race. \u201cThe unqualified racial labeling of DNA<\/a> that strips genes of the social context and experience of those who have donated these materials,\u201d she writes, \u201callows for a pendulum shift in scientific discourse that racializes genes.\u201d Race can end up standing in for factors, such as diet and environment, that go unaccounted for in gene-focused studies. The subsequent findings can then trickle down to affect how we explain differences in disease burden, create health policy, and progress toward eliminating health disparities between populations. With the term \u201cprecision medicine\u201d on the rise, referring to a care model that translates insights around genetic variation into clinical practice, the need to inspect and augment how those insights come about has grown more urgent…<\/p>\n

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

The medical anthropologist on the imperative to move beyond race in genetic research and the explanatory power of life experience and inequality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,13743,8],"tags":[24114,26678,24115,26679,12730],"class_list":["post-52922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-interviews","category-media-archive","tag-guernica","tag-guernica-a-magazine-of-global-arts-politics","tag-guernica-magazine","tag-lynette-chiu","tag-sandra-soo-jin-lee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52922","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=52922"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52923,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52922\/revisions\/52923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}