Buried Alive: the Concept of Race in Science

In the last decade, many Americans have urged that the concept of race be abandoned, purged from our public discourse, rooted out of medicine, and exiled from science. Indeed, there is something of a bandwagon of publicly expressed sentiment that we should get rid of the idea of race altogether, and some unlikely allies are riding on that bandwagon.

In politics, left-leaning analysts have long advocated a heavier emphasis on class than on race, because they see economic forces as more fundamental for explaining how societies stratify their members. But in recent years, we have also heard a crescendoing clamor from those on the right who would like to end affirmative action -- both in the workplace and in educational admissions policies. For somewhat different reasons, a cadre of political centrists finds the idea (and ideal) of a colorblind society quite attractive. Equating colorblindness with fairness and justice, they object to practices like racial profiling by the police and racial redlining by the banks.

Thus the motives for getting rid of race range from wishing to solidify entrenched privilege to trying to dislodge it, and from thinking that racial discrimination is a thing of the past to believing that the only way to get rid of persistent racist practices is to jettison the concept of race.

Much of academe is on board the "do away with race" bandwagon. In the humanities, increasing numbers of postmodernists and poststructuralists are arguing for alternative narratives of ever-shifting human taxonomies, and that trend dovetails conveniently with those academics in the social sciences who are repeating the mantra that race is merely a social construct. However, the feat that has done the most in the last few years to direct the media's attention and the public's imagination to the idea of getting rid of race is the sequencing of the human genetic code -- and the rhetoric that has accompanied it.

A lot of hope is being expressed these days about the potential power of human genetics. People are excited not just about the prospects for delivering drugs that are customized to individual patients' genes but also about the use of DNA for the exculpation of the innocent on death row. In addition, they hear predictions that the findings from the Human Genome Project will lay to rest, once and for all, the myth that race has a biological basis. However, people can easily confuse high expectations of legal and medical developments in genetics with dreams of new social views of race. Can science rescue us from race and its diabolical Siamese twin, racism?

J. Craig Venter -- the head of Celera Genomics, the private company involved in sequencing the human genome -- and many others have said that race is not a scientific concept. However, before we leap to the conclusion that only the scientifically uninformed persist in believing in the existence of race, we should pay attention to a series of developments within molecular biology and its practical uses that not only complicate that picture, but subvert the idea that we can easily separate scientific from racial thinking.

The central rationale behind the Human Genome Project is the promise of improved health. The government used that rationale to justify spending more than $2-billion on the project, and many biotechnology companies will ultimately succeed or fail based on the degree to which they can fulfill that promise. The project did not promise only abstract theoretical advances in science. The advances in human genetics about which we hear so much in the media are trumpeted precisely because of their potential practical applications.

But in medicine, categories are rarely discrete; they often overlap. Thus, we should hardly expect genetics to deliver pharmaceuticals to us in neat and tidy packages designed only for Group A, pharmaceuticals that would never work on Group B.

It will come as no surprise to anyone knowledgeable about human genetics that in the United States, for example, there are African-Americans with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that impairs breathing capacity, which is found mainly in persons of northern European descent. And of course there are whites in America with sickle cell anemia, a genetic disorder of the blood found mainly in people of West African descent. But the existence of exceptions does not negate the practicality of acknowledging a pattern.

The story begins to crystallize with the cost-benefit calculation of testing for genetic disorders. We have known for at least a half-century that many genetic disorders are distributed in the population in less-than-random fashion, primarily because of cultural rules about mate selection, as well as geographic proximity. Any group comprising people who for many centuries have mated within their group may be at greater risk of certain genetic disorders. Americans of Ashkenazic Jewish descent have a greater risk of developing Tay-Sachs disease -- a genetic disorder that causes degeneration of the neurological system in early childhood -- than members of other groups do; and, as noted above, the same is true of Americans of northern European descent and cystic fibrosis, and Americans of West African descent and sickle cell anemia. So far, no issue of race here.

Over the years, we have developed genetic tests to detect whether a person is a carrier of the genes for one of those diseases. Knowing that Ashkenazic Jews are more likely to have Tay-Sachs disease than gentiles whose ancestors came from the same part of Europe, we do not typically test gentiles for the disease. The problem is that, with some genetic disorders, like cystic fibrosis, no single gene is responsible for the condition; hundreds of mutations can cause it. In the last decade, for example, we have learned that Americans of northern European descent are more likely than other Americans to have a particular mutation involved in cystic fibrosis, labeled DF508. However, a very different mutation puts the Zuni Indians at an equal risk of developing cystic fibrosis.

