Does race have a place in biotechnological research?

The Journal of Law, Medicine <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&amp;"/> Ethics, 2006

Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons, 2011

12 Minnesota Journal of Law Science Technology 571, 2011

New England Journal of Medicine, 2003

The Journal of law, medicine & ethics : a journal of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 2012

This article is concerned about what may be happening to race and medicine in the &quot;meantime&quot; between today&#39;s clinical realities and the promised land of pharmacogenomics where the need for using race in medicine is supposed to fade away. It argues that previous debates over the use of race in medicine are being side-stepped as race is being reconfigured from a &quot;crude surrogate&quot; for genetic variation into a purportedly viable placeholder for variable drug response--to be used here and now until the specific genetic underpinnings of drug response are more fully understood. Embracing the trope of &quot;promise&quot; in pharmacogenomics alongside the idea of using race as a useful interim proxy for genetic variation raises concerns that new diagnostic and therapeutic interventions may reflect or be mapped upon existing social categories of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in a harmful or dangerous manner. At the most basic level, the politics of the meantime in...

2011

Current Hypertension Reports, 2007

The post-human genome sequencing era has presented several daunting challenges for biomedical research. How do we begin to quantify the level of sequence variation that exists within and between human populations? This challenge has serious implications for the enigma called “race,” genetic ancestry, group definition, and membership. Another challenge has been the attempt to understand the role DNA sequence variation contributes to variation in susceptibility to common complex diseases. How these challenges are met will have an impact on our ability to determine if health disparities (eg, cardiovascular disease) are due to biological differences. Here we discuss genetic variation among African Americans and Hispanic Americans and its implications for “race.” We believe that the casual use of “race” to define groups in biomedical research has contributed to our limited understanding of complex disease etiology and risk factors driving health disparities.

PLOS Medicine, 2015

Appropriating the Dao, 2024

This chapters offers insights into historical acts of comparison in which Daoism and Kung Fu were identified as “occult sciences,” interpreted through the lens of contemporary mesmerism, and situated within the historiography of a Eurasian “primitive culture.” The focus will rest on a remarkable exchange between eighteenth-century Beijing and Paris, unfolding between the French Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot, the Chinese prince Hongwu, the Huguenot masonic author Antoine Court de Gébelin, and Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, Comte de Mellet, another follower of mesmerism. Amiot became convinced that Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism, and by extension modern Western science, had been anticipated by the Chinese principles of yin and yang, rooted in an advanced ancient Eurasian tradition. This was not merely the projection of a Westerner. On the one hand, Amiot was influenced by his Chinese friends and local scholars, as well as his by observations of contemporary Chinese practices. On the other hand, the theories and language of mesmerism and French illuminism contributed to shaping his interpretive framework. Notably, Amiot would eventually prefer the Chinese system over the supposedly more superficial European one. These remarkable developments allow for some general reflections on why and how historical actors engaged in these acts of comparing and identifying certain ideas and practices, which in turn contributes to present debates about religious comparativism.