Medicine's Race Problem
2001; Hoover Institution; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)Race, Genetics, and Society
ResumoON JUNE 26, 2000, White House announced to world that human genome had been sequenced (with final, polished version due perhaps by 2002). Though precise functions of all our genes have yet to be deciphered -- Nobel laureate David Baltimore foresees a century of work ahead of -- it is clear that we are on threshold of knowledge that could revolutionize way we predict, diagnose, and treat disease. momentous discovery was lauded for something else as well: It supposedly laid to rest idea that race is a biological category. Researchers have unanimously declared there is only one race -- human said New York Times an article headlined Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows. Much heralded was finding that 99.9 percent of human genome is same everyone regardless of race. The standard labels used to distinguish people by 'race' have little or no biological claimed Times. Said Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist at Harvard: The social meaning [of race] may finally liberate us from [that] simplistic and harmful idea. That point has found its way into rhetoric of politicians. As former President Clinton has said, in genetic terms all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent same. . . . most important fact of life on this earth is our common human ancestry. were reminded by former GOP vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp that the human genome project shows there is no genetic way to tell races apart. For scientific purposes, race doesn't exist, he averred. In Hollywood, too, notice was taken. When a television talk show host asked actor Rob Reiner about sparring his character did with Archie Bunker on long-running television program All Family, Reiner (aka Meathead) explained that Archie's signature bigotry stemmed from ignorance. We are all same, though, Reiner said, the human genome project taught us that. human genome project, view of many, helped pound final coffin nail place: Race was at long last dead. It is noble, of course, to celebrate spiritual kinship within family of man, and now even to suggest that race has biological meaning, it seems, can be something close to professional suicide. mere mention of race and biology together sends many physicians and scientists scrambling to protest (too much) against a possible connection. facts, however, paint a more complex picture, one with clinical implications: race does have biological dimensions, and if we regard it solely as a social construct, we may forfeit opportunities to enlarge our medical treatment repertoire. Wanting it both ways THE SENTIMENTS FUELING impulse to regard race as an arbitrary biological fiction should be taken seriously, especially given shameful history of race and biology. People properly shudder at memory of Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which hundreds of black sharecroppers were never told they had disease nor offered penicillin for its treatment. Many now worry that genetic determinism might be used as sole explanation for social differences between races or, worse, as justification for new eugenics movements and programs of ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, corrective is not obfuscation or outright censorship of inquiry. It is a clear-eyed understanding of intertwining of race and biology. Denying relationship flies face of clinical reality, and pretending that we are all at equal risk for health problems carries its own dangers. were reminded last May of controversy about role of race biomedical research when New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published two papers describing responses of black and white patients to medications used to treat heart disease. researchers sought to compare racial groups light of well-documented observation that, on average, African Americans with high blood pressure and other cardiovascular conditions do not fare as well as whites when given same medications. …
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