{"id":5993,"date":"2010-03-14T20:15:45","date_gmt":"2010-03-14T20:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=5993"},"modified":"2015-10-25T20:59:03","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T20:59:03","slug":"race-and-genetics-attempts-to-define-the-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=5993","title":{"rendered":"Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

BioSocieties<\/a>
\nVolume 2, Issue 2<\/a>\u00a0(June 2007)
\npages 221-237
\nDOI: 10.1017\/S1745855207005625<\/a><\/p>\n

Duana Fullwiley<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor Anthropology
\nStanford University<\/em><\/p>\n

Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As the human genome was mapped in 2000<\/a>, Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded project, together with his privately funded rival, announced that humans were 99.9 percent the same at the level of their genome.<\/strong> That same year, the National Institutes of Health<\/a> (NIH) began a research program on pharmacogenetics that would exploit the .01 percent of human genetic difference, increasingly understood in racial terms, to advance the field of pharmacy. First, this article addresses Collins\u2019 summary of what he called the \u2018vigorous debate\u2019 on the relationship between race and genetics in the open-access special issue of Nature Genetics<\/em> entitled \u2018Genetics for the Human Race\u2019 in 2004. Second, it examines the most vexed (if not always openly stated) issue at stake in the debate: that many geneticists today work with the assumption that human biology differs by race as it is conceived through American census categories. It then presents interviews with researchers in two collaborating US laboratories who collect and organize DNA<\/a> by American notions of \u2018race\/ethnicity\u2019 and assume that US race categories of classification largely traduce human biogenetic difference. \u00a0It concludes that race is a practical and conceptual tool whose utility and function is often taken for granted rather than rigorously assessed and that \u2018rational medicine\u2019 cannot precede a rational approach to addressing the nature of racial disparities, difference and inequality in health and society more broadly.<\/p>\n

…Race and nominalism<\/strong>
\nRace is a thing of our world like no other. Americans in general often use the word without much reflection. It might indeed occupy a tiny portion of what philosopher Martin Heidegger<\/a> amorphously termed \u2018the background\u2019, that which just is and does not warrant our reflection until its unity \u2018breaks down\u2019. Even when the breakdown of race occurs in many areas of American social life, it is often reconstructed and made \u2018whole\u2019 again. One recent example of this was in the 2000 US census race classification that allowed respondents to report themselves as \u2018mixed race\u2019. Many African-Americans with mixed ancestry did not choose this option, but simply marked the category that best represented descriptions that they had been raised to understand themselves \u2018to be\u2019 in North America\u2014that is \u2018monoracially\u2019 black (Lee and Bean, 2004: 233). The decision to mark oneself or not mark oneself as mixed-race differed according to where respondents lived\u2014notably between those who lived in the deep South and those who lived in the ten states where 64 percent of all multiracial identification took place (New York and California among them, as well as Hawaii). In general, those in cosmopolitan centers, with high rates of immigration, diversity, and more demonstrated tolerance of others, were more likely to report racial mixing (Lee and Bean, 2004: 235). Perhaps more telling, when Americans acted on the liberty of marking more than one category, the National Center for Health Statistics created a formula that, in effect, \u2018reallocated\u2019 the multiracial population back into a single race group (Wellner, 2003: 2). This move, and the technology permitting it, was presented as an aid to market researchers who were vexed by the 2000 census data, which complicated their traditional formulas of \u2018niche\u2019 advertising to racial groups (Wellner, 2003: 2)…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship BioSocieties Volume 2, Issue 2\u00a0(June 2007) pages 221-237 DOI: 10.1017\/S1745855207005625 Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor Anthropology Stanford University Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,33,2039,8,394,20],"tags":[2472,2084],"class_list":["post-5993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-census","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-biosocieties","tag-duana-fullwiley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993","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=5993"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43474,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993\/revisions\/43474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}