"A place for race in medicine?" (Christian Science Monitor)

[jody]

A place for race in medicine?

QUOTE

Ever since the fall of the Nazis, the world has tried to keep the biology of racial disparity under wraps. It has been acceptable to link racial differences to social and cultural factors. One race might underperform another because of upbringing or poverty. But suggesting biology as the cause for those differences - like "The Bell Curve" did a decade ago when it looked at academic achievement - was strictly taboo.

Now, a new and unexpected force - medicine - is pulling back the covers. By taking a close look at minute differences in people's genetic codes, researchers and drug companies are beginning to create racially based drugs and treatments.

Given the prospect of targeting treatment, some scientists argue that the subject at least ought not to be taboo. Even if race eventually proves to be a crude and insufficient means of understanding genetic differences, it can play an important interim role, they say. Others worry that these voices fail to capture the larger picture: how past claims of "scientific" race and ethnic differences, now debunked, have been used to oppress, even kill, minorities
UNQUOTE

[ultraist]

1. There are ethical dilemmas involved with this

excerpt from OP link:

To use the rhetoric of science to sell the idea that historical inequity should be embraced as biological inevitability is an insult to those who value a common humanity," wrote researcher Richard Cooper of the Loyola University medical school in a January article in the American Psychologist. "Race is not a concept that emerged from within modern genetics; rather, it was imposed by history, and its meaning is inseparable from that cultural origin."

Indeed, scholars in recent decades had concluded that racial designations are fuzzy, so hard to pin down that people's self-reporting of their race had become the only useful method of designating race. In the 1990s the work of the Human Genome Project - an international effort to sequence and map all human genes - seemed to add legitimacy to this view. At the genetic level, humans are nearly indistinguishable from one another, 99.9 percent alike.

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If it's done, it needs to be done with the highest standards and caution. Looking at illness, such as sickle cell anemia, which affects Blacks more often than Whites, can be done; but it also opens the door for abuse, as we saw so clearly with the "Bell Curve."

I agree with Dr. Cooper's statement above, that the social construct of race and the historic oppression and degradation of minorities present serious confounds. I'm not sure it's possible to separate out these confounds.

[jody]

2. You quote Cooper’s assertion,

"Race is not a concept that emerged from within modern genetics; rather, it was imposed by history”. Could not race have also evolved in some part as a humans adapted to the unique needs of their local environment?

I agree with you on the dangers inherent in such research but potential benefits are present. :shrug:

[applegrove]

3. It is obvious why the "right" no longer wants men to be judged on

the contents of their hearts