Now we come to two striking features of the story. First, the genetic test that has been developed detects only the DF508 mutation. There is no genetic test for the Zuni mutation. Second, and vital to the story, the DF508 test is not equally sensitive in the different groups that we associate with the social categories of white, Asian, and black. The test detects over 90 percent of the mutations in whites, but only about 70 percent in blacks and less than 30 percent in Asians.

We should not be surprised by those differences. In 1995, Unesco issued a statement on race, which said that race has no utility as a concept in the biological sciences and suggested that race is not a valid concept for any scientific work. Yet only two years after the publication of that statement, an article appeared in the American Journal of Human Genetics titled "Ethnic-Affiliation Estimation by Use of Population-Specific DNA Markers." Mark D. Shriver, of the University of Pittsburgh, and his co-authors reported that, after a search of the literature and unpublished data, they had identified genetic markers that, when used in combination with other markers, allow "robust ethnic-affiliation estimation" for members of the major groups in the U.S. population.

Indeed, the new pharmacogenomics asserts unequivocally that different races respond differently to certain drugs. For instance, in a 1999 article in Science, William E. Evans and Mary V. Relling, of the University of Tennessee, claim that "all pharmacogenetic polymorphisms studied to date differ in frequency among ethnic and racial groups." That finding may not be based on thoughtfully controlled studies of different populations, but it helps explain the recent announcement that the Food and Drug Administration has issued a "letter of approvability" for NitroMed, a pharmaceutical company, to try to market what the Financial Times called "the first 'ethnic' drug," BiDil. It is a drug specifically designed to treat heart disease in African-Americans, who are twice as likely as white people to suffer heart failure. This is a social time bomb, dangerous even in the hands of well-intentioned persons who have not thought carefully about what it would mean to market such a drug.

It is certain that some whites would benefit from it, and some blacks would not. The "one drop of blood" rule is biologically absurd, but it still colors the thinking of many people, including some biological scientists and pharmacogenomicists.

A larger issue is represented by the fact that nobody is developing pharmaceuticals or genetic tests for groups like the Zuni. Although the first "ethnic drug" to reach the market is aimed exclusively at African-Americans, it is very likely that most drugs will be aimed at groups with the money to buy them -- and the numbers to make that money add up. Biotechnology companies are in business to turn a profit. It would have been politically difficult to start with a drug aimed exclusively at whites, but once the foot is in the door, we can anticipate which direction the rest of the body will go.

It is both naive and futile to try to abolish the concept of race with a series of ex cathedra pronouncements from the government, scientists flushed with pride in the latest genetic discoveries, humanities professors brimming with insights about alternative discursive narrative, or social scientists retelling yet again the socially constructed nature of all human taxonomies.

The French try to solve the problem of race by looking the other way. But does anyone really believe that just because the French don't count the numbers of Tunisians, Algerians, and sub-Saharan blacks in their midst, they do not discriminate in housing and employment against the members of those groups?

The major task for Americans is to analyze how and under what circumstances we use the concept of race. We can and should refer to race when we consider it as part of a complex interaction of social forces and biological feedback loops. The current budget of the National Institutes of Health quite properly sets aside a substantial amount of money for a study of health disparities between whites and other ethnic and racial groups. It is important for us to understand why, for example, the rate of prostate cancer is approximately twice as high among African-American males aged 50 to 70 as it is among white males of comparable age. Is it because African-Americans are more likely than whites to live near toxic-waste dumps? Or to eat different foods? Or to have "one drop" of "other" blood?

It is a mistake to discard race just because racial categories do not map exactly onto biological processes. But it is also a mistake to uncritically accept old racial classifications when we study medical treatments. The task is to determine how the social meaning of race can affect biological outcomes like varying rates of cancer and heart failure. Burying the concept of race can seem very appealing in the short term. But in practical applications, race remains very much alive.

Troy Duster is a professor of sociology at New York University. He served as a member, and then the chairman, of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Working Group of the Human Genome Project from 1995 to 1998, and as a member of the advisory council to the National Human Genome Research Institute from 1996 to 2000.

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