Abstract
The ongoing debate about the relationship between race and genetics is more than a century old and has yet to be resolved. Recent emphasis on population-based patterns in human genetic variation and the implications of those for disease susceptibility and drug response have revitalized that long-standing debate. Both sides in the debate use the same rhetorical device of treating geographic, ancestral, population-specific, and other categories as surrogates for race, but otherwise share no evidentiary standards, analytic frameworks, or scientific goals that might resolve the debate and result in some productive outcome. Setting a common goal of weighing the scientific benefits of using racial and other social heuristics with testable estimates of the potential social harms of racialization can reduce both the unreflexive use of race and other social identities in biological analyses as well as the unreflexive use of racialization in social critiques of genetics. Treating social identities used in genetic studies as objects for investigation rather than artifacts of participant self-report or researcher attribution also will reduce the extent to which genetic studies that report social identities imply that membership in social categories can be defined or predicted using genetic features.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allocco DJ, Song Q, Gibbons GH, Ramoni MF, Kohane I (2007) Geography and genography: prediction of continental origin using randomly selected single nucleotide polymorphisms. BMC Genomics 8:68. doi:10.1186/1471-2164-8-68
Bamshad M, Guthery SL (2007) Race, genetics and medicine: does the color of a leopard’s spots matter? Curr Opin Pediatr 19:613–618
Blank RM, Dabady M, Citro CF (eds) (2004) Measuring racial discrimination: panel on methods for assessing discrimination. National Academies Press, Washington, DC
Boas F (1912) Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants. Am Anthropol 14:53–562
Burchard EG, Ziv E, Coyle N, Gomez SL, Tang H, Karter AJ, Mountain JL, Perez-Stable EJ, Sheppard D, Risch N (2003) The importance of race and ethnic background in biomedical research and clinical practice. N Engl J Med 348(12):1170–1175
Burchard EG, Borrell LN, Choudhry S, Naqvi M, Tsai HJ, Rodriguez-Santana JR, Chapela R, Rogers SD, Mei R, Rodriguez-Cintron W, Arena JF, Kittles R, Perez-Stable EJ, Ziv E, Risch N (2005) Latino populations: a unique opportunity for the study of race, genetics, and social environment in epidemiological research. Am J Public Health 95(12):2161–2168
Campbell CD, Ogburn EL, Lunetta KL et al (2005) Demonstrating stratification in a European American population. Nat Genet 37(8):868–872
Chakravarti A (1999) Population genetics—making sense out of sequence. Nat Genet 21(1s):56–60
Choudhry S, Burchard EG, Borrell LN, Tang H, Gomez I, Naqvi M, Nazario S, Torres A, Casal J, Martinez-Cruzado JC, Ziv E, Avila PC, Rogriquez-Cintron W, Risch NJ (2006) Ancestry-environment interactions and asthma risk among Puerto Ricans. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 174(10):1086–1091
Conrad DF, Jakobsson M, Coop G, Wen XQ, Wall JD, Rosenberg NA, Pritchard JK (2006) A worldwide survey of haplotype variation and linkage disequilibrium in the human genome. Nat Genet 38(11):1251–1260
Cooper RS, Kaufman JS, Ward R (2003) Race and genomics. N Engl J Med 348(12):1166–1170
Fujimura JH, Duster T, Rajagopalan R (2008) Introduction: race, genetics, and disease: questions of evidence, matters of consequence. Soc Stud Sci 38(5):643–656
Fullwiley D (2007) Race and genetics: attempts to define the relationship. Biosocieties 2:221–237
Fullwiley D (2008) The biologistical construction of race: “admixture” technology and the new genetic medicine. Soc Stud Sci 38:695–735
Gannett L (2001) Racism and human genome diversity research: the ethical limits of “population thinking”. Philos Sci 68(3):S479–S492
Gonzalez-Neira A, Ke XY, Lao O, Calafell F, Navarro A, Comas D, Cann H, Bumpstead S, Ghori J, Hunt S, Deloukas P, Dunham I, Cardon LR, Bertranpetit J (2006) The portability of tagSNPs across populations: a worldwide survey. Genome Res 16(3):323–330
Goodman AH (2000) Why genes don’t count (for racial differences in health). Am J Public Health 90(11):1699–1702
Halder I, Shirver M, Thomas M, Fernandez JR, Frudakis T (2008) A panel of ancestry informative markers for estimating individual biogeographical ancestry and admixture from four continents: utility and applications. Hum Mutat 29(5):648–658
Hamilton JA (2008) Revitalizing difference in the HapMap: race and contemporary human genetic variation research. J Law Med Ethics 36(3):471–477
