"Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated"
By Osagie K. Obasogie,
The Huffington Post
| 06. 18. 2010
Race and Genetics Ten Years After the Human Genome Project
Ten years ago this month, we were definitively told that race is scientifically invalid, supposedly ending centuries of debate over the social versus biological character of racial categories. At the high profile announcement that a draft sequence of the human genome had been completed, President Clinton said "one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9% the same."
While subsequent research has slightly lowered this initial estimate to around 99.5%, much of the excitement around the Human Genome Project's (HGP) June 2000 announcement focused on this seemingly conclusive finding that social categories of race, as a coherent way of understanding biological differences between human groups, are largely meaningless.
This wasn't the Project's initial goal, which was seen as a landmark scientific achievement akin to landing on the moon. By mapping the complete set of DNA containing the "blueprint" for human life, the Project's intended significance laid in what many thought would be its revolutionary implications for human health: diagnosing...
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It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
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Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...