Panel Grapples With The Legacy of “Race Medicine” in Research

Extract

Scientists have long recognized that racial classifications reveal much about society and culture, about history and politics, but relatively little about genetics and biology: 85% of human genetic variation is found within small population groups, meaning the differences among individuals in each group far outweigh differences among groups.

Different racial theorists, mostly in the 19th century, have identified between two and 200 races of humans, although Charles Darwin discounted the importance of race, said Marcus Feldman, Ph.D., of Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

“The biological concept of race as applied to humans has no legitimate place In brological science,” according to Solomon Katz, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, who chaired a task force to rewrite a UNESCO statement on the biology of race.

Useful for Research

Feldman said groupings of persons based on known genetic predispositions would be more useful for research than racial groupings. In some diseases, population genetics has been rntensively studied. For Instance, Ashkenazi Jews are at risk for Tay-Sachs disease, and groups of families in Venezuela and the United States carry the gene for Huntington's disease. But cancer research of this kind is in its infancy. The National Cancer Institute study of ERCA1 gene alterations in the Ashkenazi population is the first of its kind (see News, May 21).