Handley LJ, Manica A, Goudet J, Balloux F (2007) Going the distance: human population genetics in a clinal world. Trends Genet 23(9):432–439
Happe KE (2006) The rhetoric of race in breast cancer research. Patterns Prejudice 40(4–5):461–480
Hunt LM, Megyesi MS (2008) Genes, race and research ethics: who’s minding the store? J Med Ethics 34(6):495–500
International Congress of Eugenics (1923) Scientific papers of the second International Congress of Eugenics: held at American Museum of Natural History, New York, 22–28 September 1921, Committee on Publication, Charles B. Davenport, Chairman. Williams & Williams, Baltimore
Kahn J (2006) Genes, race, and population: avoiding a collision of categories. Am J Public Health 96(11):1965–1970
Klimentidis YC, Miller GF, Shriver MD (2009) Genetic admixture, self-reported ethnicity, self-estimated admixture, and skin pigmentation among hispanics and native Americans. Am J Phys Anthropol 138(4):375–383
Krieger N (2000) Refiguring “race”: epidemiology, racialized biology, and biological expressions of race relations. Int J Health Serv 30(1):211–216
Lee SSJ (2005) Ethical implications of race and genomics—racializing drug design: implications of pharmacogenomics. Am J Public Health 95(12):2133–2138
Lee SSJ (2006) Biobanks of a ‘racial kind’: mining for difference in the new genetics. Patterns Prejudice 40(4–5):443–460
Lee SSJ, Mudaliar A (2009) Racing forward: the Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act. Science 323(5912):342
Lewontin RC (1974) The genetic basis of evolutionary change. Columbia University Press, New York
Marchini J, Cardon LR, Phillips MS, Donnelly P (2004) The effects of human population structure on large genetic association studies. Nat Genet 36(5):512–517
Need AC, Goldstein DB (2006) Genome-wide tagging for everyone. Nat Genet 38(11):1227–1228
Novembre J, Stephens M (2008) Interpreting principal component analyses of spatial population genetic variation. Nat Genet 60:646–649
Paradies YC, Montoya MJ, Fullerton SM (2007) Racialized genetics and the study of complex diseases—the thrifty genotype revisited. Perspect Biol Med 50(2):203–227
Reardon J (2007) Democratic Mis-haps: the problem of democratization in a time of biopolitics. Biosocieties 2:239–256
Risch N (2006) Dissecting racial and ethnic differences. N Engl J Med 354(4):408–411
Risch N, Burchard E, Ziv E, Tang H (2002) Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease. Genome Biol 3:comment2007.1-2007.12
Rosenberg NA, Mahajan S, Ramachandran S, Zhao C, Pritchard JK, Feldman MW (2005) Clines, clusters, and the effect of study design on the inference of human population structure. PLoS Genet 1:e70
Sankar P, Cho MK, Mountain J (2007) Race and ethnicity in genetic research. Am J Med Genet A 143A(9):961–970
Serre D, Paabo SP (2004) Evidence for gradients of human genetic diversity within and among continents. Genome Res 14(9):1679–1685
Service S, Sabatti C, Freimer N (2007) Tag SNPs chosen from HapMap perform well in several population isolates. Genet Epidemiol 31(3):189–194
Snipp CM (2003) Racial measurement in the American census: past practices and implications for the future. Ann Rev Sociol 29:563–588
Tang H, Quertermous T, Rodriguez B, Kardia SLR, Zhu XF, Brown A, Pankow JS, Province MA, Hunt SC, Boerwinkle E, Schork NJ, Risch NJ (2005) Genetic structure, self-identified race/ethnicity, and confounding in case-control association studies. Am J Hum Genet 76(2):268–275
Tang H, Coram M, Wang P et al (2006) Reconstructing genetic ancestry blocks in admixed individuals. Am J Hum Genet 79(1):1–12
Tian C, Gregersen PK, Seldin MF (2008) Accounting for ancestry: population substructure and genome-wide association studies. Hum Mol Genet 17(2):R143–R150
Witherspoon DJ, Wooding S, Rogers AR et al (2007) Genetic similarities within and between human populations. Genetics 176(1):351–359
Yang JJ, Burchard EG, Choudhry S et al (2008) Differences in allergic sensitization by self-reported race and genetic ancestry. J Allergy Clin Immunol 122(4):820–827
Acknowledgments
This paper benefited from discussions at the Banbury Center conference, “Who are we? Kinship, ancestry, and social identity,” which was funded in part by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Foster, M.W. Looking for race in all the wrong places: analyzing the lack of productivity in the ongoing debate about race and genetics. Hum Genet 126, 355–362 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00439-009-0674-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00439-009-0674-1